As Low-Power Local Radio Rises, Tiny Voices Become a Collective Shout

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 7, 2018 at 4:56:26 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] As Low-Power Local Radio Rises, Tiny Voices Become a Collective Shout
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> As Low-Power Local Radio Rises, Tiny Voices Become a Collective Shout
> By KIRK JOHNSON
> Jan 6 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/us/low-power-radio.html>
>
> SEATTLE — A knowledge of geography is essential if you are running a tiny, 100-watt radio station. Hills are bad, for 
> example, as are tall buildings. Salt water, though, which lies at this city’s doorstep, can boost a radio signal for 
> miles, like a skipped rock.
>
> For a low-power FM radio station, anything measurable in miles is good.
>
> But on a recent Thursday night, one station, KBFG, was struggling to even get on the air. The station’s signal, 
> audible since November in an area measurable in square blocks, had flatlined. The Ballard High School basketball team 
> was about to take the court and the live play-by-play was in doubt.
>
> “We’re bootstrapping it,” said Eric Muhs, a physics and astronomy teacher. Headphones were slung around his neck, and 
> a mop of unruly gray hair came further undone as he leaned into his laptop trying to fix a software glitch. But Mr. 
> Muhs, 60, one of KBFG’s founders, admitted that the stakes for failure were relatively low. “Almost nobody knows that 
> we exist,” he said.
>
> Low-power nonprofit FM stations are the still, small voices of media. They whisper out from basements and attics, and 
> from miniscule studios and on-the-fly live broadcasts like KBFG’s. They have traditionally been rural and often run 
> by churches; many date to the early 2000s, when the first surge of federal licenses were issued.
>
> But in the last year, a diverse new wave of stations has arrived in urban America, cranking up in cities from Miami 
> to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and especially here in the Northwest, where six community stations began to 
> broadcast in Seattle. At least four more have started in Portland. Some are trying to become neighborhood bulletin 
> boards, or voices of the counterculture or social justice. “Alternative” is the word that unites them.
>
> “It’s an unprecedented time in our radio history when we have so many stations getting on the air at the same time,” 
> said Jennifer Waits, the social media director at Radio Survivor, a group in San Francisco that tracks and advocates 
> for noncommercial radio.
>
> Weird Is Good
>
> Low-power FM stations can typically be heard for about three and a half miles if a bigger station or obstacle does 
> not block the signal. O f the nearly 2,500 such stations in some stage of licensing, construction or active broadcast 
> across the nation, more than 850 have a license holder with a religious affiliation.
>
> Many bigger stations, by contrast, are being programmed far from the cities they serve, with corporate budgets to buy 
> transmitters that can then boost a signal beyond its home base. The low-power licenses are exclusively local, 
> restricted to nonprofit groups that might have a civic cause — the South Philadelphia Rainbow Committee, for example 
> — or were formed solely for the sake of a station and the dreams that fuel its existence.
>
> Washington has the second-highest concentration of them among the nation’s 15 most populous states, with 68 stations 
> for 7.4 million people, according to the Federal Communications Commission, second only to Florida. New York, by 
> contrast, has 54 stations, but nearly three times Washington’s population. Oregon — while not among the 15 most 
> populous states, with 4.1 million people — is even more saturated than Washington and Florida; it has 80 low-power 
> stations, most in rural areas.
>
> You want weird? Just turn the dial. One station in Seattle invites listeners to phone their dreams and fantasies into 
> a recorded line, then puts them on the air, at least the ones that don’t raise concerns about F.C.C. indecency rules.
>
> Russian-speaking residents in Portland, Ore., have their own tiny station.
>
> And if you want be charmed by a 5-year-old boy chatting with his father at bedtime about dinosaurs, music and his 
> sometimes bothersome sisters, you can find that at Tristan’s Bedtime Radio Hour, broadcast on Sunday nights on KBFG 
> in Northwest Seattle, where Tristan lives. It also streams on the web.
>
> [snip]
>
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