The community of Philadelphia radio comes together to celebrate the sixth annual Community Media Day.
Save for my friends in Jacky Bam Bam and Pierre Robert, I don’t get all that much time to listen to WMMR-FM’s on-air lineup. But all of my metal head and rawk-out friends have had long faces and reason to mourn. The big corporate owners of WMMR, Beasley Media Group, fired longtime WMMR DJ Jaxon along with several additional jocks, while doing away completely with a live overnight broadcast – rare these days – and moving into the same automated music rotation system that most stations currently use.
When we think of community radio, we think of stations such as WHYY, WDAS, or WPPM, radio produced by, and interactive with its immediate “family”. This Thursday, October 20, WPPM-FM, WPPM-org and its PhillyCam television associate celebrate the 6th annual Community Media Day with a days-worth of unique programming, including a 3-hour live television and radio marathon (hosted by yours truly, A.D. Amorosi) and a pop-up sidewalk concert at PhillyCAM, all part of its People Power Media Fest. From 2 pm to 4 pm, our focus will turn to WPPM 106.5 FM and how community radio plays a role in cultural, social and political change before moving into a live TV/radio simulcast that will activate every single production studio at PhillyCAM.
The point is, apart from any quick advertising, that Philadelphia radio is something of a family, something that, on Friday, Robert and the Preston & Steve team emphasized during their usual shift change. And the family that is WMMR has been broken apart without warning or opportunities for its lost members to give or get a proper sendoff. I don’t like several of my cousins, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to their wakes when they pass.
Robert played a lost classic from The Kinks, “Around the Dial” as a way of eulogizing their missing comrades and it was off to business with the new usual in mind. And another family member lost.
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