Community radio as civic infrastructure

Writer and filmmaker Nile Southern recently profiled KGNU for Newsjunkie, focusing on the station’s new downtown community media center and its role as a model for locally rooted, listener-supported journalism. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau spoke with Southern and Maeve Conran, former KGNU news director and now managing editor of Rocky Mountain Community Radio, about community ownership, local news, emergency broadcasting, the limits of volunteer labor, KGNU’s new physical space and what other communities might learn from the station’s example.

Nile, can you tell us a little about your involvement with KGNU?

I’m still involved with the radio station as someone who serves on the nominating committee. We look for board members, and if there are listeners to KGNU hearing this, I invite them to consider increasing the depth of their volunteering by joining a committee or even applying to the board.

It’s very community-based, I assume. Anyone can join and be involved in the station’s operations or the broadcast?

Absolutely. You can come in and start volunteering right away. You can get trained to be a field producer for the news. If you have a passion you’d like to give to the public or give back in some way, you can propose a show of your own or become a DJ playing music you really like and know about. It’s a very open-opportunity situation.

How did you first get involved with KGNU, and what kept you connected with the station over the years?

A friend of mine who’s a novelist and writer, like myself, had been living in Boulder for a number of years. When I was in New York City, he used to send me cassette tapes — for those of you who remember what those are — like mixtapes. He would record the music he heard on air because it was so unlike anything he’d ever heard, and he knew I’d like it.

When I lived in London for a little while, he sent me tapes there, too. I was hooked on the station years before I knew it from the inside out, and years before I moved to Boulder.

When did you first start listening to the station?

It must have been in the early or mid-’80s. One of the factors in moving to Boulder was the radio station. I just thought, wow, this is so great. You could turn it on and hear amazing music. It was such a human-curated experience, though back in the ’80s I didn’t know what that term would mean. People were really creating an experience for you and sharing the joy of music.

The news and public affairs programming was a whole other area. My friend would send me tapes of things he heard broadcast, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy — voices that normally didn’t come across. To have them playing in your house, and to hear them over and over, was really a joy. My first introduction to the radio station was through those cassettes sent through the mail.

When did you decide to move to Boulder?

Around 1989, we started thinking about it. We moved in 1992 from London, and my wife and I started volunteering at the station. Shortly after that, I was asked to join the board.

For board members, they look for people who are familiar with the station and its positive aspects. I knew its programming and some of the DJs already, and the board needed members, so I was invited to sit on the board.

What was it like being on the board? What was the business of running the station like?

When I was on the board, we had a very active board in terms of things we were doing. We were thinking about getting a new building and moving from our old building, which was too small.

For instance, there has always been a live cabaret show on KGNU, and the older building didn’t have a performance space. It had a hallway. The joke was that the show was called the Concert Hallway. They made the best of it. They had an upright piano in the hallway, but there was very little room, and bands had to be lined up rather than configured so they could see each other.

When I was on the board, we decided to renovate and soundproof a new building that we took over. That was a big move for us at the time. Of course, 25 years later, KGNU has purchased yet another building, which is awesome and even better.

We also decided to buy an AM signal, which would get us into Denver. In Boulder, we have mountains and very strict limitations on how far the signal can go. We wanted to see how we would function in an urban center like Denver, especially with the news and public affairs programming.

Getting into Denver was not easy. The best way we figured out was to buy another station, an AM station. That was controversial because AM was on its way out, or at least not a proven delivery method for the high-quality music we play, which is designed to be heard in stereo.

There are technical aspects to the signal that are still a bit controversial. What is the value of an AM signal? I think there’s still potential there that we haven’t quite figured out. These are all volunteers. It’s not like we have a staff person devoted to strategic planning or future planning. There used to be a signal committee that looked at signal-related issues. I think AM still has potential, but it’s a very odd asset.

That must have been a window into how community ownership works in practice. What is it like to be part of a community-run radio station?

The official title is the Boulder Community Broadcast Association. The idea is that the signal, the call letters and the license are owned by the public in trust through this organization. The board members are members of the public who know something about the station.

We’ve found that the best and most reliable way to populate the board is to find people who really care about the station, know it, appreciate it and want to preserve and protect it.

It was a great inside look at the issues. If we’re going to buy a building, for instance, we don’t want to put any of the station’s assets at risk. If we take out a loan, we don’t want to put up as collateral something we could lose. That would be a disservice and disappointment to the public. It would certainly be against the mission, which is to serve the public with programming that is educational and entertaining.

Each board member had their own threshold for risk, but everyone agreed that we should never put the asset at risk. As far as I know, the station never has.

