Post by Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), a unit of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, will hold its first national conference February 25-27, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

Keynote speakers will include Professor Paddy Scannell of the University of Michigan, a noted radio scholar and historian, and Sam Brylawski, former Head of the LOC’s Recorded Sound Division and a digital recording pioneer.

In 2014, the National Recording Preservation Board recognized the need to address the perilous state of the nation’s radio heritage, which has not received the archival and critical attention of other U.S. media. Over the last two years, the RPTF has coordinated a nation-wide effort to identify major collections of radio recordings and other materials that will help to raise cultural awareness of America’s rich tradition of radio-based soundwork and make it accessible to future generations.

A year and a half later, we have built an organization consisting of more than 130 media studies scholars actively engaged in researching radio’s past and identifying key archival sources; over 350 affiliate archives, collections, and radio producing organizations across the US and Canada; and a growing number of online partners who aid in critical discussion and dissemination of our efforts.

The most recent additions to our group of affiliated organizations include NPR, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, the Paley Center for Media, the Prometheus Radio Project, the Media Ecology Project, the Studs Terkel Archive, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

The Library of Congress Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center located in Culpeper, VA.

Our first national conference, Saving America’s Radio Heritage, will bring these groups together, along with members of the broader academic, archival, media, and general public, to discuss what we have accomplished and plan for future activities. Over three days in February, we will tour the LOC’s Packard Center, meet for a day of panels focused on radio’s history and cultural significance at the LOC’s Madison Building, then move to the University of Maryland’s Center for Mass Media and Culture (formerly the Library of American Broadcasting) for a second day of workshops and caucuses focused on issues of outreach, growth, and education.

The Radio Preservation Task Force curates a regular series for Antenna about radio history and archival issues, which can be accessed here. More information about the RPTF can be found at the organization’s new website. Stay tuned for further news and discussion of the conference and the RPTF’s activities. For additional information about the task force, please contact: radiotaskforce <at> gmail.com. Questions about strategic planning and partnerships can be directed to the RPTF’s National Research Director, Josh Shepperd (Catholic University): shepperd <at> cua.edu.

Post by Jason Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

I promised the Antenna editors an account of the Podcast Movement 2015 conference, held last month at the Omni Hilton in Fort Worth, Texas. But that was before I actually got there and realized what I had signed up for: It was a massive and elaborate event, composed of podcasters, would-be podcasters, and an army of sponsors with elaborate electronic kiosks, booths, and high-tech swag. The conference room stages had been decorated in a detailed brick and metal motif meant perhaps to evoke a trendy re-tooling of an earlier industrial moment, but which actually put me in mind of the brick ovens of Bertucci’s Pizza. A young woman I met at the conference, an aspiring educational podcaster, suggested a darker historical reference point for the ovens, which due to the spatial constraints of the stages did have a vaguely cramped, carceral appearance. I arrived on a Friday morning and rather than interrupt the pre-conference sessions that were already underway, I walked through the sun-blasted downtown, past stately Art Deco towers built with petroleum money, to a local café where I found air conditioning, the free city weekly, and a thin roast beef sandwich.

The opening plenary session of the conference took place later that first evening, a presentation of awards by the “Academy of Podcasting.” And while there is much to deride about any awards ceremony and perhaps little sport in doing so, it’s worth mentioning that this one lived up to its aspirational peers in several ways: the absurd, grueling duration of the ceremony; the execrable play-on, play-off music; and a loyal adherence to the conventions of the acceptance speech. (Yes, the winners actually said “I’d like to thank the Academy.”) The ratio of annual prizes to Hall-of-Fame inductees was about even, an interesting fact for an industry so young and for a conference only in its second year. The ceremony was as much about writing the history of podcasting as creating its future. I was struck most of all by the sheer scale of the podcasting universe represented: there were nine awards categories, including “Business,” “Food and Drink,” “Lifestyle and Health” and “Society and Culture,” the latter of which Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible won. Mars also won the “People’s Choice Award,” which the audience selected in real-time on their phones. Mars gave a keynote too; in that and in my conversation with him on the last day of the conference, he modestly and thoughtfully conveyed the sense that podcasting had been a refuge from the disappointments and challenges of public radio.

Roman Mars of 99% Invisible at Podcast Movement 2015.

The next two days’ sessions were replete with variations on similar nuggets of wisdom. Attendees were exhorted to “listen” many times, typically in sessions that permitted very little time for panelists to hear the questions and comments from the audience. Advice typically came in lists; it was all I could do not to write this up as “Seven Things I Learned at the Podcast Movement. Number 1: Listen!” Almost every session combined inspirational buncombe with a genuine desire on the part of the presenters to help the attendees, who paid nearly $500 for the conference registration, to figure out how to be successful. Two delightful exceptions to the formulaic, numbered bits of advice were Nikki Silva’s expertly produced presentation of The Kitchen Sisters‘ lost sound recordings, and Lea Thau, who led about 50 of us thru a storytelling workshop complete with Moth-like presentations at the end.

For most of the time, I felt as if I were at two conferences in one, a trope I tried out several times during the short Q&As, hoping it would catch on. One conference was filled with recognizable types: public radio veterans and those who aspired to make podcasts with the public radio sensibility, grouped loosely around the PRX’s “network” of podcasts, Radiotopia. These include Criminal, Strangers, 99% Invisible, and Fugitive Waves. The other, bigger conference was composed of entrepreneurial podcasters and their great hero, John Lee Dumas, a youthful entrepreneur whose membership organization Podcasters’ Paradise commanded the enthusiasm typically reserved for pyramid schemes, motivational speakers, and returned messiahs. Despite their zeal, members of Podcasters’ Paradise were easy to talk to and taught me a lot about how to think about the podcasting platform, industry, and community, which I heard many of them refer to as “this space.” I met one on the bus-ride to the Stockyards, a hulking retro-cattle industry entertainment district, who described the split in the conference between “Pro-casters” (professional broadcasters), almost exclusively from the public radio sector, for whom podcasting was merely another way to distribute and actual “Podcasters,” the scrappy amateurs with start-up ambition and moxie. Sure enough panelists in the Radiotopia sessions (Pro-casters all), avoided the term podcasting in favor of terms like “public media” to describe their platform-straddling work, and the word “shows” to talk about their own work.

John Lee Dumas of the “online community” Podcasters’ Paradise at Podcast Movement 2015.

