Welcome back to SDRadio for Thursday, April 28, 2011.
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John Fox sent out earlier this week about Pala’s community radio.
Pala’s community station, Rez Radio 91.3 reached a milestone this week, just two and a half months into its existence. While there is still much to be done, today was the first day we’ve had eight consecutive hours of programming completely free of our usual automated music. This is the proportion of local and network programming that I’d hoped to reach as a daily minimum for considering Rez Radio to be involved and responsive to community needs in its broadcast schedule. Not that there’s anything wrong with our automated music which I am actually quite proud of and I hope everyone is enjoying. But it always has been and always will be a “placeholder” for anything else with more substance that might be available to Pala’s community radio station.
Today at 10 we aired “Native America Calling” from the Native Voice 1 network with host Harlan McKosato who took calls related to providing our kids with opportunities to appreciate music and try out musical instruments. Rez Radio carries this show live so that Pala residents can be part of the show by calling Harlan at his studio in Albuquerque. At 11, we debuted “Good Food”, a weekly one hour program from KCRW in Santa Monica, dealing with cuisine, culture through food and other food topics. At noon, Pala’s first and oldest local show, Pala Today, with news, sports, weather, community calendar and features aired. At 12:30 we debuted another interview show from KCRW, “The Treatment” with Elvis Mitchell commenting on the entertainment industry with guest Joel McRae from “The Soup”. At 1pm, Mark Gleason hosted his weekly three hour “Groovy Trip” through the 70’s with music, well-researched trivia and reminiscences relevant to the music. At 4, Scott Stone did his live two-hour weekly music show featuring more contemporary popular music until 6pm. That’s eight consecutive hours folks … nine total today if you include our daily midnight feature, “The Old Time Radio Hour” of network comedy, drama and variety from the 1930’s through 1950’s. Last night featured “The Great Gildersleve” and “Pat Novak for Hire” starring Jack Webb just prior to his days with “Dragnet”. More than eight or nine hours a day would be even better and we still haven’t reached the eight hour level every day of the week. But we will … and more. Another reggae show and one featuring R&B and jazz music … both locally produced and hosted … are set to debut in the next week or so. There are still numerous local cultural and community shows in the planning stages that are mostly just waiting for the right volunteers to step up. We still encourage welcome volunteer show proposals from anyone who’s interested. We’re also close to needing some behind-the-scenes volunteer help as well.
Our recent experiment with a live sports broadcast from the Pala softball fields went fairly well and we’ve gotten good feedback about it, so we will be doing more of that for both home and away games. Likewise, when events and public forums of particular importance to Pala happen, we will do our best to provide live coverage whenever and wherever they happen. As for our regularly scheduled local and network programming, it will continue to be the programming policy of Rez Radio to schedule shows as much as possible in the manner of “strip formatting”. This means that either the same show or individual shows with a similar theme or interest to listeners will appear in the same time slot each day … the theory being that people listen to the radio by habit rather than by appointment. To help accomplish this, talk and news shows will be clustered primarily in the 10a to 2p block (currently just until 1p). Locally hosted music will air from 2 to midnight with all shows after 8p and on weekends pre-recorded due to staffing limitations. Lighter musical genres will be scheduled in the first half of this block and the same principles of strip programming will apply. For example, if several volunteers all want to do reggae shows, the preferred scheduling for those shows will be on separate days but all at approximately the same time of day.
Rez Radio’s automated mix of rock, country, reggae, soul, oldies and blues songs will continue in all non-hosted hours and most weekend hours. Note that all automated hours include hourly public service announcements and the soon-to-be-expanded “Cupa Word of the Day” feature.
We are continuing to refine and tune our emergency communications procedures and equipment to deal with efficiently relaying any necessary information in a timely and accurate manner during any local, regional or national emergency. Suggestions towards this end are always welcome.
Rez Radio’s complete program schedule is available in our daily e-newsletter and an MS Outlook calendar … both available by free subscription … and online at www.palatribe.com/pala-radio . That’s also where you’ll find the link to listen to our live stream, which you can add to your desktop or favorite browser using this address: http://216.240.145.44:9000/stream.m3u . Free smart phone apps are available that will accept your adding this address to their list of stations. We recommend “Stream Furious” for Android phones and “F-Stream” for i-Phones. We will soon upgrade the streaming equipment to eliminate the frequent outages we’ve experienced recently, especially on the weekends. We’re also looking for anyone with smart phone app writing experience to volunteer to create a dedicated app just for Rez Radio.
We welcome any and all comments, critiques, questions and suggestions. Please email 91.3@palatribe.com . Thanks to the Pala Band of Mission Indians for their support and direction in the creation of Rez Radio 91.3 and to Rez Radio volunteers who are all doing a great job producing their shows, molding the personality of the station and taking away from the experience the joy of creating a connection with listeners.
It’s all happening!
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