Papers by Christopher Cwynar
Journal of Radio & Audio Media , 2020
This article details the various forces that shaped public radio station KEXP's evolution from th... more This article details the various forces that shaped public radio station KEXP's evolution from the 70s to today. It addresses the ways that Seattle's specific cultural, economic , and technological advantages enabled it to take on its current form as a key presence in global pop music curation and discovery. It argues that the sta-tion's progression thus represents a potential model for other legacy public radio stations in an era of diminishing public and institutional funding. However, this approach's viability will depend upon how effectively stations are able to leverage their local communities to compete in the networked digital media paradigm.
Popular Communication The International Journal of Media and Culture, 2019
This article considers the implications of rising sports rights fees and emerging digital media t... more This article considers the implications of rising sports rights fees and emerging digital media technologies for legacy public service broadcasters. I argue that, while the Hockey Night in Canada sublicensing agreement with Rogers prompted a significant amount of criticism of the CBC at the time, it is consistent with the broader history of the program. Furthermore, the situation is most significant in that it exposes the tensions between the CBC and the marketplace as manifested in CBC-TV. I suggest that this deal illustrates that the CBC should exit the commercial television marketplace. I conclude by suggesting that the CBC should shift its focus toward a renewed emphasis on noncommercial programming in areas often neglected by the commercial media. This approach could potentially provide a model for how legacy public service media institutions might reassert their civic and cultural value in an increasingly convergent and commercialized mediascape.
This article considers National Public Radio's (NPR) relationship with music and the web. I argue... more This article considers National Public Radio's (NPR) relationship with music and the web. I argue that the NPR Music project has successfully leveraged NPR's perceived autonomy from commercial factors, sophisticated cultural sensibility, established audience, and unique network of member stations to become an important curator of music-based radio and music itself. Building on an emerging discussion of the politics of curation and publicity in the social media and streaming paradigm, this article extends the concept of 'soundwork' to argue that national public media organizations must increasingly both produce and curate content in order to compete for attention and engagement on the platform-based social web. As this case study of NPR Music demonstrates, these legacy institutions can leverage their valuable 'national public' identities in order to facilitate these activities, but this strategy threatens to undermine their legitimacy during a period in which 'public' is an increasingly contested and contingent term. … I do not believe that music provides a future for public radio. With satellite broadcasting, Internet radio, and Internet file sharing, all types of music are now widely available to anyone at any time … In the future, music will have little, if any, role. (Mitchell, 2005: 190–191) Thus wrote Jack Mitchell, National Public Radio's (NPR) first employee and one of its founding figures, at the conclusion of his history of the institution. Yet even as Mitchell was typing these words, the popularity of longtime Director of All Things Considered
There have been few studies to date of the cultural work performed by NPR's information radio pro... more There have been few studies to date of the cultural work performed by NPR's information radio programmes, and those that have been conducted have overlooked the role of musical interludes in those programmes. This article combines quantitative data analysis with textual and discourse analysis to elucidate the nature of the interludes and their function within the context of All Things Considered, NPR's flagship afternoon newsmagazine programme. It argues that the structured diversity of the interludes embodies the homologous aesthetic and ideological dispositions of NPR's personnel and its core audience. The interludes themselves suggest a tension between highbrow and middlebrow aesthetic dispositions that are manifested in the structured diversity and hybridity of the genre selections as they are deployed in the context of the programme.
Borderlands and Breaking Points: Tension Across the 49th Parallel, ed. Kyle Conway and Timothy Pa... more Borderlands and Breaking Points: Tension Across the 49th Parallel, ed. Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 51-89.
Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music, 2007
... including Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. For Wilson, however, Dion outdoes her predecessors ... more ... including Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. For Wilson, however, Dion outdoes her predecessors with her brand of “hyperschmaltz, a franken-genre of sentimental intensity” (p. 60). This hyperschmaltz—with its utterly earnest ...
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Papers by Christopher Cwynar