And it was true that the members of Podcasters’ Paradise that I met were all amateurs to audio production. I learned at some point that the average number of downloads for podcasts was 158, a far cry from the tens of millions that Serial commanded. John Lee Dumas’ daily podcast Entrepreneur on Fire, however, was the lodestar towards which all the amateurs navigated. His hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly income (updated regularly on the front page of his website) represented far more meaningful numbers to the podcasters than any dreary audience averages. Dumas’ appeal lay more in his humble backstory and exuberant message. An Iraq War army veteran, law school dropout, and Wall Street washout turned podcasting millionaire, Dumas exudes the optimism and charm of someone who can’t quite believe how well things have turned out. For his podcast, Dumas interviews equally exuberant young entrepreneurs, many of whom echo his rags-to-riches narrative, keywords (“bootstrapping,” “journey”), and variations on the metaphor of “on fire” to signal inspiration. The sound design and vocal performances of Entrepreneur on Fire, like that of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Money, another podcaster luminary, owe more to AM talk radio’s thin, digitally compressed sound than to the lush, artful sound of This American Life and Radiolab. Dumas’ interview style is rat-a-tat; there’s even a lightning round, which doesn’t sound much different from the rest of the program. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the probing, allusive style made famous by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. If Dumas is “listening” to his guests, there’s no evidence of it. I will spare you a full accounting of Dumas’ message, which involves keywords whose first letters spell out the word “SUCCCCEESS.” Boiled down to its essence, Dumas exhorted his audience to “Invest, Learn, and Teach.” “Teach for Free,” Dumas advised. His free webinars on how to get started in podcasting are hugely popular loss leaders for Podcasters Paradise membership, which people pay $1,100 to join.

The “give it away” ethos and model seemed to be the golden thread running through the two parts of the conference. It was difficult to find a podcast of any kind that didn’t operate on the free distribution model, though some sold access to their full archives. Others tried fundraising in the public radio podcast model, simply asking listeners to “chip in a few bucks.” For the most part, the podcasting movement has been brought to you by corporate sponsors like Audible and MailChimp on the public media side and by subscriptions to additional services, books, “solutions,” CDs, and memberships on the business-oriented side. Some of the very popular business-oriented podcasts, like Entrepreneur on Fire, also include a spasm of super short ads from small business services like BrainTree and LegalZoom at the top of the podcast, at the “mid-roll,” and at the end. One vendor and conference sponsor, PodClear, offered high-quality internet voice service that podcasters could use to conduct long distance interviews more cheaply than ISDN lines and more reliably than phone lines or VOIP, a sign that public radio’s high-quality sound, rather than AM’s scratchy, populist immediacy, might be the emergent standard for the new medium.

Marc Maron at Podcast Movement 2015.

Marc Maron’s keynote (he was a late replacement for Glenn Beck) also represented a point of conjunction. Like Roman Mars, Maron’s work was universally known and admired. Like Dumas, he framed the success of his WTF podcast as a late reprieve from a life of failure and heartbreak. Broke, in the throes of a painful divorce, and a stalled career in comedy, he turned his garage into a studio, in part, he joked, because the ceiling was too low to hang himself from. Podcasting as a form of last-minute salvation was another uniting theme, giving the conference a tent-revival vibe. Even Lea Thau, the Peabody Award winning co-founder of The Moth, frames the success of her Radiotopia-backed Strangers show as salvation from a devastating career and personal reversals. Perhaps the purest articulation of the podcast-as-rebirth formula appeared on the back of a tee-shirt worn by one of the attendees that read “From Brain Tumor to 1 Million Monthly Downloads.” I had scoffed at the use of the word “Movement” in the conference title when I first heard of it, but now I understood a bit better the affective economy the conference was tapping into. Even Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters described the conference as a “festival” that reminded her of the early, pre-NPR days of community radio in Santa Cruz.

Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters at Podcast Movement 2015.

The gathering was big and the number and kind of podcasts represented was impressive. But I was surprised to hear speakers gushing about the conference’s “diversity.” It was, to all appearances, a very white Anglophone group, though there was at least some gender diversity, with women making up a bit less than half the gathering. The smallest session I attended, in a cramped, remote room hard by the restrooms, featured Carolina Guerrero of Radio Ambulante, the Spanish-language, pan-American podcast whose global audience grew fifty-fold in 2014 alone. Guerrero explained the meteoric growth in audience as a function of demographic changes, the show’s pan-American reach, and partnerships with BBC Mundo and radio stations in Latin America, as well as English-version appearances on Radiolab, Reply All, and This American Life. It was surprising that so little was said in the rest of the conference about the growth potential of Spanish-language programming.

By Sunday, the Stockholm Syndrome had set in and I began to identify with my captors, and to love my fellow conference-goers and the blank anywhere/nowhere of the conference hotel. Even the vendors, who lined the hallway of the meeting room level had become, if not friends, then at least familiar denizens of our temporary village. I collected lanyards, tee-shirts, and phone chargers in my tote bags and signed up for special offers. Conversations with familiar strangers became easier, as if in fulfillment of Lea Thau’s injunction that we be “Strangers No More.” People exchanged business cards with abandon, as if they genuinely hoped to stay in touch. Small confidences and bits of advice and email addresses were exchanged. We found it easier to pipe up during the sessions, despite the brief time allotted for Q&A. In a session on “Creativity and Storytelling,” the audience erupted 20-minutes in, protesting good naturedly the fact that the moderator had yet to address a question to the only woman panelist.

Serial‘s Sarah Koenig at Podcast Movement 2015.

The conference concluded Sunday afternoon with a final keynote, this one by Sarah Koenig of the podcasting’s game-changing hit, Serial. Like Serial, Koenig’s talk was exquisitely produced and disarmingly personal. After nearly a year, she still manages to seem genuinely staggered by the podcast’s runaway success. And yet somehow she knows exactly which sorts of behind-the-scenes tidbits about the reporting, production, and post-fame spin-control we’re desperate to hear. Perhaps most valuable was her candid presentation of an early draft of the first episode’s script, followed by the much-improved final version, a rare moment in the conference when the work of making good audio was shown more than merely celebrated or advertised. Koenig credited producer Julie Snyder with providing some of the most important improvements draft to draft, a valuable lesson about the importance of collaboration, another point often lost in the highly individualistic, “bootstraps” narratives and underfunded business model of the business podcasters. She also played bits of taped phone calls between herself and Adnan Syed, in which she gamely revealed her manipulations of Syed and his flirtations with her. Koenig projected the exact same uncertainty about Adnan Syed’s guilt that suffused the entire podcast without seeming the slightest bit less fascinated by the case. Koenig closed by taking questions, and yes, she really did seem to listen.

