Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
The Boulder community radio station’s new resilience hub offers a blueprint for public-interest journalism in a time of closures and consolidation
Longtime KGNU volunteer and former board member Nile Southern reports on the story behind his local radio station’s launch of a hyperlocal “media resilience hub” in downtown Boulder, Colorado.
KGNU’s annual plant sale comes around every June. That’s when we encounter local farmers, agricultural co-ops and fellow listeners donating their “starts” so folks can get a leg up planting their gardens. As people mill about ogling the healthy shoots, gathering plants and chit-chatting, the unspoken understanding is that it’s all in support of the broadcasting entity that has fed us a steady diet of “unembedded” information and astonishing, definitely human-curated music for nearly 50 years.
Fans of the station, like me, show up not only for the sweet deals, but for the “ahh” sense of purposeful community.
This year, however, is different. KGNU is moving into a new building downtown, so today’s plant sale will be the last at this location. Peeking inside the old building, one sees offices in transition, and the famous music library now in dozens of boxes — LPs and CDs marked “Jazz A-F,” “Bluegrass T-Z,” and so on.
The symbolism is obvious: The station is evolving while larger media systems flounder amid closures, consolidation, censorship, cowardice and greed. KGNU continues to buck the trend of media consolidation by people-powering the means of production — and taking things up a notch. Here along the Front Range, we’re all grateful for it.
Community radio in the United States has long embodied ideals that UNESCO once described as central to “knowledge societies”: freedom of expression, access to information and knowledge, respect for cultural and linguistic diversity, and quality education for all. Unlike NPR or PBS, community radio was not born of a federal plan, but of grassroots vision, volunteer energy and the conviction that local voices matter.
How has KGNU continued to thrive amid federal funding cuts, the loss of local print outlets, volunteer burnout, religious broadcasters buying up frequencies and the inevitable graying of its audience?
One answer is that KGNU’s base of volunteers and listeners — including moi — are essentially owner-investors. They pledge money and time. They steward the station’s license. They serve on committees that plan events, manage the budget, help administer programming changes and help the station divine the future.
Community participation is key. People show up — to support the plant sale, help with the station’s move, answer phones, or get trained to produce a news story. We are all invested in helping our station succeed.
These volunteers and on-air guests are your friends, neighbors, local community leaders, scientists, university professors, nonprofit workers, filmmakers, poets, culture workers, thought leaders, politicians, frontline community folk and public officials. Everyone has a seat at the table. The difference here is that it’s not just the table the station is offering — it’s the entire kitchen, as well as the whole duct-taped house.
As Station Manager Tim Russo put it at the ribbon-cutting ceremony:
“The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters put out a resource guide about what community radio should be — and I take this to heart. It says community radio is not about doing something for the community, but about doing something with the community for itself. It’s about community owning and controlling its own means of communication. And that’s what this space represents. This new KGNU Community Media and Cultural Center and resilience hub offers that affordable, accessible space for the creative and nonprofit community and individuals to get together.”
As the pledge-rap mantra goes: “You are the ‘U’ in KGNU.”
Russo has a deep history with inclusive community media-making and resiliency. As a founding director of the grassroots media collective COMPPA (Comunicadores Populares por la Autonomía) based in Chiapas, Mexico, Russo helped establish a network of independent radio stations and media centers throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. His tireless drive to make KGNU a tactile media-creation centerpiece for the community has risen like the phoenix in the heart of downtown Boulder.
“We took our first steps 48 years ago, building a lasting community media resource that would reflect and affect the everyday lives of communities across the Front Range,” Russo said. “We hope that this new space becomes that much more of a participatory space, that much more of a space where you can define what the future of the station is.”
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author Amy Goodman stood next to Russo alongside Colorado congressional representatives, city council members, KGNU staff and volunteers. She was clearly excited to kick off “KGNU Radio Week,” declared by the city’s mayor in honor of the station’s longstanding service to the community.
“I don’t even talk about the corporate media as the mainstream media anymore,” Goodman told the crowd. “You represent the mainstream: those who care about war and peace, who care about the climate … who care about inequality, racial and economic justice, reproductive rights. KGNU is such an important model to the whole country.”
KGNU’s renovated building, twice the size of the old station, is designed to keep broadcasting during emergencies, with solar panels, battery storage and flood-resilient design.
“The goal is for KGNU to remain open during times of disaster and be a hub for the community,” Russo said. “For me it’s not so much about the building, but the community coming together to do something for itself, which is to create a community cultural and media center that also serves as a resilience hub for the community in times of disasters.”
I’ve observed KGNU being a crucial “first responder,” working alongside local authorities to provide real-time coverage of breaking news, including the shooting at King Soopers and the devastating Marshall Fire that scorched the town of Superior.
Increasingly, communities in the United States are finding themselves without a responsible public media utility. That danger was devastatingly demonstrated in Minot, North Dakota, when a catastrophic toxic train derailment exposed a fatal flaw: No live local radio staff were available to interrupt broadcasts and issue emergency alerts because the local stations were being fed from automated, out-of-state studios.
