College and Community Radio Tidbits - 1980s College Radio Nostalgia and Community Radio Station Crisis in Colombia

1980s College Radio Nostalgia

The recent NY Times piece on college radio certainly generated some commentary, including a blog post on My Aimz Is True about the writer's connection to college radio in the 1980s and 1990s and how it helped shape her music taste and turned her on to songs by They Might Be Giants, the Smiths and Husker Du. She writes:

"College radio had a huge influence on developing my musical tastes in the 1980s and early 90s. Growing up in small town Wisconsin, I listened to WRST from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. They even let some of my high school friends DJ, usually at 4a.m. on Thursdays. My only other source of alternative music came from friends who had older siblings in college, and they passed on what they heard at their local college stations to we high school underlings."

Community Radio Station in Colombia Under Siege
Non-commercial radio faces many obstacles in the U.S., mainly over struggles about funding, volunteer involvement, and connecting with an audience. But, imagine, if your station was under siege by outside groups, and was repeatedly vandalized. A post on the MAMA Radio blog talks about a community radio station in Colombia whose transmissions have been compromised due to vandalism and equipment theft. By the way, the author of this blog, Mario Murillo, is a Hofstra professor and radio veteran (WBAI, NPR, WHRU at Hofstra) currently working in Colombia. He's also involved with college radio in Columbia at radio station Javeriana Estereo.