All photos from Podcast Movement. 

Post by Neil Verma, Northwestern University

In her 2013 book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey points out a contradiction in listening habits arising out of the proliferation of podcasts and other programs born in the digital space. On the one hand, listeners experience radio in perhaps more personalized ways than they did in the past, listening to what they want and when they want, often in the micro-airspace of a personal device. On the other hand, these same listeners represent their acts of listening to others through social media much more readily and broadly than did listeners in the past (p. 154).

Our listening acts are thus simultaneously both less “in public” and more so, while becoming far more available to monitoring by a variety of entities clamoring for every crumb of data on audience preferences and behaviors.

The good news is that this contradiction suggests that despite the insularity of their sonic lives, there remains a persistent desire within many people to listen together, if only virtually. Lacey points to the rise of curated listening events, which have expanded quite a bit in the years since her book was published. Note the upcoming Cast Party bringing podcast shows to film theaters, recent RadioLoveFest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the ongoing events of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Although it’s not really new, listening together without visual stimulus still feels unusual, like an experiment in experience. By liberating publics and concentrating them, providing a paradoxical collectivity and anti-sociality at once, group podcast listening is full of possibilities, although it is unclear what they are and how to harness them.

Poster for the RadioLoveFest live radio series at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In this post, I’d like to think about the classroom as a space in which to find out more about that. While we have opportunities to use public and virtual spaces to promote collective listening (this was the premise of my #WOTW75 project in 2013), and some of the most experimental thinking about podcasting is taking place online (see Sounding Out!’s Everything Sounds piece, Cynthia Meyers’s study of podcast business, and Jason Mittell’s coverage of Serial), it’s in classrooms where we can really “do” collective listening in a unique way. Unlike listeners in online groups, movie theaters, museums, and festivals, those in classrooms host critique without seeming to undermine community. Moreover, they benefit from a tremendous power that even educators themselves often undervalue: by meeting again and again, classroom listening enables conversations to grow, as the listening we do alone becomes the listening we do together.

According to this reasoning, teaching classes on podcasting isn’t just a new idea to attract students – although it does – but also a way of knowing the form of the podcast anew. In other words, podagogy (a word I didn’t make up, swear) is just as necessary to the current task of inventing podcast studies as it is to the task of applying it.

I recently had a chance to experiment with this in a course I taught on “Podcasting and New Audio,” which focused on narrative-driven podcasts in historical context. Broken into three sections – “What is a Podcast?,” “Possible Histories the Podcast,” and “Formal Problems / Critical Strategies” – the course gave opportunities for complicating student understanding of shows that many already knew well. By teaching Radiolab’s “Space” alongside a week on the history of sound art, for instance, we could rethink this show on discovery along lines suggested by conceptual art. Combining Serial with Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the history of conjecture, we dug into the show’s hermeneutics, considering the way the narration approaches “evidence” with boundless suspicion while also providing listeners with sonic details that work as “clues,” offering seemingly privileged windows into meaning, like tracks in the snow.

I found the historical classes – highlighting the hidden legacy of radio drama, documentary, and the radio “feature” on podcast formulas – especially gratifying. Even the most ardent podcast fans know few masterpieces of the past. Want to blow the mind of a lifelong devotee of This American Life? Assign The Ballad of John Axon. Trust me.

Cover for a 1965 LP edition of The Ballad of John Axon by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker.

I added two podagogical (there it is again) features to the architecture of the class, both of which involved listening to our materials as a collective, in the room.

In the first, I asked students to work in groups to produce recordings as responses to the reading, creating a quasi-podcast of their own. Prompts included: after reading Nancy Updike’s manifesto for radio, create a 1 minute “manifesto” using only sound (I got a great one based on Russolo); provide the shortest possible piece of audio that tells a “story” whose structure responds to how podcasters like Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass understand that term (the snap of a mousetrap, two seconds flat). Listening to these in class gave each group a chance to talk about their thinking, emphasizing sound as not just a vehicle of response but also as a way of knowing. Indeed, the very anticipation of being asked to create audio made them listen differently, tuning their receptors and making them as detail-oriented in the study of podcasts as many already are when it comes to TV and film.

That’s the same idea behind the second experiment in the course. In each meeting, one group would take the task of devising and leading a “Guided Exercise in Collective Listening.” To explain, I gave an example. On the first day, I broke the group into thirds and assigned them each one of Michel Chion’s “Three Listening Modes” (semantic listening for language, causal listening for sources of emanation, “pure listening” for sound objects) to shape how they listen to The Truth’s “The Extractor.” Then we listened to the whole piece and had a discussion about how it was different depending on our mode, and what points in the piece cued us to shift from one mode to another. In another case, I instructed them to make a four frame “storyboard” for Sean Borodale’s A Mighty Beast while we listened to it together, later asking what choices we have to make in “translating” from sound to a constrained number of visuals, as a way of troubling our lazy notions of the relationship between sounds and mental images.

Soon the students took over directing our listening activities. That became the richest part of the course, particularly for difficult episodes. Listening to Love + Radio’s brilliant but disturbing story “Jack and Ellen” encouraged us to look at how editing constructed the complex reliability – and the complex gender identity – of a blackmailer. A group that undertook Radiolab’s controversial “Yellow Rain” segment instructed us to listen for moments of shifting allegiance, an idea that sharpened our appreciation of the rhetorical use of silence in that piece, along with its bearing on questions of race and power.

Art from the “Jack and Ellen” episode of Love + Radio. Image: Cal Tabuena-Frolli.

Another value of listening together in class was more ineffable. Getting podagogy out of the pod, it became clear that these pieces simply hang in the air differently among other people than they do in the ear and alone, carrying discomfort, mortification and identity more heavily when they fill a room. By having both experiences, class listening introduces sequence to Lacey’s contradiction. Students begin with private listening on their own, have a second experience informed by peers as a group, and then explain their experiences and their discrepancies to one another. The rhythm moved from the public to the private and back again, something that a one-time collective listening event alone does not accomplish.

Curated listening in public is a laudable and exciting development, I hope we see more of it. I hope it gets even weirder. But in the classroom, collective listening can be a way of teaching the ear to be more critical, more aware of its own comportment and aesthetic responses, as well as of the habits of attention and social dynamics that underlie those responses, the very matters that podcast scholarship ought to be after.

