Learn all about the upcoming opportunity to apply for local community radio licenses on today's episode of =Making Waves= on KDVS. Featuring Tracy Rosenberg of Media Alliance, Vanessa Maria Graber of Prometheus and our own Todd Urick, the audio was recorded June 4th in San Francisco. Dave Id who posted more thorough coverage on Indybay, did the recording. Listen HERE.

To get started organizing for your own LPFM station, check out Radio Summer.

Irreverent world traveller Jim Ellinger, of Austin Airwaves infamy, joined Radioactive Gavin deep in the vinyl vault for this week's edition of =Making Waves= on KDVS. He teased me about Davis being "too clean" and complimented the town's reputation for great co-ops. Then we got down to business. He told us stories: rebuilding a Haitian radio station after the earthquake, showing up with a video camera while an FCC field agent was visiting a popular pirate radio operation, and helping out the fabulous microradio KFLIP. Ellinger says the FCC should grant licenses for emergencies or festival events on a 30-day basis. Listen HERE.

This week's =Making Waves= radio show on KDVS featured brilliant community radio champion Michelle Eyre of Rec Net. We spoke on the phone live on the air. In a letter to Congress this week, she wrote: "It is finally time to fix the non-commercial educational FM radio service, a service that means well but is currently being abused and in need of some tender loving care."

Considering last week's widely criticized rapture hoax, perpetrated by Harold Camping's 'mega-ministry' Family Stations, Eyre seeks limits to how many FM licenses these large satellite operations should be allowed to hold at the expense of local access to the public airwaves. Fighting for media justice for 25 years as a key researcher providing FCC commentaries, Eyre is also an outspoken LGBT advocate and the founder of J1 Radio.

She coined the term "Great Translator Invasion" and anyone interested in pursuing LPFM opportunities in the year ahead ought to get familiar with Rec Net's work on this important issue.

Listen HERE.

The FCC will soon open a rulemaking to decide how to process over 1000 pending applications for translators. The handling of these applications is the most significant question in the implementation of the Local Community Radio Act, because the outcome will determine whether any channels are available for low power stations in urban areas. Advocates fought to pass legislation for ten years because only 3.6% of nearly 12,000 Census-designated Urban Areas contain an LPFM station. Keeping LPFM out of urban areas disproportionately affects people of color and hurts diversity on the airwaves. Greater population density means big city stations will have the listeners, volunteers and community partnerships needed to serve as neighborhood hubs and literacy resources.

Brandy Doyle, policy director at Prometheus Radio Project and Common Frequency's Gavin Dahl posed for this photo outside the FCC in Washington, DC after visits with commissioners' staffers. Ours may have been the very last meeting with Commissioner Meredith Baker's staff before the announcement of her resignation as a regulator to join Comcast. We wondered why the staffers were acting so strangely! The Media and Democracy Coalition brought attention to LPFM as well as the public interest opposition to the proposed T-Mobile merger with AT&T during a day of advocacy. (*Gavin did not visit with any members of Congress or their staffs on the Hill during this trip, due to his Digital Arts Service Corps status.)

Our friends at the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa hosted a workshop and discussion on Wednesday May 4th about grassroots fundraising, led by prominent local activist Carl Patrick. He instructed that grassroots fundraising is not just about getting money, it's about getting supporters more invested in your organization. Small donations allow your group more independence, whereas dependence on large foundations can be limiting. Shifting control requires creating a vision that's achievable, first, he said.

It was clear that the attendees shared discomfort with talking about money. We identified our fears: coming on too strong could offend, reluctance because others are also broke, butterflies about big donors and distaste for brazen schmoozing. We are sick of people with no money having to support grassroots groups. Charity rarely changes structural problems in society. We want to show people we care about their lives, not just their money. It isn't always easy to be concise, but telling our own stories feels so important. And of course there's the old catch-22, that it takes money to make money.

Carl told us that 7 out of 10 people in the US give money to nonprofits. 85% of the money donated comes from families with household incomes under $60K. Poor people give a higher percentage of their annual income. A total of $240B was given to nonprofits by private donors last year, according to stats from Kim Klein's 'Grassroots Fundraising Journal.' The biggest barrier is not asking.

Tips for making personal asks for financial support:

Ground yourself and think about what's going on in the world. Don't be on autopilot, find out why each donor will support the work that you do. Be cool and unattached to the outcome, give options. Be clear, concise and direct. Ask folks to give an amount that's meaningful to them. Be excited and thankful for whatever is given. Be prepared with other ways to get involved. And be sincere.

Today's =Making Waves= radio show features highlights from the panel on UC-Davis campus called “Whose Stations? Our Stations! Community Voices, Educational Radio, and KUSF in Exile.” Hear professor and community media scholar Dorothy Kidd, communications attorney Alan Korn and KUSF music director Irwin Swirnoff discuss the battle for community and student radio in the city of San Francisco.

CLICK HERE to download the audio or you can open the link in a new window to stream it.

Before Alan Korn began practicing law and fighting for communications rights, he was a college radio DJ, music writer & longtime rock n roller whose past bands benefitted from getting their demos played on KUSF. At Common Frequency's event on April 23rd he explained the thinking behind the official petition to deny the transfer of KUSF's radio license with the Federal Communications Commission. 

Common Frequency was also pleased to host community media scholar and University of San Francisco professor Dorothy Kidd. She talked about building a campaign for a communications commons and how the sale of KUSF is an example of a media enclosure, or privatization of public resources.

I also wanted radio listeners to hear what Irwin Swirnoff from Save KUSF had to say about the importance of student media advocating on its own behalf. Thanks again to everyone who pledged their support to KDVS last week. Also, comments from panelist David Martin and moderator Tracy Rosenberg were left out of the broadcast for time consideration.

