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Years ago, in Louisville, “people just didn’t understand this concept of having a radio station where people could just walk in and play what was interesting to them, or talk about what was on their mind,” Sharon Scott told me. “This was just totally radical.” Scott started ART-FM, otherwise known as WXOX 97.1 FM, in 2011, out of her family’s living room. Her husband, Sean Selby, a carpenter, helped put it together. She served as the general manager. Soon, their son pitched in with graphic design. Scott was surprised by the response among her neighbors, how “hungry they were,” she said, “for something like this that they never even knew existed.” ART-FM aired commentary from a World War II veteran named George who DJed until age ninety-eight; three women from Iran brought frontline news alongside recipes and language lessons; later, a Ukrainian DJ aired his soldier cousin’s dispatches from the war. The whole project was possible because ART-FM is a low-power community radio station, of which about two thousand exist across the country, operating at under a hundred watts and with a narrow broadcast range. 

“It’s hard, with radio, to judge how effective you’re being, and how are you really, really reaching your community?” Scott said. But ART-FM has been such a success—during Give for Good Louisville, when area nonprofits compete to see who can get the most donors over a twenty-four-hour period, the station is consistently a top fundraiser—that Scott was eventually able to move into a real studio. She now works with around a hundred and twenty community DJs. In 2023, she quite literally wrote the book, Low Power for Dummies, on how these operations work—in part, she said, because there seemed not to be a wide understanding of low-power radio, its possibilities, or its practicalities. So much of that knowledge, she told me, “is just passed along, you know, from person to person, just like oral traditions.” Now low-power people tell her it’s their Bible.

Part of what requires explanation is the distinction between community radio and public radio: “very different entities,” as Scott told me. “It’s just very muddy waters for people who aren’t in the biz.” Low-power stations are hyperlocal and as varying as the wind, concerned with community voices, emergency notifications, and information specific to a confined area. They necessarily rest on a few common limitations—most usually budget, volunteer labor, technical know-how, and the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. Practitioners of community radio also tend to see their work as politically and philosophically important. “The Low Power FM movement is a small but energetic alliance,” Scott writes in her Dummies book. “Real living, breathing humans are pushing through the cracks of commercial automation with spontaneous ideas and original thought. DJs are playing music because it moves them, not because it fits a mathematical formula. Listeners are discovering these new vibrant stations, where real DJs speak to them in real time, about real things that are going on. They find that no algorithm can simulate the effect of connecting with another human.” Now, against the precipitous backdrop of funding cuts to public media, low-power radio emerges as a lesser-known source of inspiration for what has long been possible.

Low-power radio and public radio have a contentiously intertwined history involving frequencies and funding. After World War II, the FCC supported educational institutions’ experiments in low-power radio. These stations fell into a category known as “Class D”; many college radio stations lived inside this designation. But by the late sixties, Class D stations were seen by some as merely “electronic sandboxes” in which students messed around with minimal oversight or expertise. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established, in 1967, a new definition of “public radio” emerged, and it crowded out low-power stations, which didn’t have enough money or manpower to comply with the new set of rules imposed in exchange for federal funds. (In a New Republic article, “How NPR Killed College Rock,” the writer Ian F. Svenonius characterized the takeover of college stations by public radio as an expression of “yuppie” cultural, political, and economic power.) 

In 1978, Class D stations were blocked from proliferating. In time, they dwindled in number. The freeze lasted through the nineties. In that decade, the efforts of Stephen Dunifer, the founder of Radio Free Berkeley, among others, pushed an alternative idea of radio as a collectively held resource, under the motto “let a thousand transmitters bloom.” Activists of the microradio, pirate radio, and community radio movement built portable or “drive-by” broadcast operations; Free Radio Berkeley operated one at a local community flea market under the heading “Flea Radio Berkeley: Creating the itch the FCC cannot scratch out.” Protracted lawsuits between such activists and the FCC unfurled. Then, in 2000, a concession: an FCC-approved “window” in which low-power operators might be able to formally apply for radio licenses for broadcasting only a few miles’ worth of programming to their communities. 

