Entitled Opinions

I only discovered this program recently, while reading about their interview with the author, Marilynne Robinson. [LINK]  The full name of the show is "Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)" It's a 1-hour "literary" talk show. It has the kind of audience where you can make a clever aside about Ralph Waldo Emerson and they will know what you're talking about. I'm imagining it's a subset of core NPR enthusiasts but with fewer hipsters. More here.

The program is hosted by Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University in the Department of French and Italian. (Rosina Pierotti is an endowed professorship.)  So how literary is it you ask? I'll list off a few recent episodes:

• Ruth Starkman on Aristotle, friendship, and virtue ethics
• Hans Sluga on his book Politics in Search of the Common Good
• Thomas Ryckman on Einstein
• A Monologue on Lightness and Heaviness in Art
• Paul Rabinow on Foucault and "the contemporary"
• Jessica Merrill on Russian Futurism
• Mark McGurl on Fiction-Writing Programs in the Postwar Era
• Grisha Freidin on Leo Tolstoy

The programs discuss broad themes like money, ethics, and art movements, but also specific public figures, authors, and revisit classic novels. Harrison's metatext has gotten so meta he's been interviewed about interviewing by both  the Ideas program on CBC Radio One, WBUR On Point, and on the Lunch Special Show at KQED. The show has been running since 2005 but has only aired 150 episodes. More here.

I ♥ College Radio

I was actually a bit surprised that the HTML heart symbol was permitted in the title field there. The iHeartRadio brand launched with the URL iheartmusic.com back in April of 2008. It was sort of a mix of ideas from the start. they were going to stream music to mobile devices and webcast 800 of Clear Channel radio stations online. The comedy here is that Clearchannel is simultaneously moving toward a national programming model where hundreds of these stations will be more-or-less identical.So as tech-savvy as it might seem at first, the content is about as edgy as cheese-whiz.

Last year they debuted the ability to make custom music streams, much like Pandora. Clearly they had figured something out about the content problem. Then I got news yesterday. Clear Channel was soliciting college radio stations to join their platform. This was unexpected.  They put out a press release confirming everything on January 23. You can read it here. Sources report that they are negotiating individual deals with university and radio station representatives, indicating a level of motivation and interest that cannot possibly be generated by a sense of charity.  The first college stations to get involved are below:

• Appalachian State’s WASU – Boone, NC
• Connecticut College’s WCNI – New London, CT
• Dartmouth College's WFRD - Hanover, NH
• Denison University’s WDUB – Granville, OH
• DePaul University’s Radio DePaul – Chicago, IL
• Emerson College’s WERS – Boston, MA
• Flagler College’s WFCF – St. Augustine, FL
• Green River College’s KGRG – Tacoma, WA
• Ithaca College’s WICB – Ithaca, NY
• Rice University’s Rice Radio – Houston, TX
• Seton Hall University’s WSOU – Orange, NJ
• Stanford University’s KZSU- Stanford, CA
• Temple University’s WHIP – Philadelphia, PA
• College of Wooster’s WCWS – Wooster ,OH

You will notice that not all of these are even radio stations in the broadcasting sense. Rice radio is the webcast that the students were left with after KTRU was sold off. WHIP, and Radio DePaul are all also strictly online. The rest are a mixed bag: WSOU is arguably the biggest college radio station in America, WERS is nearly as big.  WICB is a large but rural college station with s strong commercial lean, KGRG, WASU, WCNI and WCWS are all rimshots to major markets lost in the suburbs. WFRD is in the unrated market areas on the Vermont and New Hampshire border. There is no pattern to this list, it screams shotgun approach, and these are just the early signers. There will be more.

What is the purpose?  That's an open question.