Ink for Internet talk station Radio Titans

Radio Titans is an Internet outlet for podcasts that was started by Carl Kozlowski (arts writer for the Pasadena Weekly), Jake Belcher and Brant Thoman. They do the Grand Theft Audio podcast, which puts up ten hours a week of talk and humor, and several other shows. The schedule is modeled after a radio station, though it looks to have mostly openings. The Pasadena Star-News paid a visit last week to the Radio Titans Hollywood studio:

The door at the Radio Titans studio has a large crack in its window, and there's no doorknob, just an empty hole, so it's not soundproofed.

The Internet station is based in a rundown Hollywood office building, in the room where Doris Day is said to have handled her business affairs. Sometimes, hosts can hear people yelling in the hallway during broadcasts, and the construction of a new nightclub downstairs turned out to be audible on the radio.

"For a good month there solid, every day there was some kind of pounding or drilling going on.," said Brant Thoman, one of Radio Titans' three co-founders. "Fortunately we do have filters that kind of drown out some of that, but some of it we just work through it. We have to, and people know we're this little station."

This is the age of Internet radio, where small operations can compete with the big companies that dominate airwaves....[Grand Theft Audio] is two hours of current events and comedy every weekday morning, and it's attracted some big names in the comedy world and elsewhere, including Cheech and Chong, Carlos Mencia and David Koechner. Recently, they spoke with "Iron Man 3" director Shane Black, the day before he appeared on "The Tonight Show."

Kozlowski, who says he may be the only fulltime LA reporter who also programs an Internet radio station, has had guests like Burt Bacharach and Richard Linklater on his "Kozversations" podcast.

Photo: Andy Holzman/Los Angeles News Group