You describe listeners and volunteers almost as owner-investors. How literal is that feeling among the KGNU community?

It’s both figurative and literal. There’s no contract that gives them ownership. If you put in your will that you’re going to continue funding the station, that’s fine, but the station is not going to give you an ownership share.

It’s more figurative. It’s up to the public and their ability to pay a yearly fee, and there’s a scale for that. In a way, what that gets them is access. They can come in, be DJs, serve on the board or committees and help affect the future of the station. They can call the comment line and leave a message, which is broadcast every Tuesday. They hear what’s on people’s minds in terms of the programming.

An example of a controversial programming decision was dropping National Public Radio. That was determined primarily because NPR can be heard widely up and down the dial. Part of KGNU’s mission is to serve voices that are underserved and traditionally not heard in major media outlets. So why carry a major media outlet that’s already heard many times a day?

There were political reasons as well. We don’t want to be embedded, or in the worst-case scenario, stenographers to power. We’re unembedded and unaffiliated. We don’t take corporate funding. I think most community radio stations only take underwriting from local businesses, certainly not from military or pharmaceutical companies.

Another issue coming up now is a proposed programming change where KGNU would carry The Daily from The New York Times. It’s an interesting program, but it’s widely heard on NPR. I plan to write to the feedback portal and say, first, we hear it elsewhere, and second, so many shows we carry are very critical of The Times, rightfully so. We carry CounterSpin, which deals with fairness and accuracy in reporting, and they’re often mentioning a Times article that gets something wrong. Ralph Nader’s show is also often poking holes in coverage from The Times.

There’s a tendency to try to move toward the center to attract a wider group of folks who will hopefully pay. But what distinguishes KGNU is that it doesn’t do that. It’s known for being far to the left. You hear things on KGNU that you would never hear on most other stations, whether that’s through a volunteer like David Barsamian, who does Alternative Radio, or other programming.

My attitude is to emphasize the strength of the difference — the difference engine of KGNU — rather than trying to be more normal or more accessible to people in the middle of the spectrum. People who want the middle, a balanced and chatty discussion of current events, can find that in plenty of places.

How is KGNU different from local public radio or other local news outlets?

There’s a tendency in public radio to be more consistent with the programming lineup. That might mean big nationally syndicated shows like Fresh Air, or local versions of more local-oriented programming. They often do a good job, but I think they are more geared toward comfort and not being offensive than KGNU and community radio in general.

Community radio can bring in frontline communities that are adversely affected by policies, environmental effects and all kinds of things you might not hear on National Public Radio because they’re seen as marginal or don’t relate to the broader constituency.

Another thing that distinguishes community radio is that it doesn’t have this barrage of market-driven financial reports geared toward people with stock portfolios. The daily repetition of “the numbers” has a subliminal effect. KGNU and other community radio stations have weaned themselves from that. We don’t want people hypnotized by a money-culture attitude that this is the bottom line.

There are plenty of other things to be concerned about, including frontline communities, which Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! report on every day. They bring voices that might only be found in half a sentence in a New York Times article or an NPR report, and they give them a full discussion.

KGNU and other community stations can also devise their own programs that fill a need. KGNU has a science show, for instance, with a team of producers who are scientists. They can look into what story would be interesting. Today’s broadcast of How on Earth did a full exploration of microplastics and the current known science about it, and the legislation that was just proposed to eliminate monitoring of microplastics.

Do those stories grow from the community?

There’s a team, like a collective, and different collectives of reporters pool together. In this case, the science collective meets and discusses what to delve into. It might be a book that’s out by a scientist, or a news report where they do some research and find someone at the University of Colorado who was involved with the report. Then they bring that person on to explain the report and anything else that’s not in it.

They are actively producing rather than being told by a higher-up, “You should do something on X, Y or Z.” They have full autonomy to generate the stories they generate. They also take input from the public on occasion and put the word out: “If there’s a story you’d like us to cover…”

In the rare case that they don’t have anything prepared for that week, BBC Science has a great half-hour program. That’s another beautiful thing. Things can be switched. It’s agile. It’s not a big deal to make a sudden programming change, as long as it’s within the realm of what people are expecting to hear.

[Maeve Conran, former news director at KGNU, joins the video call at this point]

Maeve, could you introduce yourself and your work?

I was the news director at KGNU until about six years ago, and I still work with the station as a volunteer, but also in my capacity as managing editor for Rocky Mountain Community Radio.

That’s a coalition of public and community radio stations in and around the Rocky Mountain West. There are about 22 of us, and we’ve been around for more than three decades. KGNU is a founding member.