If that might seem minimally threatening to larger powers, it was nevertheless a controversial move, one that was strongly lobbied against by the National Association of Broadcasters, and opposed by National Public Radio. According to Christina Dunbar-Hester, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California–Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, NPR in essence claimed that low power “provided nothing NPR didn’t already do, and that NPR did it better.” Low-power license application windows would open again only on a few much-anticipated occasions. Scott, for her part, is an NPR skeptic. “The station just, you know, picks up these prerecorded shows and replays them for most of the day,” she said, referring to the programming shared with affiliates from headquarters, in Washington, DC. “They’ve got some local DJs, but for the most part, their programming is not local.”

That is not quite how Tristan Clum sees it. Clum—the program director at KUNM, an NPR affiliate based at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque—started working in public radio as a student volunteer twenty-five years ago. He is now fifty-six. Until recently, he said, money from the CPB made up 12 percent of KUNM’s budget, and the station is now trying to fundraise 548,000 dollars over the next two years simply to remain level with where things had been. Clum is “a fan of low power for what it says about how we use our airwaves,” he told me, but “I’m not a listener, and neither are most of the people that I know.” To the low-power crowd, he said, NPR is sometimes a shorthand for stations that run any kind of syndicated programming and have to pay attention to “silly things called ratings.” KUNM pulls only two shows from national NPR programming: All Things Considered and Morning Edition—and they are the station’s most-listened-to fare. “That’s what a lot of our listeners want to hear,” Clum said. (Though he noted: “Another part of that is because we put it on when they’re driving, which is when they’re listening.”) News deserts are nothing new, he said, and KUNM has been used to “operating in a kind of low-resource environment.” This was why the station had to pay attention to ratings, he explained, to “do the best” with what listeners donate.

Twenty-four miles north, in rural Placitas, New Mexico, Joan Fenicle, who is eighty-three, works as the cofounder and manager of a low-power radio station called KUPR. “I’ve always bitched about the fact that we’re not eligible for public funding,” she told me. Now, having heard about KUNM’s loss of federal resources, she wonders if that ineligibility “might be a blessing.” To be sure, there have been many months when Fenicle isn’t sure if KUPR might need to pull from its reserve savings. But when, for instance, the station needed a new transmitter, at a cost of seven thousand dollars, the community pitched in nine thousand. “We’re small,” she said, “but people value what we do.”

Low-power people tend to have a keen understanding of nearby NPR stations and their finances, but the reverse is not true. Several public radio station people I spoke with emphasized that they didn’t know much about low power, nor did they listen to it. The historical split between these two types of radio, Dunbar-Hester told me, revealed “a missed opportunity” to fund noncommercial radio “to serve both a national public interest and local communities.” She was “especially concerned now about rural and tribal stations that have lost federal funding via NPR/CPB,” as they served smaller populations and couldn’t necessarily fundraise in the way that Clum described. To Dunbar-Hester, low-power stations “might be more resilient as they are so grassroots—but they don’t reach as many people as NPR affiliates, so the loss of federal funding is a real blow.”

In a sense, low-power stations have been formed by constraint—financial, regulatory, legal. The result is something rangy, creative, and so local that it might be, as Clum gestured, irrelevant to people living forty miles away. KUPR has a broadcast area that is roughly one-third Native, one-third Hispanic, and one-third “everybody else,” as Fenicle told me. “We’ve tried very hard to represent that in our programming.” The station airs a popular show called Enchanted Tiki Hut and another called Indigenous Brilliance. Soon, KUPR hopes to partner with the local newspaper, the Sandoval Signpost, for steadier news coverage. Tuning in to KUPR, Fenicle said, is more about “terrain than it is distance.” She described a recent drive along the river: “I kept the station all the way to where I turned left and headed down the hill, and then I lost it.”

