Today, Howard Stern announced he’s signed an exclusive contract to move his show to Sirius Satellite Radio, staring in January ’06.

But instead, let’s talk about another threat and/or savior to the audio medium.

Internet radio, in both “live” and prerecorded formats, has been with us ever since that first, ultra-lo-fi version of RealAudio.

But those of us who’ve dreamed for a viable alternative to the corporate airwaves have been disappointed. The big broadcasters and the big record companies failed to get net-radio legally quashed. But the dot-com crash, and the decline in ad volume on indie websites, have limited the medium’s viability.

A bigger hindrance was net-raido’s deskbound status. You couldn’t take it with you. You had to be connected to an Internet line, or within the ultra-short range of a WiFi transmitter, unless you wanted to record a stream and burn it to a CD.

But now, the increasing ubiquity of MP3 players has spawned a new concept (or at least a new buzzword)—“Podcasting.”

The podcasting premise: Recorded programs are made available for download, either from a regular website or an RSS syndication feed. You can then hear the stuff on your computer or your portable MP3 machine. Using easy audio-mixing software, anyone with a little money and a little talent can make and distribute their own podcasts.

Early weblog proponent (and recent Seattle resident) Dave Winer has embraced the podcasting concept. So has Holland’s biggest gift to MTV, Adam Curry. Curry’s got a daily hour-long show, during which his experience in regular broadcasting shines through. He’s also got a link list about the topic, iPodder.org.

Most podcasts thus far, including Curry’s and Winer’s, are rambling, leisurely-paced talk shows and panel discussions. Their topics are usually tech- or web-related, with brief sidebars about politics. Yet already, some producers are exploring the infant medium’s broader possibilities. One of these is Portland’s Tim Germer, with his regional-music show Northwest Noise.

Canadian blogger Jason Clarke calls podcasting “traditional radio broadcasting’s worst nightmare.” He claims that “traditional over-the-air radio is broken in many ways even more than television is.” He thinks podcasting, as the final set of ingredients making DIY net-radio feasible, just might free the masses from the minions of Clear Channel.

On the reverse, CBC staff producer-announcer Tod Maffin claims “podcasting will save radio.” Maffin believes podcasting could become “appointment listening,” overthrow the tyranny of the corporate playlist, and even generate revenue from subscriptions or pay-per-listen schemes.

I don’t know if podcasting can get that far. But it’s got possibilities. Abundant possibilities.

When I was a DJ on KCMU, it was a UW student operation. Long before it morphed into KEXP, it had phased out the volunteer student staff for trained professionals.

Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, UW student radio is back, under the rubric “RainyDawg Radio.” And it’s great.

It’s a hi-res audio stream with all your indie pop faves, new discoveries to surprise and arouse you, and an intense local focus. Kudos to all involved.

I, along with some 20,000 other locals, found my way to the Tacoma Dome’s north parking lot bright n’ early last Saturday morning.

We were all off to hear John Kerry give a major swing-state campaign speech.

I’d arrived at 10:30 a.m., an hour after the gates had first opened. It took another hour to wind up the line and get into the outer standing area. An hour after that, those of us without pre-attained tickets were fed through the metal detectors into the inner audience zone.

Almost everyone held an optimistic, celebratory mood. There was a clear air of possibility in the crowd. People felt they really could take this country back, or rather, take it forward, beyond the cynical politics of greed and prejudice.

The conservative counter-protestors were few and brusque. One yelled epithets against “liberal scum,” as if he could persuade people to his side by insulting them.

Most of the homemade buttons and badges were anti-Bush in nature. But the rally’s organizers made sure plenty of professionally made pro-Kerry signs filled the space.

Following the usual round of warm-up speeches by local politicos, “folksy” radio veteran Garrison Keillor led the crowd in a somber a capella rendition of “America the Beautiful.” He then told an anecdote about escorting Kerry to the Minnesota State Fair, where the radio host bought the candidate a corn dog and the candidate had to remind the radio host to put ketchup on it.

A good 45 minutes elapsed between the end of Keillor’s address and the arrival of the candidate’s motorcade. When he finally appeared, he brought two more warm-up speakers. Kerry’s ex-primary opponent Gen. Wesley Clark (below) decried Bush as “an incompetent commander in chief.”

After the general, Kerry’s army buddy Jim Rassmann slammed the TV attack ads questioning Kerry’s Vietnam service.

Finally, the candidate himself took to the mike. He spoke for almost an hour, drawing plenty of whoops and applause along the way.

He made the usual points—reform health care, kick-start the economy, rebuild international alliances, stop tax windfalls for the rich, get folks working again (at living wages), rebuild public education, help real families instead of hiding behind “family values” platitudes.

He said little or nothing about abortion rights, gay rights, ending the Iraq war, ending the drug war, repealing the Patriot Act, getting the FCC off its censorship kick, breaking up the media conglomerates, or bringing a just peace to the West Bank.

Still, Kerry did say what I wanted to hear about the issues he chose to discuss. And he gave the most impassioned, most robust speech of the three of his I’ve seen in person.