We share content. We collaborate on news reporting. We have a shared rural climate reporter. We’ve had reporters at the state Capitol in Colorado. I produce a weekly show that’s distributed across our network, featuring content produced at our community stations. I also do a lot of training, onboarding and editorial support.

Many of our stations are very small. Some don’t even have a newsroom. I help get them started with local news gathering. Sometimes they have a part-time reporter but no news director, so I’ll be the de facto editor. Some of our newsrooms are much bigger and more well-resourced NPR-style stations, so I might step in if their news director is on vacation.

We are seen as a national model for collaborative efforts. There’s a lot of discussion around whether it’s collaboration or consolidation. Especially when larger news outlets get involved, smaller stations can have their voices heard less. We’ve always been conscious of making sure everybody has equal participation. I try to elevate the voices of smaller stations and get them an equal voice in the news gathering we’re doing around the region.

A concrete example is wildfires. Right now, we have multiple wildfires burning in Colorado and in our broader region. Some of our stations are tiny — one person who might be the manager, newsperson and DJ all at once. We’re able to coordinate coverage so everybody doesn’t have to go to all the Zoom briefings. One person can cover a particular fire, another can cover an afternoon briefing, and we divvy things up. We share resources when natural disasters play out across multiple communities.

Collaboration seems to come up often with smaller independent news organizations, unlike older, larger organizations that were more proprietary.

Very much so. That’s where Rocky Mountain Community Radio came from originally. Several decades ago, Colorado Public Radio had that kind of proprietary approach and was going around gobbling up transmitters in some rural areas. Some smaller stations were concerned about keeping their very local presence. That was one of the impetuses behind the formation of the organization.

When people talk about the local news crisis, they often focus on newspapers. What does community radio offer that newspapers, websites and newsletters can’t?

Nile Southern: Community radio has an ecosystem that is absent from other forms of media. Even for wildfires, you have trusted sources in the community. That trusted source might be someone experiencing the fire at that moment and able to report on it. The newsroom will have its own policies about how to release information and may have guidance from local authorities, but they’re able to take that input.

It’s dynamic and unpredictable, and community radio has the agility and flexibility to reflect in real time what’s going on in the community from real members of the community. You’re not waiting for paid staff who might be sick or who have already left the area because they’re worried about themselves. You’re able to reflect the frontline communities affected in real time.

Maeve Conran: I was news director during some major natural disasters, and you really do see how people turn to radio. There are a few layers to this. One is just technology. When everything goes down, people can listen to the radio. When the electricity goes out and the Wi-Fi goes down, people will be in their cars tuning in.

We had that exact experience at KGNU. We had a massive flood here 13 years ago, and it wiped out the infrastructure of entire towns, including some mountain communities. People called the radio station saying, “You’re the only source of information. I can get nothing else. I’m sitting in my car, and you’re telling me what’s going on.”

Especially with increasing climate crises, the technology makes radio more accessible in a direct, immediate way. You don’t need the right app. You don’t need Wi-Fi. You don’t need to be on the right mailing list. You can be in your car and turn on the radio.

But the broader thing is that community radio literally invites people from the community to come in and talk about the issues they’re most concerned about. During crises, of course we’re going to have the district fire chief on, or the incident commander, the mayor and policymakers. But we’re also making space for the folks who have been evacuated, or the farmers who lost crops because it has been a record dry winter.

There’s an ethos in community radio that invites those people in. It sounds basic, but it’s tangible: creating space for people to tell their own experience and stories in their own voice, as opposed to filtering it through a reporter who takes a couple of quotes and puts them in a newspaper article. That’s valuable too. But having a platform where people can tell their own truths is really important.

That’s one of the big projects I’ve been working on the last couple of years: support for our local stations in times of emergency, including creating emergency plans. Because we live in our communities, we might be evacuated too. Who gets to go to the station? Who turns the button on? Who coordinates all of this?

That seems like one reason community radio has built trusted relationships with its community: people are not only part of the broadcast, but able to speak directly.

Maeve Conran: Absolutely. That plays out in many ways. One thing we’ve done as a collaborative is statewide and regional call-in shows. I wish more stations would do call-in shows. KGNU does them all the time, and they’re powerful.

At a time when we’re on screens so much, and a lot of interaction is through the nasty comment sections of news sites, having space where you can have dialogue with people in your community is invaluable. I never would have thought it would feel so urgent 10 years ago, but that’s where we are now.

We hosted a call-in show on immigration. One of our stations in Utah and KGNU in Boulder were co-hosts, and it was broadcast simultaneously on 10 other stations around the region. We were comparing immigration enforcement in Utah, a much more conservative state, with Colorado. We made sure we had guests who were living through those experiences: advocacy groups, but also immigrants themselves.