KGNU’s new home is not just about radio nostalgia. It is about local communications infrastructure — a public-interest utility owned, trusted and used by the community it serves.
KGNU is “an oasis of intellectual self-defense,” as my longtime friend and local producer/host David Barsamian quips.
When Barsamian first started, he was learning to play sitar and hosted a show of Indian music called “From the Ganges to the Nile,” featuring music and poetry. He soon began interspersing taped lectures on the politics of the region — covering the Middle East, Iran, Mesopotamia and the Indo-Gangetic Plain — because, as he put it, “I felt such a lack of information about the peoples and cultures between those two rivers.”
He also noticed the rise of officialdom and jingoism in mainstream and local media, which often focused on surface issues, reductive stereotypes and war. He began recording and broadcasting public intellectuals who visited Boulder, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein and Edward Said — voices that were often ignored by mainstream media. His programs became so compelling that he traveled the country to bring other voices, via interview and lecture, to the airwaves, including Angela Davis, Greg Palast, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva and many others.
“Alternative Radio” continues to captivate audiences the world over. Recently Barsamian appeared on a KGNU radio show hosted by Boulder Bookstore’s Arsen Kashkashian.
“Since we’re in a bookshop,” Barsamian said, with his usual sunny fatalism, “I quote Gravity’s Rainbow, where Pynchon says, ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.’ And that’s so true. I think dissent is really what we need more of — and critical thinking.”
KGNU Community Radio’s mission is “to provide a channel for individuals, groups, issues and music that have been overlooked, suppressed or under-represented by other media.” This is foundational to its success. The station is recognized by the local populace not only as worth supporting for the news and information it delivers, but also as one of the best ways to resist corporate hegemony and society’s tendency toward what social critic and author Curtis White calls “Middle Mind” thinking.
The $9 million investment in the station’s new home (a mélange of creative tax credits, in-kind service donations, discounts from architects and remodelers, the sale of the old building and significant donor input) has alarmed some volunteers as beyond the station’s grassroots means. But KGNU’s newly renovated home also confirms the value of independent, publicly owned and operated media.
KGNU’s humble beginnings in the late 1970s as an experiment in local control started with a broadcast license, transmitter, record player, mixing board and microphone in a cramped studio in downtown Boulder.
Since then, the station has offered a distinctive mix of music and public affairs programming. It may seem exceptional, but its basic model is replicable.
The station hosts live candidate debates on city council races and ballot initiatives, and features live panel discussions during the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. The sense of possibility instilled by solutions-oriented journalism is palpable, embodied in such Pacifica programs as “Rising Up With Sonali” and “The Ralph Nader Hour.” There is a sense of communal pride that the apparatus delivering this continual feed of intelligence is owned and managed by the listener.
Getting people to pay a monthly membership fee remains a challenge. Yet those who call in to pledge increasingly describe independent media as a cultural resource more important than ever.
As I and many other longtime volunteers see it, KGNU’s greatest challenge is to blossom into something more attractive and relevant to young people, most of whom don’t listen to the radio. One of the reasons behind the purchase and renovation of the new building was to provide a maker space and safe hangout area where young people can come, plug in, get trained and influence the future of radio, podcasting, media-making and social resilience.
The building’s location across the street from Boulder High School and within walking distance of the University of Colorado Boulder bodes well for fulfilling those aspirations. Efforts already underway involving young people are being led by seasoned news-department pros such as Maeve Conran.
“This is going to be a gathering place for folks who want to tell stories,” Conran said. “We’re going to be not just doing audio here — some video, social media, music, news, culture, a lot of arts reporting as well — and there’s a performance space. I see this as a model for community radio stations around the country. Folks have always looked to KGNU for ways to replicate what’s been done here.”
Originally from Ireland, former KGNU News Director Maeve Conran’s melodious voice was heard every morning on KGNU for years, until she took a much-needed break. Recently, her voice has returned to KGNU’s airwaves, this time as part of a multistate news-gathering collective she helped develop.
Conran is now managing editor of the Rocky Mountain Community Radio Coalition, a group of 21 non-commercial radio stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Her position was created through the Colorado Media Project’s mandate “to strengthen local news efforts and promote inclusivity in Colorado’s news ecosystem.”
Conran has advice for producing news that resonates locally:
“What are the things we can do well that nobody else is doing? Amplifying voices from the community and being that place that welcomes collaboration with these other community entities — because nobody else is doing that. I realized that, okay, I’m not going to be like CNN. I can’t be 24/7 breaking news all the time. But what we can be is this really important community outlet. So, leaning into what you can do well, relying on the incredible strength of the volunteers we have, and recognizing each person’s strength — because some organizations, I think, have a bit of a one-size-fits-all approach.”
The point is not simply that KGNU airs unusual programming. It is that the station gives community members the tools to become producers of public knowledge, not just consumers of it.
Community radio is as good as the sum of its parts, and in Boulder, those parts reflect a wide array of wisdom and expertise. Producers and programs populate the airwaves and endure online. Why publish another white paper, essay or thesis when you and your students can host a living, breathing, interactive radio show?