John Kerry’s found his proverbial mojo. Whether that’s enough to put him over the top remains to be seen. But at least the Saturday crowd seemed to think it was probable.

BusinessWeek has proclaimed the death of the “Mass Market” in the U.S.

With the rise of tertiary cable channels, ultra-specialized magazines (my current fave: Physicians’ Travel), and the Web, advertisers are increasingly moving to media that target specific audiences. Caught in the resulting fiscal death spiral: Network TV, local TV, and daily papers.

Perhaps you won’t miss the days when half the country watched the same sitcoms, and 80 percent of households received “the paper” (typically a dully-written, Republican-partisan sheet) every day.

But if Procter & Gamble or General Motors wishes to no longer support general-interest journalism, who will? Not web ads, not sufficiently, at least not yet.

A lot of us lefties have had our beefs against the news coverage from the networks and the daily papers this past year and a half. To a great extent, the big media’s superficial, authority-driven war coverage was driven by the twin drives to keep costs down and to gain readers/viewers with spectacular stories/images. Thus, the mania in 2003 for “embedded” reporters, who got to cover the war up close as long as they saw and said what the White House wanted them to see and say. Undercover, investigative stuff is much more labor intensive, and doesn’t guarantee any flashy payoff.

As a long-term-unemployed journalist myself (will someone out there please hire me please?), I’ve seen the long-term effects of this shift in ad support. It’s undoubtedly the real reason the Seattle Times wants to end its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer. It’s the real reason chain-owned radio stations are decimating their news departments, and national magazines are buying fewer freelance articles. It’s a trend that won’t be fully reversed even when the general economy improves.

So what’ll save quality news in the U.S.? Pledge drives? Church subsidies? Foreign imports?

I haven’t the answers. If you have, lemme know.

…who wished the well wishes on my recent birthday. It was indeed pleasurable and memorable.

One of the things I did that day was to visit Chateau Ste. Michelle, the modern factory (hidden behind a pseudo-French facade on an old dairy farm) that, as much as any other outfit, spurred the Washington wine biz to its current lofty heights.

The winery tour was brief and efficiently laid-out. The guide told a little bit about the many different wines made here and at a satellite facility in Eastern Washington, and about some of the awards the company’s received over the years.

He didn’t mention Ste. Michelle’s origin as Pomerelle, a little plant on the Sea-Tac strip that had made cheap screw-top wines since the end of Prohibition. In the late ’60s, it started making “real” wines under the Ste. Michelle name. Under master marketer Charles Finkel (who went on to start the beer importer/distributor Merchant du Vin and the Pike Pub and Brewery), Ste. Michelle became prominent enough to get bought out by U.S. Tobacco, the “smokeless tobacco” guys. With this corporate backing, the company built the “Chateau,” added subsidiary brands and branch plants, and became the grape-crushin’ colossus we know n’ love today.

Back in Bothell, one drive-up espresso stand embraces an epithet that’s apparently become beyond-passe in the big city.

LAST FRIDAY, the mercilessly-hyped new arena rock band Velvet Revolver came to the Moore. The group, and its audience, were welcomed by no fewer than three radio-station promo tents.

All three tents boasted mega sound systems, each blasting a different yet identical mix of generic dirtboy metal. Two of the tents proclaimed the word “alternative” as part of their respective stations’ slogans.

Once upon a time, generic dirtboy metal was the definition of what “alternative” music was an alternative to.

…not to be judgmental about judgmental people anymore. But sometimes I can’t help it. Such as when KOMO’s voice-O-relative-sanity Ken Schram gently lambastes the NIMBY hypocrites fighting he homeless “Tent City” camp in Bothell.

ROGER EBERT defends Howard Stern:

“I find it strange that so many Americans describe themselves as patriotic when their values are anti-democratic and totalitarian. We are all familiar with Voltaire’s great cry: ”I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.’ Ideas like his helped form the emerging American republic. Today, the Federal Communications Commission operates under an alternative slogan: ‘Since a minority that is very important to this administration disagrees with what you say, shut up.'”

All seven of the new KEXP street posters are at this site for your hi-res downloading pleasure.

Forty years ago this week, pirate radio stations started broadcasting from ships moored just off the coast of England.

The “British Invasion” rock revolution had already been well underway. But BBC radio spent only a few hours a week on it–and even those shows were heavily padded out with interviews, due to union regulations limiting “needle time.” There was still no commercial radio in Britain, which had had commercial TV since 1955.

So, some clever Irish entrepreneurs taught themselves the shticks of U.S. top-40 stations, fitted an old lightship with studios and a transmitter, and began Radio Caroline (named after JFK’s daughter). Caroline was followed by several others, including Wonderful Radio London (whose Dallas-produced jingles were included on the album The Who Sell Out).

