Archive for January 30th, 2011
Get on the air in your community – The Local Community Radio Act 2011
Good news for those who want to set up community broadcast stations and “get on the air”.
January 24, 2011
The New Year ushered in a new era for community radio. President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act into law, allowing for the biggest expansion of community radio stations in U.S. history and allowing low-power, neighborhood based stations to broadcast in urban areas for the first time. Hundreds of groups waiting for radio stations were ecstatic at the news.
A day later, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission pledged “swift action to open up the dial for these new stations.” In the coming months, the FCC will be working to develop the rules for an application window for new radio licenses, which could happen as early as November 2011.
Just in the past few weeks, Prometheus has been contacted by hundreds of groups wanting to start a station, adding to the many hundreds who have been waiting and advocating for more radio licenses for ten years. Prometheus is planning a nationwide campaign to help groups apply for licenses and is seeking donations, volunteers, and partners from media and social justice organizations to assist with outreach. Learn how to get involved.
Passage of the Local Community Radio Act marks the first major legislative success for the growing movement for a more democratic media system in the U.S., and represents the power when grassroots groups, media advocates, and policymakers join forces to overcome corporate opposition to media diversity.
After building political will for ten years, this team effectively mobilized thousands of people to contact key Senate offices in the final weeks before passage. Hundreds then called the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobby group that had been blocking the bill’s progress by convincing Senators to put secret holds on it. They urged former Senator Gordon Smith, President of the NAB to stop pulling strings to kill the bill. But when radio advocates received little response, they chose to take more colorful action..
Resources:
Read the story – http://prometheusradio.org/node/2445
You can find all the info here – http://prometheusradio.org/
Low Power FM Equipment Guide – http://frrl.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/prometheus_equipment_guide.pdf
The History and Future of Hyper-Local Radio
A great resource – find radio stations that you can hear in the proximity of a zip code, city, state, or world radio. Shows frequency, call sign, distance, estimated signal strength, and city. Also includes streaming audio stations. If you need to find an unused frequency for your in-house FM audio distribution this site can make some recommendations for your area. Radio Locator – http://radio-locator.com/
Professional FM Transmitters – http://www.hllyelectronics.com/professional-fm-transmitter.html
What do you do for a living? Are you a victim of a Career Crisis?
Are you in a moment of a career crisis? When someone asks you, “What do you do for a living” what do you say? How much do you inflate what you really do and, if you inflate or exaggerate your job title or the responsibilities you have been granted by the corporation where you work, then why do you do it? Have you seen this behavior in other people? Perhaps these are moments of career crisis. Perhaps this type of response clearly demonstrates and articulates the existence of a gap between the hopes and reality of life.
If you get to the top do you own your career success? Likewise, if you don’t, do you own your failure? Isn’t your lot in life and your career achievement the result of every decision you ever made? Why shouldn’t you own your success as well as your failure? Is this too simplistic? Is there relief in the concept of Tragedy?
Is there hope for people who suffer moments of career crisis?
Now everybody, all politicians on left and right, agree that meritocracy is a great thing, and we should all be trying to make our societies really really meritocratic. In other words, what is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which if you’ve got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top. Nothing should hold you back.
It’s a beautiful idea. The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing.
You know, in the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an “unfortunate.” Literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may, unkindly, be described as a “loser.” There is a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser. And that shows 400 years of evolution in society, and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. It’s no longer the gods, it’s us. We’re in the driving seat.
That’s exhilarating if you’re doing well, and very crushing if you’re not. It leads, in the worst cases, in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim, it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally. They own their success. But they also own their failure.
Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I’ve just been outlining? I think there is…
Watch this TED talk to find out - Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
