On April 30, New York police attacked the Columbia University student encampment and Hind’s Hall (Hamilton Hall) occupation, and WKCR-FM student journalists were there. The radio station’s website went down due to the amount of traffic – and that was the impetus for the following recordings, a portion of which was also mirror-livestreamed onto Youtube.
The station doesn’t appear to have any automatic audio archiving. So these recordings are here for anyone to listen to, and as documentation of the live reporting that offered such valuable perspective that is missing from establishment media reports.
Others have noted the importance of this media work, as you can see in the collection of posts pictured below.
Here are the recordings:
— LIVE —
April 30th, 9:14pm – 10:41pm:
Live coverage – Recorded, then uploaded onto youtube and onto archive.org
April 30th, 10:50pm – May 1st, 1:19am :
Live coverage, mirror-livestreamed onto youtube and later uploaded onto archive.org
— AFTERWARDS —
May 1st, 9:08pm – May 2nd, 12:42am:
Overall recap of the occupation and the police raids, available via archive.org & now mirrored at youtube
Three further sections are included here, in context of the WKCR recordings:
- Two short videos contextualizing the students’ occupation and the police response.
- A short note on making the archive, with tools that you might want to use at some point.
- Praise and deeper look at the work the student journalists at WKCR have been doing.
// And don’t forget, with this focus on the importance of media coverage and those who do the work, about the 133 (as of the end of March) Palestinian journalists and media workers Israel has killed since October 7th. \\
Context of students’ encampment / occupation protests for Palestine
Here is a statement from the Palestinian BDS National Committee on the students’ uprising.
And here are two videos:
Speech by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, after the police raids.
The song Hind’s Hall, released by Macklemore on May 6th:
“what you willing to give? / what you willing to risk? / what if you were in gaza? / what if those were your kids? / if the west was pretending that you didn’t exist / you’d want the world to stand up / and the students finally did / let’s get it”
Making a livestream and archive of the radio broadcast
These tweets are how I got into recording an archive – taking my own advice after I realized I could do some of what I thought someone should do:
Some tips on recordings,
livestreaming, and archiving:
When the WKCR website’s streaming got overloaded and stopped functioning for people, the ‘m3u’ streaming option was still working. This is something that can work for different devices; on a PC, it was a matter of opening up a media player (VLC is freeware) and ‘Opening a network stream…’
I think VLC can simultaneously record such a stream while listening to it, but OBS Studio is a freeware program that can record a mix of inputs simultaneously, and can also send it out as a livestream (‘broadcast’ is the ‘B’ in ‘OBS’).
In terms of archives, the Internet Archive (archive.org) is worth knowing about. There were a couple other recordings that people had posted there; I was able to get recordings there of the last 5-minutes of the broadcast (1:15am-1:19am May 1st) as well as the recap broadcast the next evening, to include here added to what I’d recorded directly. The Internet Archive also includes the ‘WayBack Machine’, which archives web sites and pages for future access.
One note about posting the livestream and recordings onto youtube, is that it makes it more accessible for people to find than otherwise.
The work of the Columbia U student journalists at WKCR-FM
Below is a compilation screenshot of some posts praising the work of the students, mostly in the hours of the live broadcast April 30.
There are also some articles to read more about the students’ work:
(from before the police raids):
- How Columbia’s Student Radio Station Is Meeting the Moment
(April 22 at Mother Jones, by Najib Aminy & Jacob Rosenberg) - Chaotic and thrilling: Columbia’s radio station is live from the student protests
(April 26 at The Guardian, by Victoria Borlando & Hannah J Davies)
(and from after the police raids):
- Catching Up With Columbia’s Student Radio Station After a Historic Broadcast
(May 1 at Mother Jones, by Jacob Rosenberg & Najib Aminy) - Columbia’s student radio station was the main source of information for the protests. Here’s why that matters
(May 1 at Business Insider, by Katie Notopoulos) - The Week That Student Journalists Put the Mainstream Media to Shame
(May 3 at The Nation, by Zito Madu) - Campus Protests Over Gaza Spotlight the Work of Student Journalists
(May 3 at New York Times, by Santul Nerkar) - Student Radio Covers Campus Invasion Better Than Big News
(May 6 at TheArtisTree, by Renesh Mehta)
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