Mike Janssen

Mike Janssen Served as Scanning The Dial's original co-authors from Mar, 2008 to Jan, 2010 and is a freelance writer, editor and media educator based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He has written extensively about radio, mostly for Current, the trade newspaper about public broadcasting, where his articles have appeared since 1999. He has also worked in public radio as a reporter at WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he began his career in journalism and filed pieces for NPR. Mike's work in radio expanded to include outreach and advocacy in 2007, when he worked with the Future of Music Coalition to recruit applicants for noncommercial radio stations. He has since embarked on writing a series of articles about radio hopefuls for FMC's blog. Mike also writes regularly for Retail Traffic magazine and teaches workshops about writing, podcasting and radio journalism. In his spare time he enjoys vegetarian food, the outdoors, reading, movies and traveling. You can learn more about Mike and find links to more of his writing and reporting at mikejanssen.net.

Stations tie special programming to Olympics kickoff

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Authormike72x72_3 With the Olympics about to begin Friday, two classical radio stations have announced special programming to mark the occasion. One is Boston’s WGBH, which has already kicked off its World of Classical Music Challenge on Aug. 1. The station is asking listeners to help create “the dream team of classical music” by submitting their favorite pieces of music from the world’s five regions as represented by the Olympic Rings: Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Submissions will be accepted until Aug. 24.

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Classical radio makes for mellower worms

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Humans are not the only species soothed by the strains of classical radio. We know this thanks to Abram Sparks, an eighth-grader and budding scientist who lives in Hazel Green, Alabama.

Sparks won a regional science fair in April with an experiment in which he subjected worms to different musical genres. One bucket of worms listened to a radio playing classical music, while the other listened to rap. As the Huntsville Times reports, the worms in the classical bucket exhibited all the characteristics of respondents to public radio’s Classical Core Values study: they were soothed and free of stress, evidently a worm’s natural state. (It’s harder to say whether they had achieved “clarity of mind.”)

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Making the case for HD Radio with fresh programming

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Authormike72x72_3 I’ve told you about the changes coming up at WGCU in Fort Myers, Fla., where classical music will soon be moved to a channel available only on digital radios. WGCU’s classical channel will air Classical 24, the nationally distributed satellite feed produced by American Public Media. Other public stations have taken  similar approaches, filling their digital channels with Classical 24, Classical Public Radio Network (when it was still on the air), or other 24/7 formats such as rock or electronica.

Over at the Edison Media Research blog, Tom Webster suggests that radio programmers should give their HD streams a little more thought, especially if they hope to give consumers any real incentive to buy new HD Radios. His focus is on commercial radio, but the advice applies to public stations as well.

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Florida station moves classical to HD

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We’ve been ruminating and prognosticating lately about the Future of Classical Radio, but it’s equally important to follow present-day developments in good old terrestrial radio — for many still the primary source for classical.

So I took notice when not one but two public radio stations announced in the past few weeks that they’re moving away from the dual news/classical format and giving more daytime hours to news and talk. They join several other stations that have made similar changes since we launched this blog in March. As I’ve written before, 200-plus public stations in the U.S. air both news and classical. But the format is saddled with some inherent drawbacks, the main one being that few listeners enjoy both kinds of programming.

One of the stations to dump the dual format is going whole-hog — not just taking classical out of middays, but taking it off its primary signal entirely.

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