Map of NBC’s combined red, blue, orange, and gold networks in 1928.

Post by Bruce Lenthall, University of Pennsylvania

Teaching a media history course nearly 15 years ago, one day I found myself stumbling in search of a metaphor to help explain to undergraduates the network radio system that arose in the late 1920s.

“Think about network stations on television,” I suggested.

“What are network stations on TV?” the students asked. “How are they different than any other stations? How do you find them?”

“Do you remember those two knobs on a television?” I asked, trying to make this as simple and concrete as possible. Succeeding, instead, in showing my age. “Essentially, one knob let you change between the national channels, the network channels. When you turned the other knob, you changed channels among the local, non-network ones.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, with the air of one who has figured out something that has long confused her, a student spoke up. “This is really helpful,” she said. “My grandmother had a television with dials on it and I never could figure out what you used them for.”

The point here is not the futility of trying to explain television knobs and dials to a generation in the age of the remote control. The point is not even my own occasional cluelessness about current cultural experiences. No, the real point here is about some of the challenges of teaching radio history.

When I teach the history of radio – as I have done in a variety of course contexts from a media in history course to a history of American culture in the 1930s – I am routinely reminded that for undergraduate students, the basics of the early radio systems have long since been lost from cultural memory. Notions of national networks, of limitations on the number of stations – and with that, limitations on what audiences might hear and who might speak on the air – are unfamiliar. Even the metaphors a later generation might use to recall some of the early days of radio no longer have currency.

At the same time, though, other elements of the American system of broadcasting as it rose to prominence remain so entrenched in our deeply held assumptions that it can be hard for students to question them at all. For many of my undergraduates, commercially funded, for-profit broadcasting seems such a natural and positive way to organize media that it can be difficult for them to step out of such a system and examine it.

Such challenges are, of course, common ones for instructors: how to make the unfamiliar understandable and to understand the familiar by reexamining it through new eyes. And such challenges are why, in part, studying media history in general, and radio history in particular, is so powerful. Comprehending the unfamiliar media of the past can help us to see the familiar ones all around us anew. Digging into the history of broadcasting provides a comparative perspective – a comparison that enables us to see the system of our own time as distinct. Examining the historical comparison and the decisions that shaped past radio allows us to take what seems natural to us and to see it as something that has been constructed by choices – choices that could have been made differently. In turn, that perspective enables students to consider the benefits and costs of those choices.

As my classes explore the history of radio, we peer through three sets of lenses: the messages and content on the air, what radio meant to its listeners, and the structure of the industry. I ask my students, which frame of reference provides the most valuable insights into radio’s past? Invariably, my students say we need all three perspectives to really understand radio. That’s true, of course. But it also reveals how hard it is for novice scholars to take a stand. All of us who research radio know there are many valuable approaches to our work that we could take; but we also know that we have to pick one because we cannot do everything at once. My students are less comfortable choosing the approach that offers them the greatest insight.

There is no question, though, which is the easiest area for them to discuss. The early radio programs may be foreign to students, but discussing those programs is not. When we talk about Amos ‘n’ Andy in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, my students quickly understand the importance of talking about the program’s construction of race. They may not see the differences between the works we read by Melvin Ely and Michele Hilmes on this question at first, but they get there. This becomes an opportunity to consider factors that made radio so popular and the role racial othering played in the creation of a mass audience. Similarly, students are comfortable considering Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” as a potential critique of the media itself (OK, for that one, they also see Citizen Kane to help them unpack Welles’s views).

My students have a more difficult time considering what radio meant for its listeners. Here I have raised for them some of the issues I address in my own book. What did it mean to connect with far-flung and often-imagined others? To be part of a mass audience? Where did listeners find a sense of control and where did they lack it? Maybe I am too close to some of these questions or maybe others need to come first, but I’ve never fully gotten students to engage with them. Instead, I have repeatedly found my classes tacking to questions of what was on the air and, even more, the early structure of the industry.

That last one, the structure of radio, is particularly hard for students to understand. It is not just, as I have said, that the comparisons we might offer are both too unfamiliar and familiar for them. More than that, such structures themselves were – and are – often invisible and inaudible. I also wonder if, in the United States, we are not always comfortable thinking about economic motives and structures as something open for questioning. The idea that a radio system that prized commercial success and the pursuit of profit could be something we created, rather than the natural state of a society that values freedom, can be a jarring one. Exchange students from France and Germany in my classes have been quicker than many of their peers to envision means of funding media other than through advertising.

Because the centralized and commercial system of broadcasting is so hard to make plain to students, it is doubly difficult to present alternatives that existed. Alexander Russo has a detailed account of the structures that bolstered radio beyond the networks – an account I have never taught. How to showcase for students the limits of a structure, when the students do not know the structure itself?

Ultimately, understanding that structure requires students exercise imagination as much as analysis: visually representing radio’s complex reach, for instance, and, critically, imagining alternatives to a commercial network system.

In the end, though, the difficulties in teaching this material help make it so compelling. When students successfully come to terms with radio’s messages, meanings and structures, they take something opaque and make it their own, and they take something that is very much their own and find the distance to shine a light into it. Considering a host of historical media systems and critiques – hopefully – sets them up to decide what they value in, and to consider alternatives to, contemporary media as well.

And if, in the process, they learn that once upon a time, people changed channels by walking across the room and twisting a dial, well, so much the better.

Post by Peter Schaefer, Marymount Manhattan College

Given the tremendous wealth that continues to pour into Manhattan and Western Brooklyn, it’s hard to imagine that in the 1970s New York City came perilously close to declaring bankruptcy. The city nearly defaulted on large loans due in part to revenue reductions associated with decreased local manufacturing. To help remedy the situation deep cuts were made across the municipal budget. As a result, New Yorkers saw a city on the brink of collapse with irregular garbage collection, shuttered local libraries, and public school classrooms bursting beyond capacity. Public broadcasting was particularly hard hit with hiring freezes at the municipally owned public radio station WNYC, along with a reduction in staff and constant threats to curtail broadcasting hours. Budget cuts to stations like WNYC resulted in dramatically decreased efforts to save material from this era. In retrospect, the financial catastrophe of 1970s New York might seem like a mere pothole on the road to the city’s current renaissance. But in regard to radio preservation, the ‘70s fiscal crisis left a giant crater in the historical record.