We invited calls from around the region, and some of them would blow your mind. People would say, “I never hear these stories. I just read about policy, and now I’m hearing this woman talk about living in fear because her dad might not come home from work.”

We’ve done shows like this on water issues, immigration, politics and other subjects, and we always get the same response from listeners: “Thank you for creating this forum. I never hear these kinds of perspectives, and I never hear these kinds of voices.”

We also try to be strategic. We might involve stations from communities that are very different from each other. With water, for example, urban listeners can be disconnected from where their water comes from beyond turning on the tap, while rural communities are seeing rivers depleted and feeling the economic impact. We create space for them to hear each other.

We’ve talked about the positive side of community-based organizations. What are the deficits or challenges?

Maeve Conran: The big gap in understanding is that volunteers need to be managed, trained and edited. I teach at the University of Colorado, so I know what it takes to teach people journalism, radio broadcast and audio production.

When we say, “We have loads of volunteers,” yes, but that needs to be managed. People need to be trained. There needs to be editorial oversight. Volunteers are not just unpaid staff. It’s not, “I’ll get 10 volunteers and take the weekend off because they’re going to do the news.” It doesn’t work like that.

There’s a huge infrastructure behind the scenes. Volunteers are not just filling a gap because we can’t afford more staff. Involving the community in producing the news is intentional. But there’s a real monetary cost to that, including staff oversight.

You’re also dealing with people who don’t necessarily understand editorial oversight or appreciate being told, “No, you can’t do this 20-minute rant on the radio. We have guidelines.” There is sometimes tension around having so many volunteers involved in a way we don’t always talk about honestly.

It’s incredible to work with volunteers, but not everybody appreciates the resource lift required to make space for them while still producing good-quality news and information. You need to train people and make sure everyone understands the quality level. It doesn’t happen by accident.

KGNU has a new facility. How does physical space matter for media, especially now that so much happens online?

Nile Southern: When we were in a room deciding what the space was going to be like, people were writing down ideas. There should definitely be a history wall showing the history of KGNU through photographs and other things.

We wanted to design a place that is welcoming, especially to young people. Maybe a teacher brings students from Boulder High School into the station, but maybe after school they can just hang out somewhere with comfortable couches. What can we provide them so they get the idea that this is a comfortable space, that it’s their space? It’s a maker space. They can plug in, get trained and start creating things.

That’s one of the differences with a physical space. You have real people in real spaces. Young people are especially important because we’re also next to the University of Colorado, so we want to make people welcome to engage with work of this kind.

Maeve Conran: A lot of the stations I work with in our coalition have physical broadcast spaces right downtown, literally at the heart of their communities, whether it’s Aspen or Paonia. People can walk by, look in the window and see the radio station.

Having physical space in a central place builds trust. There’s transparency and community engagement. KGNU’s move downtown is incredible. You’re two blocks from Boulder High, five blocks from the university, and right downtown in the heart of everything.

Having a physically welcoming space is important. You have to be intentional about it. KGNU has always had an open-door office policy. The new space is open: You walk in the door, and it has huge open ceilings. You’re not walking in and finding closed doors everywhere. KGNU has been very intentional about making it welcoming.

For communities looking for a viable news model, what lessons could they learn from KGNU, and what should they be careful not to romanticize?

Maeve Conran: Don’t underestimate how much work it takes.

When communities start up news things, they sometimes think, “We’ll just get a bunch of volunteers. It’s going to be great.” That is great, and I love the volunteer model, but you need oversight. Somebody has to be in charge. The buck has to stop somewhere.

I’ve seen tension in all-volunteer spaces where three people are left to do everything, and 50 people show up when it’s fun. Everyone has to have an equal commitment to participate in the best way they can.

Don’t romanticize how much work it takes. The news is relentless. It’s all day, every day. We’re not CNN. We’re not doing breaking-news ticker tape all the time. But there is a relentlessness to it. It’s constantly coming at you.

You have to set up something sustainable. I’ve seen people get excited and enthusiastic, produce six months of high energy and then burn out. Then everyone feels disappointed. You have to go into it for the long haul. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, to use the cliché, and you need systems that have sustainability built in.

A big part of that is bringing in the next generation. Sometimes you get a core group of people who become gatekeepy. They don’t necessarily want to bring other people in, and it becomes a pet project. You have to constantly invite the community and young people in, and ask intentionally: Who is not showing up in these spaces?

