Travel with Rick Steves Celebrates a Year on the Air
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| Let's talk travel! |
By Tim Tattan
The public radio show Travel with Rick Steves recently celebrated its first birthday. We premiered on April 2, 2005, during the Spring Pledge Drive on Seattle's KUOW (94.9 FM). From the generous support the show generated even before listeners could hear a full broadcast, we knew there was a receptive audience of listeners curious about the world and eager to explore it with Rick.
Since that initial Seattle broadcast, we've steadily been added on public radio stations around the country, most recently in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, and Oregon. We're now heard on 36 full-powered stations, plus dozens more low-power repeater outlets that some stations use to extend their signal into communities just beyond reach of their main transmitter. If you'd like to hear Rick, find out when he airs in your neighborhood.
These new affiliates will each air a selection of some of the best of our earliest shows for the first two to three months, and then synch up with the same release schedule as is heard on the rest of our affiliates by summer.
If Rick's not on the air yet in your area, call or email your local public radio station and request that they consider airing his show. In the meantime, you have two other options.
First, you can listen online. Subscribe to the Travel with Rick Steves podcast free at iTunes and hear Rick anytime on your iPod. Or visit our archive of past episodes to listen to streaming audio on your computer or download podcasts (for all MP3 players) for the topics that interest you.
Second, Travel with Rick Steves is now being broadcast from outer space on Sirius Satellite Radio. The show has been added to the "NPR Now" weekend lineup, Saturday mornings at 7:00 a.m. Eastern (4:00 a.m. Pacific) and Sunday evenings at 7:00 p.m. Eastern (4:00 p.m. Pacific). Sirius Satellite Radio's more than four million North American subscribers can hear the show on channel 134 starting April 8 (for details, see NPR Now).
Finally, two of our affiliates have made it even easier to scratch your travel itch: South Dakota Public Radio has moved Travel with Rick Steves to the popular Sunday morning at 10:00 Central/9:00 Mountain time slot over the nine-station network across the state. And San Bernardino, California's KVCR (91.9 FM) — which already airs the show Thursday mornings at 10:00 — is adding a second broadcast on Sundays at 12:00 noon on in the "Inland Empire" and most of the eastern part of metro Los Angeles.
Tim Tattan is the producer of Travel with Rick Steves.