Before visiting the WNYC Archive I assumed that the older the broadcast era, the spottier the historical record becomes. That is not the case, however. Due to the 1970s fiscal crisis, WNYC recordings from that era are the least represented in the archive. It’s contrary to what one might assume, but there’s a richer and more comprehensive historical record for NYC public radio of the 1930s than for the 1970s. This example attests to the fact that what’s included in an archive depends on much more than the durability of recording formats. Archives develop over time because of decisions made in response to cultural assumptions and economic imperatives more so than the material conditions of sound recording. These decisions are often hidden from view when archives are made publicly accessible.

In regard to radio preservation efforts, such as the vital new Radio Preservation Task Force, how might we think differently about the representation of extant materials such that what’s not preserved is also a part of the public face of an archive? In what follows I consider the implications of embracing the monuments to radio history while simultaneously acknowledging the surrounding ruins. I explain some of the emerging norms for radio preservation, and I conclude by connecting contemporary fallacies about the utility of information to the question of how to represent radio history.

The Radio Preservation Task Force, along with other like-minded initiatives such as the American Archive Content Inventory, is establishing what it means to preserve 20th century radio history in the 21st century. This history is still being written, but so far the public access points for the radio historical record employ tagged audio clips, social media updates, and keyword searches to databases. These interactive options are an important resource for communication historians and the public at large, and at the same time, these options are becoming ossified as the way we access the cultural history of radio. What if we offered additional ways of showing radio history that do more than provide a means to access and comment on surviving documents?

Contemporary radio preservation efforts tend to present history in ways that elide the space between the past and the present. For example, take the show Nights in Latin America broadcast on WQXR from 1947 to 1971 and hosted by Pru Devon. Although the vast majority of WQXR materials are lost to the ages, much of the content and supporting documents related to Nights in Latin America survive. Ms. Devon’s daughter saved her mother’s scripts, research notes, air-checks, and fan mail and recently donated these items to the WQXR archive. The ruins of the station’s past now appear forgotten as preservations efforts for the show oscillates from transient to permanent.

Radio history appears stable, durable, and immutable via tributes to Nights in Latin America aired on NPR shows like All Things Considered and represented online. These preservation efforts and its attendant public face, do not show the fact that the historical record for WQXR is spotty at best. Some lacquer discs, some quarter inch audio tapes, and some assorted ephemera comprise the bulk of the archive for the station’s long 20th century legacy. What we see in this example is the wide gap between the appearance of an archive and its actual content. As a result, radio preservation efforts when made publicly accessible typically appear as an unmediated report of an ideally preserved past.

Without some nod to the ruins of radio, cultural artifacts are represented in ways that gloss over the decisions that shape an archive’s contours. These decisions may be motivated by economics (as seen in the 1970s NYC fiscal crisis example) or by cultural values (as with the historical revisionism of the Radio Preservation Task Force) or by other fortunate circumstances (such as the mindful conservation of a family legacy as with the example of Nights in Latin America). But in all cases, radio preservation efforts stem from a lineage of integral decisions. Some of these decisions might be lost to the ages as well, but there is value in striving to represent this loss, however imperfect.

Just like there are often disguised decisions that shape an archive, decisions are made in the creation of all contemporary data sets. I frequently encounter students who are surprised when I encourage them to use resources other than Google Scholar to access scholarly literature. These students don’t yet know that Google is a filter not a portal to a limitless universe of information. Anecdotes such as this reflect why I think now is the time to call attention to the ruins of radio history. Common access points for radio’s past offer easily accessible and instantly recoverable historical artifacts. These interfaces deepen historical knowledge but also lend credence to notions of information as a means for social control.

The historical record is being deployed in new ways via aggregated data sets. Evgeny Morozov refers to “solutionism” as a mistaken belief in the ability of big data to solve social problems that range from health care to crime. To put such faith in aggregate data analysis ignores the fact that all data are imperfect reflections of the reality they represent. To embrace the gaps in the radio historical record works against current tendencies to believe in the essential unmediated status of data, whether these data pertain to non-network radio broadcasts or data directly connected to social issues. In short, a turn toward radio ruins serves a critical function in the fight against an ideology of information control.

Now you might be thinking that it’s fun to privilege the vibrant strands of radio history, and it’s a downer to acknowledge what’s lost, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The gems uncovered via the vital work of radio preservationists will sparkle even brighter if shown in context as the rare items that they are. In other words, a turn toward radio ruins doesn’t have to be just about loss but could help make what’s found appear all the more special. And in so doing helps embrace the particular against the aggregate.

The view from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where the character of Candy Matson lived in Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209. Photo: Christoph Radtke

Post by Catherine Martin, Boston University

I recently spent some time going through the American Radio Archive’s Monty Masters collection to gather information for my dissertation on women in radio and television crime dramas. As I reviewed scripts for Masters’ female PI series, Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209, I was struck by the number of edits relating to place and street names: more than any other radio series I’ve encountered, Candy’s writers appear to have been dedicated to getting San Francisco’s geography right. Of course, this might have simply been a product of the series’ production environment. Candy Matson, which ran on NBC’s West Coast network from June 1949 to May 1951, was broadcast from San Francisco in a period when most West Coast radio production was consolidating in Los Angeles. The locally popular series frequently emphasizes its regional affiliations, with Candy (voiced by Natalie Parks Masters) traveling up and down the West Coast and solving crimes from Los Angeles to Puget Sound (where she almost dies in a sabotaged seaplane). At home in her city of San Francisco, she surveys the urban space from the bay window of her Telegraph Hill penthouse and zips between neighborhoods in her flashy convertible. However, it is more likely that such attention to urban detail was meant to establish and strengthen Candy’s precarious authority as a radio private eye who also happened to be a woman.

Howard Duff, who played private detective Sam Spade in The Radio Adventures of Sam Spade.

