Journal ArticleDOI
Radio Revisionism: Media Historiography and the KDKA Myth
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The authors reexamine the historical role of KDKA, focusing on the maintenance and reinforcement of what they call "the KDKA myth" to examine how KDKA has managed its primacy claim throughout the station's history.Abstract:
Popular recountings of radio's past tend to begin with KDKA's November 2, 1920 broadcast of the Coolidge-Harding election returns, in effect deligitimizing the complex pre-commercial period in American broadcasting. The effects of this are apparent in the neglect of the pre-commercial period in popular and scholarly histories of radio. In contributing to the bourgeoning body of revisionist work in radio scholarship, this essay reexamines the historical role of KDKA, Pittsburgh. Primarily, I focus on the maintenance and reinforcement of what I call “the KDKA myth” to examine how KDKA has managed its primacy claim throughout the station's history.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France by Stephen Bann (Cambridge University Press; 216 pp.; $37.50)
Dissertation
Sound conversations: print media, player pianos, and early radio in the United States
Abstract: While historians frequently identify early twentieth-century sound technologies, such as the phonograph, as playing an important role in the march towards more passive, homogenized, and commoditized ways of interacting with music and sound, these ends reveal little of the means. This dissertation focuses on two sound technologies, the player piano and radio, in two discrete case studies. Both case studies utilize a range of print media sources—from the popular Saturday Evening Post to the specialized trade magazine the Player-Piano—and center on a span of years that were significant within the cultural and commercial development of either technology. Individual chapters explore one or two early twentieth-century periodicals in depth, using their player-piano and radio advertisements, editorials, humor pages, stories, non-fiction articles, and periodical contexts to present rich and complementary views of the two technologies. Throughout, I emphasize content creators (ranging from ad makers to editors) and the divergent goals that drove their work. The multi-perspective narrative that results highlights the push-and-pull of meaning around the player piano and radio as their popularity grew among the American public. This dissertation has two central objectives. At its most basic, it aims to contribute to our understanding of these two technologies during largely unexplored parts of their histories. The contrasting mainstream and specialty periodicals included in its analysis generate a diversely contextualized picture of conversations that surrounded the player piano and radio. Its second, broader goal is to highlight and explore commercial influences in early twentieth-century musical life, and the various ways they intersected with cultural discourses and agendas.
Journal ArticleDOI
Editor’s Remarks: Celebrating 100 Years of Radio Broadcasting!
TL;DR: The year 2020 marks the hundredth year of commercial broadcasting in the United States and most countries around the world as mentioned in this paper, and it is the year when the Westinghouse Electric Company (WEC) introduced the first commercial broadcasting system.
Journal ArticleDOI
Characteristics of the Spanish podcast sphere. Between democratization and commercial logic
José Gamir-Ríos,Lorena Cano-Orón +1 more
TL;DR: A content analysis of 21 variables was applied to the 206 programs that attained the highest popularity in the general rankings of Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iVoox during the first quarter of 2021 as discussed by the authors .
References
More filters
Book
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
TL;DR: One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly and what the troubling social and political implications of this are as mentioned in this paper.
Book
Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
TL;DR: In this article, the author reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market and argues that liberal marketplace principles - ideas of individuality, property, public interest and markets - have come into contradiction with themselves.
Book
Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922
TL;DR: Douglas as mentioned in this paper reveals the origins of a corporate media system that today dominates the content and form of American communication, but early press coverage may have decisively steered radio in the direction of mass entertainment.
Book
Stay tuned: A concise history of American broadcasting
TL;DR: The context of broadcasting is discussed in this article, where the prehistory of broadcasting and the coming of commercialism are discussed and lessons from the past for the future are discussed. But the focus is on broadcasting competitions.