Tuesday, May 23, 2017

GCR Welcomes New Partner Station in Northeast Ohio

Global Community Radio is pleased to welcome another local community radio station to our network. WNPA-LP "Neopa Community Radio" serves the Canton, Ohio area at 102.5 FM, and streams worldwide online.

WNPA will offer GCR2 music programming to their listeners during overnight/early morning hours seven days a week.

We welcome Neopa Community Radio as a partner station, and we encourage listeners in the Canton area to send us feedback on GCR programming.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Minor Schedule Change to GCR1 Friday/Saturday Programming

Due to "restructuring" at United Nations Radio, the weekly segment Global Perspective is no longer in production. In its place, GCR1 has moved the weekly segment American Cafe from Voice of America to Saturday afternoons at 1:50 PM Eastern. UN Radio will continue to offer its other weekly segments, UN and Africa, and Gender Focus, which will continue to be heard on Saturdays at 1:30 and 1:40 PM Eastern, respectively, along with UN Daily News, Monday to Friday at 9:05 AM, and UN News in Brief, Monday to Friday at approximately 5:27 PM Eastern.

American Cafe's former time slot of 4:50 PM Eastern will now be occupied by another Voice of America weekly podcast, The Game Room. Each week, The Game Room presents some of the most interesting stories from the week in international sports.

Why do we keep changing our programming?

GCR has no desire to drop any of its existing programming. We feel that all of our programming on both streams is of the highest quality. We are proud of our program lineups, and don't want to see them change. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of our programming providers, like UN Radio, VOA, DW, and a host of other networks, radio stations, and producers from around the world. They are the ones who decide whether or not a particular program stays in production. A program may be cancelled for a variety of reasons, most of them either of a financial or personal nature, and Global Community Radio often has no say in these decisions. In the case of UN Radio and Global Perspective, GCR did take part in a recent programming survey offered to us by UN Radio, in which we gave very high praise to all of UN Radio's program offerings. Our guess is that, unfortunately, the overall response to that particular feature was not sufficient to justify its continued production.

As always, we appreciate the continued support and understanding of our partner stations and our listeners as these changes are made. We will always keep our programming schedules accurate and up to date, and you can always watch this space for the latest programming news, and other station developments as they happen.

Jason Longwell
GCR Station Manager

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Follow Up: GCR1 Changes

Those who follow this blog regularly know that GCR1 has undergone a few schedule changes in recent weeks. Now, we are completing these changes, and hope that the GCR1 schedule will remain stable for the foreseeable future.

The final broadcast of Humankind aired on Sunday, April 30th. Effective Sunday, May 7th, GCR1 will offer The Aware Show in the 8 AM hour. We hope this will be a suitable substitute for those who enjoyed the Humankind series.

Another Sunday change. Backstory is no longer being offered as a weekly radio series. It is still available as a podcast which listeners can access on their website. In its place, we present two programs. At Noon, we offer Rear Vision, a program that looks back at critical events in World History. This is one of the many outstanding shows we air from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). At 12:30, we are bringing back to our schedule The Correspondents, a VOA "week in review" news magazine which will compliment our existing VOA weekend programming that starts at 1 PM Eastern.

This, in turn, causes a change to our early Friday morning schedule. At 2:30 AM Eastern, we are replacing Rear Vision with the series What Keeps Me Awake. This, too, comes from the ABC down under, and is a fascinating conversation series with individuals from all walks of life talking about the issues they often ponder late at night.

Another change we learned about recently concerns the long running progressive news program Free Speech Radio News (FSRN) which had been producing a weekly half hour program in recent years. Due to lack of distribution, and due to their inability to find "firm financial footing", FSRN has ceased production. Their last broadcast was produced on April 28th. On Mondays, GCR1 will now air Left, Right and Center 30 minutes earlier at 10 AM Eastern. At 10:30, we have added The Laura Flanders Show. Laura is no stranger to community radio, as she has been part of various progressive news programs for many years. Her weekly program will present field reports, interviews, and commentary on a variety of relevant subjects. We hope fans of the former FSRN programming will enjoy this series.

One last change we recently made to the early Saturday morning schedule. Unfortunately, the DW program Quadriga has not been reliably available to us. We need shows that are accessible and which are produced on a regular basis. When we suddenly have problems accessing a show's audio files, we have no choice but to drop this program, and find other programming to put in its place. We have found another series from DW which is available reliably every week. It's called Spotlight on Europe. Unlike DW's flagship program Inside Europe, which will continue on GCR1, Spotlight on Europe presents the week's European news from an African perspective. This series will now air Saturdays at 1:30 AM Eastern, with Conflict Zone airing at 1 AM Eastern.

The GCR1 program schedule will be updated to reflect these changes shortly.

As always, we welcome your feedback on our programming. Let us know what you think, and what you'd like to hear on Global Community Radio by sending email to globalcommunityradio@gmail.com

Jason Longwell
GCR Station Manager