Look for more sporadic news updates this month as I hunker down and pound out major portions of my master’s thesis. Regular refreshes (like the Schnazz) will continue, and news updates will occur if the story’s is big or unique, both of which could happen considering the FCC’s official implementation of its media ownership rule revisions takes place on September 4.
All of the coordinated grassroots media reform e-mail and call-in campaigns have worked so well to date that a big petition push is now on, and a national conference on media reform is slated for November 7-9 here in Madison. The Amherst Alliance has also ginned up 
a double-sided flyer for “LPFM Summer,” which is starting to hit full stride.
The face-to-face meetings combined with the petition should lay a great foundation for further last-minute lobbying come September 2, when Congress reconvenes for the fall.
Plans for a mass microbroadcast on Media Democracy Day continue to progress as well. As articulated previously, the idea is for microradio stations around the country to collaborate on providing content for a day-long broadcast. The initial idea divides the day up into segments, which each microradio station simultaneously broadcasting and webcasting their signals to a central server, which then would feed dozens more stations. So far there’s about a half-dozen stations interested in participating in the mass microbroadcast, and the word has yet to really percolate.
Finally, the folks at the A-Infos Radio Project find themselves in dire straits – they provide freeform audio distribution services to more than 20,000 people every month, and they do it all with no budget. Occasionally funding crunches like these come along (the last few have involved expansions of storage space), and this time around it’s the bandwidth bill.
It would be a tragedy for the Project to get strangled; for seven years it has been one of the premier free sources for independent radio programs available. They rightly point out that if each person who uses the site donates a dollar they’d be rolling in dough. They have more than earned that dollar.
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