[Today’s run: none]
I’ve been thinking about radio station programming. And I have been reading a mid-’80s college text on broadcasting. I don’t know if this LPFM thing is going to happen, but I am learning something from it already.
LPFM is a non-profit radio service, kind of like NPR. But NPR requires it’s member stations to be larger than what LPFMs can be. So no LPFM station is an NPR station.
LPFMs can buy content. They can play music or do interviews, or generally do whatever they want. But they cannot run commercials. They can do “underwriting”, like the NPR stations do.
Our concept is to do audio books, and the library of available books is at librivox.org. They are books which have a public-domain copyright status. That means they are either old or written by cranks or both. Old is ok if it’s Dickens or Shakespeare. But there is a lot of old junk out there too.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about whether we should have our day broken up in to “hours” like the regular radio stations do. Should we try to fit our audio books in to time slots or go with chapter divisions?
Also I was thinking about whether we want to do a whole book beginning to end in one go or have it in daily bites until it is consumed.
Finally, I was thinking that maybe we would have an 8-hour programming day and repeat that twice over the course of the day. Someone who wanted to hear the next chapter of Jane Eyre could tune in again 8 hours later and catch what they missed.
Besides books, I was thinking about having a “homework hour” and maybe eventually have a dial-in show where school kids could call in and ask for help with their homework. Maybe we could have some author interviews or a short segment about new happenings at the libraries. And maybe someday we would do some local school sports play-by-play too.
One of my favorite small-town radio shows is the call-in swap. I like those. I think we can do that ok as long as prices are not mentioned.
And I wondered if we could do some “modern” audio books if we paid some kind of fee. I will have to look into that.