WELL-GROUNDED RADIO
Last week Karl was telling me how much I'd enjoy satellite radio. Perhaps he's right, but I like radio with a local flavor -- even if it's not my locale. I like listening to the AM skip that we get after the sun goes down -- traffic reports from KNX in LA, news and yak from KSL in Salt Lake City, Padres games from the Mighty 1090 in Tijuana (day or night).

I like Internet radio stations that are attached to a particular location rather than those that are pushing a generic feed. KBAQ keeps me connected to Phoenix. WGMS makes me feel better about Washington D.C. And listening to the ClassicFM reports of how the trains are doing in London feeds my imagination regarding a place I'd really like to visit. There is something about local flavor radio, sans robotic formatting, that makes the whole radio experience more intimate.

Garrison Keilor also prefers radio that originates closer to home -- what he calls good-neighbor radio -- "People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you." For me, though, it has less to do with proximity and more to do with imagination. It doesn't matter if the delivery is over AM, FM, or the web. It doesn't matter that it is a far away place. (Sometimes the further away the more exciting. I remember the time that I picked up the CBC from Edmonton on the car radio. I was pretty excited! I drove straight home and emailed the station engineer -- who immediately wrote back, astonished that his signal was making it to California -- even on skip.) What matters is that it is in a place rather than some gnostic, disembodied, and disconnected signal that could be coming from anywhere. Good radio is well-grounded.