By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, March 2013
In late March 2013, Irish Times music writer Jim Carroll published a column in praise of KCRW and the broader public-radio music-discovery model. The column landed in front of KCRW general manager Jennifer Ferro and the rest of the Santa Monica station’s staff. The original FishbowlLA framing called the piece the kind of international validation that the LA-public-radio audience didn’t always get to hear.
Then
Carroll’s Irish Times column on the record specifically singled out KCRW as one of the global standard-setters for music radio. The station’s Morning Becomes Eclectic show, the broader KCRW music programming, and the kind of artist-discovery model that the station had refined across decades had built an international reputation that the column was documenting from the European side.
Jennifer Ferro had been KCRW’s general manager since 2010 — the post she would continue in for the rest of the decade. The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring of both Carroll’s piece and KCRW’s broader institutional position. International music-press recognition for a single American public-radio station was structurally distinctive.
Now
Jim Carroll has continued at the Irish Times as one of the publication’s most-bylined music writers across the interval. His On the Record column has remained one of Ireland’s anchor music-criticism voices through the entire post-2013 streaming-platform transition that has reshaped how music gets discovered globally.
Jennifer Ferro continued as KCRW’s general manager through 2024, when she announced her retirement after a 14-year tenure as GM and over three decades at the station. Her successor took over operational leadership in mid-2024. The station’s music-discovery franchise — Morning Becomes Eclectic, the broader DJ-driven curatorial model, the live-performance studio work — has continued as one of the station’s defining identities through the entire transition.
The international-public-radio-recognition dynamic the 2013 piece captured has shifted in the streaming era. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and the broader algorithm-driven discovery platforms have substantially absorbed what public-radio music programming used to do uniquely; KCRW’s continued institutional position as a curatorial brand is more distinctive now than it was in 2013, when the streaming-platform displacement of music-discovery was still emerging.
The 2013 column reads now as one of the small documented moments when the international music press was still treating individual American public-radio stations as global tastemakers — a framing that has held up better for KCRW specifically than for the broader public-radio-music-discovery category.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.