Showing posts with label KJAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KJAN. Show all posts

Monday, November 26, 2012

The web stream where your friends are


Oh, joy! My favorite locally owned, small-town, throwback-to-an-earlier-age, 500-watt AM radio station in the universe now is streaming 24/7 on the Internet.

If you want to hear "community radio" the way it was before Corporate America ate the radio dial, just tune in the morning show on KJAN in Atlantic, Iowa -- complete with "Hymn Time" and "What's New in Pink and Blue."

What it is, is local, small-town radio as it was when radio was . . . local. And radio.


FOR THOSE of a certain age who grew up in Baton Rouge, let me explain it this way. KJAN is a modern-day, small-town version of WJBO circa 1968, only punching above its weight class. If you're from Omaha, substitute WOW radio from that same year.

Also, "Radio Atlantic" has a wonderfully eclectic middle-of-the-roadish music format, placing emphasis on the "-ish." After all, it did just play some Joe South and "Renegade" by Styx on overnights a while ago.

Really, KJAN is a treasure -- and an endangered species. Give it a listen.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

'The station where your friends are'

KJAN
Radio Atlantic

I'M HOPING, from time to time, to post some pictures dealing with . . . whatever.

I was playing with the scanner the other day, and I took the opportunity to scan in some old negatives that never saw the light of . . . being turned into actual prints.

These pics are from a 1998 feature story I wrote about KJAN, 1220 AM, in Atlantic, Iowa. KJAN is one of a dying breed of radio stations -- intensely local, full-service (meaning airing music AND news) and run by humans instead of computers.
 
That a station such as KJAN -- "The station where your friends are" -- exists at all anymore is notable in an age of corporate ownership and "efficiencies." This, after all, represents radio the way it was in 1967 . . . or 1947 . . . or 1937, for that matter.

But KJAN's existence as a fully staffed, "full service" radio station in little Atlantic, Iowa, is amazing. And it's still that way in 2007.

Evening DJ (and music director) John Scheffler, shown here, is still at KJAN. He first got the "radio bug" when his Cub Scout troop toured the station in the late 1950s, and that's where he is today. (Note that he's still, in 1998, playing 45s . . . seven-inch vinyl to those under 35. Cool, eh?)

RADIO IS ABOUT PEOPLE. Radio is about public service. Radio is about community.

Or at least it used to be, in an age long ago and far away -- before the advent of Clear Channel, the "efficiency" of one staff running five stations and "Hold your wee for a Wii" contests.

It's good to know that at least one little 500-watt AM station in the middle of Iowa still is about those things.