Pirate radio ships soon surrounded Britain. Unlicensed stations even popped up on abandoned British Army forts. The government cracked down, and devised the Marine Offences Act to prohibit UK citizens from working for, supplying to, or advertising on the pirates. By August 1967, all the pirate stations were gone except Caroline; whose owners slogged through years of struggle to stay, literally and fiscally, afloat. (Radio Caroline still exists as a mostly-volunteer organization. It runs an Internet and satellite radio station, while raising money to restore one of the old radio ships.)

The BBC started its own belated pop station, Radio One, just as the first pirates shut down. But it, and the legal commercial stations that finally showed up in 1973, still had needle-time restrictions; and besides, the music had become a lot less fun by the days of Steely Dan. Still, a newer wave of pirates, mostly noncommercial volunteers using cheap low-power equipment, carried on.

So this week, who’s officially celebrating all this history? Why, the BBC of course. It’s temporarily renamed one of its local stations as “Pirate BBC Essex,” with current DJs and old pirate-station celebs in a studio on a lightship moored just off England’s east coast. And you can hear it all streaming online; though its all-oldies playlist sounds a little too familiar to these Stateside ears.

The lesson of those times for today? Those early seaborne pirate stations were thoroughly commercial operations and also branded themselves as daring rebels; that stance has become mightily tiresome in our present age, when screeching business magazines proclaim one corporate “revolution” after another. (More specifically, those of us who knew old U.S. AM radio might find it hard to comprehend how that poppy, hook-y, ad-laden format could seem a breath of fresh air in stuffy paternalistic old Britain.)

Today, in both the U.S. and the U.K., commercial radio is a consolidated, tightly controlled space, weighted down by cross-conglomerate “synergies” and strafed by cost-cutting. Satellite radio offers more formats, but each of those is just as strictly predictable as its broadcast counterparts.

We need every new attempt to break this hegemony–online stations, low-power stations, and, yes, even a scurrilous pirate here and there.

…chopping away at our (and broadcasters’) rights? Sign the Stop FCC petition.

WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring came the return, corporate galleries be damned, of the indie art walk in Occidental Park. Artists now have to buy a city license and sign a disclaimer attesting they’re selling their own stuff, but the freewheeling spirit of creation and discovery remains.

FOUND ON THE GROUND on East Pike Street: “We’re getting married tomorrow in Portland, whether you like it or not.”

THE QUINTON INSTRUMENTS building on Denny Way, formerly a warehouse for the old Frederick & Nelson department store, is coming down for one of Paul Allen’s megaprojects.

Quinton, now out in the far suburbs, makes, among other things, hi-tech treadmills. I trod on one at Providence Hospital last September. The diagnostician asked me to tell her when I was too pooped to keep running in place. Ten minutes later, after the machine’s difficulty level had been upped to six miles an hour at a fifteen percent uphill grade, I gave the word; which, of course, was “Jane, stop this crazy thing.”

ABOVE, the remains of Titlewave Books; which, as previously mentioned here, closed after nineteen years.

Below, the remains of Venus, the plus-size clothing boutique on Capitol Hill that insisted women of dimension are beautiful.

WITH MUCH LESS MEDIA HYPE this time around (thank God), Krispy Kreme opened its latest donut stand on First Avenue South last week, just in time to get the staff trained before nearby Safeco Field opens for the start of baseball season next week.

They promoted the new place by handing out boxes of the glazed circles downtown. The boxes include a full ingredient listing. Among the deliciously good things that go into those sweet Os: Vital wheat gluten, diammonium phosphate, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, ethoxylated mono-and-diglycerides, calcium propionate, fungal alpha amylase, pentosanase, protease, and carnuba wax.

KEXP’S PUTTING OUT POSTERS and postcards around town, aimed at helping the station’s core listeners feel proud of their indie-musical knowledge. This one, f’rinstance, is a cute joke if you know the two bands referenced by the visual clues. Since you all undoubtedly know them, I won’t have to tell the names here.

…you can try this alternate source from the network’s Portland affiliate. (The station’s air frequency, 620 AM, is essentially unhearable in the Puget Sound country, due to the “Christian Information Station” from Shoreline on 630.)

I’ve been listening to the first hours of Air America Radio, that new “liberal talk radio” company. You can hear it online, or on XM Satellite Radio. It’s on the air, thus far, only in NY, LA, LA’s exurbs, Portland, and Minneapolis. There’s no word if or when it’ll be over-the-airwaves around here.

It is, to borrow a horrid cliche, a breath of fresh air.

The hosts I’ve heard so far (Al Franken, Chuck D, Katherine Lanpher, and Randi Rhodes) are smart but not smartassy, clever but not insulting. And they’re proud to call themselves both liberals and patriots. This isn’t nambypamby NPR-ish “nice.” Nor is it Republican sleaze-mongering. It’s unabashed, outspoken, and often funny as all heck.

TOM RUNNACLES offers up a fine li’l tribute to Alistair Cooke. Some email respondents to him then go and spoil the proceedings by noting that Cooke’s BBC Radio essays had become steadily more reactionary over the past two decades. (Cooke, like Sinatra, had apparently fallen in love with the Reagan crowd as saviors of a more genteel past.)

Howard Stern?