Candy Matson is not the only radio detective series concerned with emphasizing the detective’s intimate knowledge of the city. I’ve previously argued that The Adventures of Sam Spade (1946-1951, ABC/CBS/NBC) used Sam’s knowledge of San Francisco to assert his authority to interpret the urban space for increasingly suburban post-war radio audiences [1]. His conversational style of narration encourages audiences to see the city through his eyes, and his attention to detail asserts the intimacy of his urban knowledge and contributes to the urban atmosphere that pervades radio private eye series. Candy also navigates the city with ease, driving herself from place to place in a convertible, like a true Californian. From her penthouse on Telegraph Hill, she heads down the hill to visit her friend and sidekick Rembrandt Watson, downtown to call on Inspector Ray Mallard at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, or across any of the city’s numerous bridges to explore the broader Bay Area. Significantly, Candy maintains a sense of control and power by insisting on driving herself, commenting that “I feel much better when I’m driving,” especially when traveling with strange men on cases because “there are a lot of forward passes that fall incomplete when a lady is driving” [2]. Candy even drives when she travels with trusted male friends like Watson or Mallard, showing off her knowledge of shortcuts, scenic routes, and obscure swimming holes along the Sacramento River, and cementing her claims to the special knowledge about people and places that makes the private eye an urban expert.

Candy’s claims to this urban (and suburban) expertise are especially important given her position as a female private eye in post-World War II America. As scholars like Jessica Weiss (2000) and Wini Breines (1992) have pointed out, postwar popular culture was filled with mixed messages about women’s roles and abilities, simultaneously promising them that they enjoyed equality with men and pushing them to find ultimate fulfillment in the more traditionally feminine roles of wife and mother. While she was not the first lady detective on radio, Candy is certainly among the most hardboiled, a genre more typically associated with working class male detectives and readers. Creator Monty Masters originally wrote the role of Candy for himself, but cast his wife, Natalie Masters, when his mother-in-law suggested making the detective female. While the character remained daring and take-charge as a woman, the writers also worked to emphasize Candy’s femininity. Jack French (2002) reports that Masters changed the original audition script to emphasize a romance between Candy and Mallard, which continues throughout the series and culminates in their engagement and Candy’s retirement in the final episode, “Candy’s Last Case.” In addition to the romance that ties her safely to one man – unlike her male counterparts, who often enjoy multiple flirtations per episode – the announcer’s opening narrations emphasize Candy’s femininity and even undercut her independence, especially in early episodes. One such introduction goes:

“Like a little whodunit without too much gore? This is for you then. And here’s another thing—we’ve got a gal for a detective—not a guy with all muscle and no brain. She’s cute, too. Oh, and I’ll let you in on a little secret. She thinks she solves all the cases she works on. But she doesn’t—not quite. There happens to be a guy named Inspector Ray Mallard who pulls our gal out of tight spots.” [3]

Others emphasize her blonde hair and compare her curves and “scenic effects” to Highway 101 [4]. Candy also frequently emphasizes her love for shopping.

Natalie Parks Masters, who played the female private investigator Candy Matson.

These contradictory emphases on Candy’s detective abilities and feminine appearance and dependence highlight her difficult position as a female PI who must struggle to be taken seriously, both by her clients and radio audiences at home. While she ultimately avoids the fate of so many female investigators on film, whom Philippa Gates (2011) argues went from enjoying progressive representations in the 1930s to becoming figures “of parody, passivity, or – by the 1950s – questionable sanity,” Candy has to continually prove that she is both a competent investigator and a normal woman – that she can still maintain feminine graces while taking on jobs that occasionally result in her getting knocked unconscious by a gunsel. The end result is unique and intriguing: a private eye program that presents ugly urban crimes without the seemingly requisite world-weary narrator. But despite this lack of the customary hardboiled gravitas, Candy continually resists categorization as a lightweight. She may be a former model, but she knows her city better than anyone and she insists on maintaining the power to navigate it. While she never managed to attract a commercial sponsor or make it to NBC’s national network, her popularity with West Coast audiences indicates that more than a few people were interested in stories about women working in atypical professions.

—

[1] Catherine Martin, “Re-Imagining the City: Contained Criminality in The Radio Adventures of Sam Spade.” Delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Boston, MA, March 25, 2012.

[2] Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209, July 21, 1949

[3] Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209, July 14, 1949.

[4] Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209, August 4, 1949.

Post by Jennifer Hyland Wang, Independent Scholar

This is the seventh post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

At the beginning of Radio Voices (1997), Michele Hilmes defended her study of radio to a field which had ignored it; studies of the programming, practices, and cultural traditions of radio, had “become the ‘repressed’ of television studies, occupying a position similar to that of the silent film era in film studies twenty years ago” (xv). To understand television’s role in American life, she argued, scholars must study radio. In her groundbreaking work, Hilmes brought American radio to life, revised contemporary media scholarship, and resurrected radio studies as a viable and valuable academic enterprise. For me, though, that was not her most significant contribution to broadcast history. In this field-defining text, she devoted chapters to daytime radio and the many women who operated in and around broadcasting. If studying radio is the repressed of television studies, then surely studying daytime radio – denigrated by contemporaries and snubbed by most academics – is to study the repressed of the repressed. Before Michele Hilmes, precious few scholars looked at radio, much less at how gender shaped American broadcasting. Few took seriously the sound of women’s voices wafting through the daytime ether. Except for Michele Hilmes. This, in my mind, was a more radical act, cementing her place in feminist media history.

Mary Margaret McBride, aka “Martha Deane.”

Hilmes re-centered the role gender played in broadcasting history and challenged her peers to try to make sense of broadcasting without it. In her books and published articles on the radio, television, and film industries, Hilmes listened to the whispers of the women who shaped American media and the spaces, places, and times when those voices were silenced. Whether writing about female DXers, soap opera writers, or daytime audiences, Hilmes pointed academics to a gaping hole in our understanding of how American broadcasting functioned. She told the story of how radio broadcasting used gendered identities to inform basic industrial practices and define the relationship between advertisers, audiences, and broadcasters. Hilmes delineated the profound and dynamic ways in which gender shaped broadcasting history and how gendered hierarchies were embedded in broadcasting’s DNA. Not only was American broadcasting shaped by gender, she argued, radio produced gendered representations and discourses that sometimes replicated, sometimes challenged, and often confounded those terms. No one had spoken with such clarity and insight on the critical role of gender in the origin of American broadcasting or on the continued relevance of gender in understanding the media’s operations.

