#117 – Soundwork: Preserving the Legacy of Radio, Podcasts (& Alice’s Restaurant) (Copy)

“Podcasts are luring people into listening,” Jennifer Waits reports, quoting the esteemed radio scholar Susan Douglas, from her keynote address at the recent Radio Preservation Task Force conference in Washington DC. Jennifer also relays some important reasons for studying radio history shared at the conference, especially to help understand the present and plan for the future, and she fills us in about efforts to preserve the early history and recordings of podcasts, as well as women’s pivotal role in the medium.

Then we discuss Jennifer’s annual charting of the stations that will observe the Thanksgiving tradition of playing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” and a mysterious 1970s public access TV artifact depicting a pirate radio station that once broadcast from Paul’s Portland, OR neighborhood.