A case in point is space scientist Joel Parker, one of the producers of KGNU’s weekly science show “How on Earth,” who also knows how to land rockets on comets. Another local producer, Nathan Schneider, founder of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, produces a monthly show, “Looks Like New,” with his students, looking at technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures.
Yet another CU professor, Michele Simpson, has a monthly radio show, “Talking Black,” which mixes the personal with the historical while grappling with the Black experience in a college town that remains overwhelmingly white. These inspired shows, invented by regular members of the community to fill a need or simply rise to the occasion, deepen KGNU’s bench of entrepreneurial, performative cultural creatives stepping up to the broadcasting plate and swinging for the fences.
Locally engaged hosts fill KGNU’s “Metro” public affairs show each day. It’s an open-format half-hour that spotlights people doing work in the community. From the tiny studio in the Buell Media Center, a building that also hosts larger media outlets such as Free Speech TV and Denver’s flagship jazz station KUVO, one of the familiar voices on air at the noon hour is Beverly Grant, who often invites her guests to tell us their “origin story.”
She is no stranger to growing things. Her Mo’ Betta Green Market is about broadening food access, providing food and nutrition literacy, supporting the neighborhood economy and showcasing neighborhood arts, history and culture. She’s yet another local stakeholder reinforcing KGNU’s cultural capital by doing what she loves and believes in–on air. Like so many other show hosts, she’s not only walking her talk, but talking her walk.
Dave Ashton, KGNU’s Denver program manager, handles day-to-day operations and makes sure the shows that originate in Denver make it into the Boulder airwaves. He has personally cleaned the studio with Grant after farmers came in from the fields to be on-air with her.
“Getting acknowledged for their good work is really important for so many of the educational and nonprofit people we work with,” Ashton said. “Earning the faith of the people we talk to — there’s catharsis. We’ve covered some difficult topics. It’s not always uplifting, but it’s always important, because it’s real life. Having people’s faith to put on that kind of focus, they’re just like, ‘You guys aren’t gonna mess this up. We believe you’re doing a good thing.’ To me, you can’t put a dollar amount on that, because we’re directly accountable to these folks.”
The daily audio feed coming out of KGNU’s newsroom each morning is like sitting around the kitchen table between your ears. That is the effect Abby O’Brien, KGNU’s bright, recently hired 20-something news director, instills.
“I’m lucky enough that through this job I get to meet all kinds of people from my community, from different backgrounds and different age groups, and I think there are not so many other spaces where that happens,” O’Brien said. “A key effect of volunteer engagement is strengthening the local news ecosystem. Our mission is to uplift underrepresented voices, so we get to reflect the community in the stories we tell — stories that maybe a bigger outlet wouldn’t think to tell. That part is exciting.”
Another indicator of the station’s resilience is how local journalists from recently shuttered, or diminished media outlets that once had weekly columns and large followings, have remade themselves by recasting their creative output for radio.
Michael Casey, former film critic at Boulder Weekly, now has a film show every Friday, where he focuses on interesting movies playing locally at a wide variety of cinemas. Casey’s show brings audiences to films and screens they might not have otherwise heard about, living the station’s mission “to stimulate, educate and entertain our audience, to reflect the diversity of the local and world community.”
John Lehndorff, former Boulder Weekly food critic, now hosts “Radio Nibbles,” a one-hour “kitchen table talk”-type live call-in show where local restaurateurs and culinary stakeholders sit around the studio table talking about all manner of local kitchen issues: family recipes, labor, housing, farm-to-table trends, seasonal co-ops, heirloom seed operations and various stuffing ideas for Thanksgiving.
Food is often sampled on air, from heirloom honeys to savory pies, and each week Lehndorff answers or asks: “What’s the best thing you’ve tasted lately?”
In another media era, these voices might have remained tied to print columns. At KGNU, they become part of a live, participatory civic commons.
As the ribbon-cutting ceremony began with Native American leaders inviting all to join a Circle Dance. I danced sideways with everyone else, left foot forward. This is Boulder, right?
Shortly after, Amy Goodman addressed the crowd again.
“Listener-, reader- and viewer-supported journalism is really important now,” she said, “and independent media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.”
Soon I ran into my old friend Jon Stout, former director of Free Speech TV, an organization instrumental in getting “Democracy Now!” in front of audiences nationwide, originally via cable access. We reminisced about how KGNU was among the early stations to carry Amy Goodman’s program, now heard on more than 1,400 TV and radio stations nationwide.
Stout summed up community radio’s ethos in action:
“I’ve been listening to KGNU for over 30 years, and whenever someone would move into town, the first thing I would tell them is that KGNU is the best thing going on in Boulder. It’s a way to get connected to the whole community, and to find out the stories of our neighbors that we don’t typically hear. It’s a way to find out what frontline groups are doing to advance a vision that our community can get behind and that serves our people, that serves the planet over profit. It’s the antidote to corporate media and the death machine that it is. And it also is a great way to listen to and find new music. It’s something that has kept me going for years. It celebrates community while creating community.”
Amen.
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