Yet, Michele Hilmes’ work collecting, mentoring, and cultivating female scholars is as profound a contribution to the field of media studies as her own innovative scholarship. To explain, I need to tell a story. I was one of Michele’s many advisees in graduate school. I fell in love with radio and history in her classes, even as I yearned for a family. The difficulties I faced merging motherhood and academia were present from the very start of my academic training. I wrote my dissertation under Michele’s steady guidance as I raised two young children. I birthed my third baby the same morning I was scheduled to defend my dissertation. One week post-partum, bloated and sleep-deprived, I nursed my baby, walked into a room and defended my dissertation, and came out in time to nurse my young son again. At that moment, the messy, tangled terrain on which many female academics live their lives – the chaotic juxtaposition of breast feeding and intellectual inquiry, the labor that gives forth a new life and the labor that completes a long fought-for Ph.D., of sleep deprivation so severe that answers to basic questions eluded me at my defense at the moment that I was expected to stand toe-to-toe with my academic betters – was never more absurd, more lived, or more real.

I have no unusual strength, no special superpower that allowed me to finish my degree while knee-deep in diapers, snot, and sippy cups. Completing graduate school was a much longer process than I, and certainly Michele, had ever imagined. What I did have was an advisor who had been there, someone who had balanced motherhood and academia, and had not just survived, but thrived. She had walked the walk, raising a delightful child while negotiating the demands of a dual career family. She was a proud mother and a productive and pioneering scholar. She showed me, and many others, that a balance – albeit tenuous, dynamic, and fraught – between family and career was possible, if it was negotiated on your own terms. She never judged our choices – to stay home with young children or to seek a tenure-track position, to pursue a traditional career in academia or one outside the ivory tower. Her feminism was pragmatic. She would ask about our personal dreams and professional aspirations and then helped us each fashion an academic career that resembled no one else’s. There was not one path, not one way to be an academic, and not one way to be a mother. No matter my choices, Michele Hilmes remained a steadfast presence in my life, encouraging me to marry my ambition as an academic with my duties as a mother in whatever convoluted way I could. It wasn’t a question of whether I, or any other female academic, could have it all. It was a question, she believed, of how much we could have on our plates at any given time, a process that was negotiated and renegotiated in increments, sometimes minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day.

In a recent podcast to celebrate Michele’s retirement, I listened to the many women who have graduated from UW-Madison’s Media and Cultural Studies program under Michele’s watch, or who had found encouragement from Michele in their early research, who wanted to speak about Michele’s profound influence on their academic life. Michele guided women like Cynthia Meyers, Lisa Parks, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Clare Bratten, Eleanor Patterson, Kit Hughes, Norma Coates, Megan Sapnar Ankerson, and Aniko Bodroghkozy and myself, among many others, through graduate school, dissertations, and workplaces.  In her academic work, Michele Hilmes unearthed the voices of historical women who experimented with broadcasting in the medium’s earliest days and broadcast them for all to hear.  Through her tenure at UW, she encouraged dozens of women to find their own voices in and around academia, multiplying the women trained to recognize the profound influence of gender in the formation and operation of broadcasting. It is this marriage – her media scholarship and her mentorship of female graduate students – that is a lasting and profound contribution to the field.

Post by Andrew Bottomley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This is the fifth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Professor Michele Hilmes is retiring at the end of this Spring semester (May 2015), after a highly distinguished career of nearly 30 years in the media studies field – more than 20 of those years spent in Antenna’s home, the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To mark the occasion, a few of her students and colleagues at UW-Madison put together this radio documentary/podcast in her honor. After all, what better way to celebrate Michele than with the very medium she has spent so much of her career investigating and championing?

Written, Produced, and Directed By:
Andrew Bottomley

Co-Producers:
Jeremy Morris and Christopher Cwynar

Editors:
Jeremy Morris and Andrew Bottomley

Sound Mix:
Jeremy Morris

Host:
Andrew Bottomley

Featuring (in alphabetical order):
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Chris Becker
Ron Becker
Jonathan Bignell
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Norma Coates
Kyle Conway
Christopher Cwynar
Brian Fautuex
David Goodman
Jonathan Gray
Tona Hangen
Eric Hoyt
Kit Hughes
Josh Jackson
Jason Jacobs
Henry Jenkins
Derek Johnson
Michael Kackman
Danny Kimball
Bill Kirkpatrick
Derek Kompare
Shanti Kumar
Kate Lacey
Elana Levine
Lori Lopez
Amanda Lotz
Jason Loviglio
Janet McCabe
Allison McCracken
Cynthia Meyers
Jason Mittell
Jeremy Morris
Sarah Murray
Darrell Newton
Lisa Parks
Eleanor Patterson
Josh Shepperd
Matt Sienkiewicz
Lynn Spigel
Katherine Spring
Jonathan Sterne
Derek Vaillant
Neil Verma
Alyx Vesey
Tim Wall
Jennifer Hyland Wang

Music:
“Odyssey” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0

“Crashed” by Stereofloat
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 3.0

Old Time Radio Clips (in order of appearance):
This is Your Life (TV)
The Jack Benny Program, “How Jack Found Rochester”
Martha Deane Show, “Dewey Wins”
The Burns & Allen Show, “Gracie Allen Inc.”
NBC Chimes
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The War of the Worlds”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air, “The Fall of the City”
Suspense, “Sorry, Wrong Number”
The Shadow, “Phantom Voice”
CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Them”
Gang Busters, “Crime Wave Special Report”
Lux Radio Theatre, “The Thin Man”
The Thin Man (film)
Hollywood Hotel, “One in a Million”
The Movie Parade, “Design for Living”
Hootenanny of the Air
Amos ‘n’ Andy, “Andy the Actor”
Fibber McGee and Molly, “Fireball McGee”
The Texaco Star Theatre (Fred Allen), “Amateur of the Month”
The Aldrich Family, “Girl Trouble”
The Chisholm Trail
Transatlantic Call: People to People, “Women in Britain”
We Hold These Truths
On a Note of Triumph
Serial (podcast)

Special thanks to Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, as well as all the participants for recording themselves.

Post by Bill Kirkpatrick, Denison University

Here’s an under-appreciated fact: Michele Hilmes is a talented singer, as in “sings in public and people want to listen” talented.

I mention that because the many encomia to Hilmes in the wake of her retirement from teaching are likely to focus on her academic accomplishments, so it’s nice to inject some tidbits about the person. But the real reason is because the metaphor of the voice is just too irresistible when discussing the leading figure in Radio Studies of the past two decades: she is someone who gave voice to the discipline, who championed its many voicings. In that way, Hilmes’ voice and legacy resound far beyond her own work, and well beyond Radio Studies itself.