KUPR operates out of a mobile studio that was originally donated by the estate of Ed Grothus, a famous antinuclear activist who lived in Los Alamos, where he operated the Black Hole, a “museum of nuclear waste”—castoffs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Initially, the studio was “sturdy,” Fenicle said, but “so ugly.” She and her colleagues redid the carpet, put up metal siding. Eventually, they worked out a system so that in case of a wildfire—a very real possibility in Placitas, which sits in a high-risk area—the radio station could stay on the air, broadcasting emergency information while being controlled from a remote location. The station is also working with the Placitas Resilience and Emergency Preparedness Alliance, recording the alliance’s monthly meetings and then rebroadcasting and archiving them, so that people can access information about how to prepare for a wildfire. “Placitas lacks when it comes to emergency notification,” Fenicle told me. “There are no sirens.” There has been a recent push to get more people signed up for CodeRED, a mobile alert system. But, she noted, “we are told that the rule of thumb is that maybe five percent of the population will do so.”

Such concerns are immediate and pointedly local: radio as an emergency alert system and reflection of community identity. I asked Bruce Auster—NPR’s managing editor for collaborative journalism, which has supported reporting, for instance, on the impact of Hurricane Helene in eastern Tennessee and the Kerr County floods in Texas—about what the cuts to CPB might mean for affiliates. He wasn’t especially concerned about the short term. But, he said, “we have in most cases about two years to find alternative revenue sources, and partners are already thinking creatively about how to sustain the regional newsrooms.” In Warm Springs, Oregon, Sue Matters, the station manager of KWSO, an NPR affiliate radio station operated by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, told me that her station experienced a “huge increase in donations and memberships from doing media interviews about the CPB cut.” And yet it’s uncertain whether that level of investment will keep up, if the CPB funds will someday be restored, or if this is the new normal. No one is sure what to do, she went on, because there are simply “a lot of unknowns for sustainability in the future.”

At the time that I spoke with Scott and Fenicle, the Grassroots Radio Conference was underway in Spokane, Washington. There, a man named Jim Ellinger, who runs a nonprofit called Austin Airwaves, in Texas, was co-leading a workshop: “Is This Story Worth Getting My Ass Kicked?” Ellinger, who is in his seventies, travels around the world setting up low-power stations. A volunteer firefighter, he has a particular interest in public safety and disaster relief, and sees radio as a critical resource. Once, following a deadly flood in Wimberley, Texas, he set up a station by climbing onto the mayor’s roof. He has constructed a solar-powered radio operation in Borneo; he’s set up broadcast operations in Haiti post-earthquake. 

In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Ellinger was at the Astrodome within days. Austin Airwaves and other community radio activists described to the FCC how, inside the building, information was being presented on bulletin boards, which made it hard to disseminate to the thousands of people living inside. “There were arrests, scuffles, people who passed on,” Ellinger recalled. In an unprecedented move, the FCC quickly allowed Ellinger to proceed with a temporary low-power license, so that he could air news around the Astrodome—about relief efforts, recovery, and more. Ellinger and his group bought thousands of little transistor radios to distribute to the evacuees. “It was the single largest purchase ever at the ninety-nine-cent store,” he told me. “All the radios in the city.” 

But even with the FCC’s blessing, Ellinger ran up against opposition from Harris County decision-makers. The endeavor was short-lived. A different group was allowed to set up a low-power broadcast (KAMP 95.3) from the parking lot, but soon enough they, too, were asked to move out. Evidence of the tiny, ephemeral station and the people who told their stories on it lives on at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.  

Ellinger told me that this story has become “FCC lore.” He has repeatedly encountered officials from the FCC who know of his Astrodome attempt, which made the national news. “We certainly recognize the value of radio in a disaster,” he remembered an FCC official telling him at the time. (The FCC did not respond to requests for comment.) Ellinger sees today’s cuts to public media as “nothing but bad news.’’ Community radio, though, is something else. These stations are used to being stretched, and are tiny, passionate, and “scattered,” Ellinger said. “Most of these stations are low power, local, under a hundred watts, and serving nothing but the local community. If they’re lucky they get ads from the record store.” He added, “The general feeling is that we’re too small to mess with.” 

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