You might say, “We have an open-door policy. Anyone can come in any time.” But a lot of communities and people have been consistently excluded from these spaces. Just because you have an open door doesn’t mean they’re going to walk through it. You have to go out, find those communities and build relationships so they can be part of it too.

Does KGNU do outreach to people who might not feel invited into the radio station?

Maeve Conran: KGNU has always done that. I don’t want to speak on behalf of KGNU, but they have consistently had that at the core.

It’s one thing to say, “We have volunteer orientation every other month. If you walk through the door, great.” But many people won’t be able to walk through the door. They don’t know the door is there, or they’ve consistently been excluded from these kinds of spaces. So you have to be intentional.

KGNU has been intentional about outreach to young people, setting up internship programs and building relationships. That’s really important.

From both of your perspectives, what would Boulder lose if KGNU disappeared tomorrow?

Maeve Conran: The soul of it. It’s the arts, the culture, the news. I know we’re talking in a news sense here, but it’s also the arts and culture and joy of communities displayed on the radio station.

KGNU and other stations I work with aren’t straight news. It’s everything in between, because that’s life. It makes space for the weird music shows and the great music shows and everything else. It’s the heart and soul of the place.

I can’t imagine Boulder without it. There’s no other space like it that is so intentional about having an open-door policy — and not just opening the door, but going out and bringing people in.

Nile Southern: One of the reasons we moved from London to Boulder was the radio station. I knew there was at least that. There are other wonderful things, too, of course, but the cassette tapes I received in the mail of random KGNU programming, mostly music, convinced me that there was something here.

The tapes spoke for themselves. That’s like a fishing line — maybe a deep-sea trawling setup, bad analogy — but you would lose that ability to draw people in.

As Jon Stout told me, and I quoted him in the article, whenever someone new comes to town, the first thing he tells them is, “KGNU’s the best thing going on in Boulder, and you should start listening right away.” It’s one thing that brought him here as well.

What would be missing is this magic draw into almost limitless possibilities. Many shows began here that are still on the air after 35 years, and some are syndicated.

As a model for other stations, I agree with Maeve that there are pitfalls. But I think communities should focus on their individual strengths. What can people bring? Someone might be able to bring grant-writing. Someone might have specialty knowledge about science and say, “I’ll do a science show.”

Whether they’ll be in for the long haul, you don’t know. But you can start seeing what’s possible. It’s an ecosystem. Maybe a science show starts, and then you need someone to come in and help with the lift because it’s too much for the person who started it, or they’re having a baby, or they have a new job. It’s adaptable.

I wouldn’t rely on National Public Radio, which is probably expensive to commit to. Once you commit to that, your morning structure is determined, and the emphasis on the financial markets is drummed in five times a day, if not more.

Go with what makes you unique as a grassroots community. Find the grassroots in the community, not just the people who want to be on air and be the big DJ of the moment. Find a collective. That first meeting may be rough, but after six months you may figure out who is really committed, who is ready to get trained and who can provide experience and training.

There must be other communities that could broadcast what is unique about them out to the world.

Maeve Conran: There are loads, and it’s a wonderfully supportive ecosystem. There are national organizations, including the Grassroots Radio Coalition and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and we’re all here to help.

I do training for stations all over the country just for fun, to help. I’ll get an email from someone saying, “We’re interested in doing…” and I’ll say, “Zoom me in.” We want to replicate this because we see how incredible it is for our communities.

It’s a tremendous resource if you have a community radio station. The last year or two have been particularly difficult in terms of financing and funding, but communities have responded in a way that says, “We can’t lose you.”

Our next challenge, in public and community media more broadly, is creating long-term models for financial stability. Boulder is a very affluent community. There are very small communities that do not have big donors or even enough population under their signal to support them, even if everyone makes a small contribution. Now we’ve lost federal funding from CPB, so it’s a challenging time.

We’re seeing huge interest in local news from philanthropic organizations, but we’re at an inflection point. We have to figure out long-term funding. Otherwise it’s hard for stations to plan when every year they’re asking, “Are we going to make our budget?” That has always been built in a little bit, but we need a national conversation about how important these radio stations are in our communities and how to fund them for the long term.

There are wonderfully positive stories coming out of KGNU and other stations. KRCL in Salt Lake City, another station in our network, is expanding. There are positive moments and positive stories to tell. Every single day, you get to turn on your radio and have this incredible radio station. Every day, it’s amazing.

Nile Southern: There’s something to be said about storytelling and being able to hear stories whenever you want. It’s a great human capacity to engage with. You’re hearing stories, as Maeve said, that you often don’t hear elsewhere. There’s something heartwarming about empathizing. Empathy is at the base of so much of this careful listening, and it puts us in a unique perspective.