Donald Hambrick and Ming-Jer Chen argue that successful new academic disciplines emerge when scholars build “admittance-seeking social movements.” In contrast to Kuhnian revolutions or divisive confrontations with the disciplinary mainstream, the admittance-seeking movement seeks to carve out a place for new scholarship within an existing area of study. A major part of Hilmes’ importance has been her success in persuading Media and Cultural Studies to recognize the value of Radio Studies and Sound Studies in the face of its original indifference or even resistance.

For an admittance-seeking movement to thrive, say Hambrick and Chen, three elements are needed: differentiation, mobilization, and legitimacy-building. First, “it needs to differentiate itself from other existing fields, making claims about how a class of important problems cannot be solved by these status quo entities.” Hilmes, as a cultural historian who thinks as much about media institutions, economics, and policy as she does about the social, cultural, and political roles of texts, has been able to make a strong case for differentiation, showing her colleagues how the study of radio contributes to important questions in the field.

She makes the case for radio scholarship along multiple axes: the interconnectedness of radio and film, the indebtedness of television practices and texts to radio’s precedents, the centrality of radio to questions of cultural politics and the public sphere, the transmedial problem of sound, and many more. The breadth of her work reflects, first and foremost, an extraordinarily creative mind that can’t help but identify interesting connections; along the way, however, and as a byproduct of that breadth, Hilmes brings radio studies into a range of other conversations, allowing scholars of film, television, policy, gender, nationalism, and many other subjects to see the significance of radio to the questions they are interested in.

Only Connect, Fourth Edition (Cengage Learning, 2013)

The second of Hambrick and Chen’s elements is the mobilization of resources, by which they mean building the infrastructure and social relationships that enable like-minded scholars to find and support each other, define the questions and objects of the field, share their work, and form a disciplinary identity. In this regard, it is no surprise that Hilmes was so drawn to E. M. Forster’s phrase “only connect” that she named a book after it (Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States). She’s a connector of the first order; for example, approaching her at a conference is always tantamount to getting an introduction to someone else in the field.  Among radio scholars, her generous mentoring and tireless encouragement of junior scholars is, without exaggeration, legendary.

But beyond being supportive at an interpersonal level, Hilmes has accomplished a lot of concrete, practical field-building for Radio Studies. Among the initiatives that owe a substantial portion of their success to Michele include the biannual Transnational Radio Conference, Radio Journal, the North American Radio Studies Network, and the expansion of Sound Studies within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). These initiatives brought together radio researchers from around the globe and helped them see themselves engaged in a common scholarly enterprise.

Teaching is equally critical to sustaining a discipline, and Hilmes contributed there, too: recognizing that we needed a textbook that did justice to radio within the history of broadcasting, and that she was in a position to write one, she did. She even deserves credit for some things that I’m happy to put on my own CV, like co-founding the SCMS Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group with Alex Russo: that was basically Michele’s idea. In other words, if Radio Studies is more vibrant than ever, it is because Hilmes, not alone but foremost, has mobilized resources and organized people in order to establish the enabling conditions for the field to emerge and expand.

“In Focus: Sound Studies” from Cinema Journal 48.1, Fall 2008; edited by Michele Hilmes.

Hambrick and Chen’s third element in field-building is: the new discipline must be taken seriously: “[T]he aspiring community must build legitimacy in the eyes of the academic establishment, by intellectual persuasion.” Hilmes’ work speaks for itself, of course, as does the legitimacy of radio scholarship through the Hilmesian work of her graduate students, colleagues, and respected scholars across Media and Cultural Studies. But she has also engaged in more active persuading: by editing an “In Focus” on Sound Studies in Cinema Journal, making the case for Radio Studies in a range of venues as keynote speaker or invited panelist, or simply asking the “What about radio?” question as an audience member at conferences.

If the above reads as overly biographical, so simply overly fannish, I hope it nonetheless also illustrates for scholars in emerging fields what it takes to build and give voice to a discipline. Hilmes’ example shows that great scholarship is important, but it is not enough: new areas of study emerge primarily through the concrete labor, so different from the research we’re trained in, of making the case for new kinds of scholarship and organizing the people and resources to give it wings. Because she has been a great scholar and done that kind of work, Michele Hilmes can be assured that her legacy is not just on the library shelf; it is reflected in the journals, the listservs, the conferences, and above all the people who, collectively, are Radio Studies.

Radio scholars–and I include myself–tend to have a love-hate relationship with their marginalization within cinema and media studies, but that identity is fortunately becoming harder to sustain. This year, instead, I felt a palpable confidence among radio scholars that hasn’t been there in years past. That might be because of the Serial-driven “year of podcasting,” which helped aural media appear more relevant to a wider range of scholars; the continuing strength of the broader field of sound studies doesn’t hurt either.

But most of the credit should go to the hard work of field-building: the conferences and list-servs; the Radio Studies scholarly interest group and the Radio Preservation Task Force; the soon-to-be resurgent Radio Journal; folks like Andrew Bottomley here at Antenna and Brian Fauteux and Jennifer Waits over at Radio Survivor working tirelessly to keep the voices of radio scholars included in the broader media studies conversation; even the growing cohort of young (and decreasingly young) radio scholars finding professional success (however defined for them).

I wasn’t able to attend all the radio-themed papers and panels this year, but that’s part of the point: a few years ago I could; this year, no one could. (Before anyone reads that as a veiled critique of the conference program, in which a couple of radio-heavy panels were scheduled concurrently, please listen to my interview with SCMS scheduler extraordinaire Bruce Brassell and know that I have only respect and admiration for the folks who put the conference together.) Nonetheless, based on my subjective sampling, it appears that many of the goals that we have for radio studies are clearly being met:

• Quantitatively, the number of radio-themed panels (and the audiences for those panels) continues to grow
• Papers that consider radio are increasingly found on mixed-media panels
• The “donut hole” of scholarship on 1960s-1990s-era radio, which seemed so self-evident in years past, is slowly closing
• Radio scholars are increasingly engaging the kinds of broader disciplinary conversations that help move the field beyond justification to exploration

Of course, some goals remain on the horizon for us to continue working toward. For example, I had hoped that the Montreal location might bring more international scholars to the conference, but clearly we still have a lot of work to do if we want expand the conversation significantly beyond North America. There are logistic, linguistic, and disciplinary challenges to overcome, but that must remain a top priority.

The necessity of such work notwithstanding, the 2015 conference was clearly a moment of consolidation and advancement. As I write this on a plane out of Montreal, it is hard not to feel optimistic about the state of radio studies, within both SCMS and the broader field of film and media studies.