Jennifer Waits is a radio DJ, winemaker, Mom, creator of the fantastic blog Spinning Indie, co-conspirator behind Radio Survivor and friend to all who love independent music and local radio. She has just published a long piece about her trip to Davis for Common Frequency's benefit dinner, panel and concert. She also attended our daytime gathering featuring workshops for area radio enthusiasts on grassroots fundraising, morning radio news and musical exploration at freeform radio stations. This is her photo of Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Uprising Radio. You can read her entire piece HERE.

Also, Katie Fleming of Common Cause kept up a great live Twitter feed during the workshops. Follow us!

Leading up to our big benefit event, Common Frequency was covered by The People's Vanguard on Tuesday, The Davis Enterprise on Wednesday and now Sacramento News & Review! Sue Cockrell, a photographer at the Enterprise for over 20 years, was in the studio with me during a recent episode of =Making Waves= and we had a nice conversation in between air checks. 

The best clip may be this one, quoted by Tara Eshghi in the alt-weekly: "The combination of music, news, local voices, culture, representation and interactivity make radio a great tool for organizing. But most radio is closed off from participation. We think innovative new radio programming on the West Coast will revitalize the medium at a crucial time when so many people are abandoning the cheapest, most ubiquitous way to communicate."

Common Frequency board member Tracy Rosenberg and broadcast coordinator Gavin Dahl flew to Boston for the latest and greatest Free Press media reform conference over the weekend of April 8-10. Over 2500 people gathered to discuss the intersection of media, technology and democracy. Gavin spoke at a workshop called Put Your Hands on the Radio with friends from Prometheus Radio and Tracy presented as part of a session called Media Literacy for Mobilization: Popular Education Tools for Digital Justice. Audio and/or video is now available from most of the panels.

Community Broadcast Coordinator Gavin Dahl was invited to speak on Why Radio is Still Relevant at the 4th annual LA Media Reform gathering, hosted by Common Cause and LA Progressive. His remarks are below.

Let's start with introductions. I'm Radioactive Gavin from Common Frequency. We provide free and low-cost engineering, legal and consulting services to people educating themselves to be the media. Founded back in 2006 by punk engineer Todd Urick and friends from community media groups up in NorCal to support the radio license application process, we are now coordinating with Prometheus Radio Project, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the Future of Music Coalition, Pacifica Foundation and a team of professional volunteers together called the Radio For People Coalition to support the build-out of over 100 brand new radio stations.

You may have heard of LPFM radio, little 100-watt radio stations owned and operated by community groups which will be expanding across the country in the years to come thanks to the Local Community Radio Act which finally passed in December. This will be the final opportunity for legal radio stations in our history, we're working on that too, but that hasn't happened just yet.

I'm talking about nonprofit groups including for example a few dozen native tribes across the country and a handful of peace and justice groups here in California who have been granted their own Full Power non-commercial radio licenses for frequencies by the federal government. There are churches and new NPR stations getting on the air too, but we focus on supporting independent local groups. And we're also forming a network to plug all these stations into each other. Imagine, if you will, an alternative to NPR, a network of independent radio stations bringing you thousands of hours of music discovery and important issues each month. I'll talk more about that later.

(Introductions around the room)

So let's get started. Here's my basic premise. The combination of music, news, local voices, culture, representation and interactivity make radio a great tool for organizing. But most radio is closed off from participation.

So you see, my advocacy for a renewed investment in radio by all of us dedicated to change is really grounded in a fundamental critique of the radio status quo. So why does Common Frequency think radio is so important in 2011?

There are a lot of ways to get your message out to the world.

I've worked in print and online journalism, I'm not only a broadcaster, and in my experience as a blogger, and then as a reporter for Idaho's largest alternative newspaper the Boise Weekly, and last year as a writer and editor at RawStory.com one of the things I learned was how being part of an established media organization has its benefits. Making a paycheck for your work is one of the ways to ensure important stories get covered; requesting press credentials is usually easier; and a byline can help you get access to sources you might not otherwise have a chance to interview.

When my articles would get printed in Boise Weekly I knew that a few thousand people in my community who were paying attention would think about the issues I was investigating in a whole new way.

At Raw Story, an established political news site, I had by far the largest readership of my life so far, I'm talking about over 1 million unique visitors to the site each week. But the problem with an Internet-only strategy is somehow you've gotta make people come and view your content. As an editor at Raw Story I might link out to a blogger I liked and they would see 1000 hits come in that day, but hardly anyone was back again the next day without traffic directed from an established source.

While the digital divide has narrowed, access to broadband Internet is still not universal, and it can hardly be defined as affordable. Data released by the Commerce Department earlier this month showed that large sections of the country still have little to no access to high-speed Internet service. But think about this, because there are billions of web pages, there is so much to choose from that users tend to gravitate to whatever is most popular, whatever is most advertised, whatever they already know. If your parents have email accounts through Yahoo or AOL, chances are they read more news online from those two content providers than anyone else.

The FM dial is totally different. FM radio equipment is totally ubiquitous in the US. Most every automobile, alarm clock, walkman and stereo receiver has a radio tuner built in. Here in LA when people tune in to FM, there are only a couple dozen choices instead of a couple million. If your audience is local, broadcast is very efficient. Think of the millions of dollars it takes just to run fleeting advertisements on commercial TV. You can launch a full-power educational radio station for $250,000, a Low-Power FM station for $25,000 and a pirate station for $2500 and a couple cases of beer.

Another hurdle for Internet communication is the cost of distribution related to the scale of the operation. Think about Pandora with millions and millions of listeners. The bigger the audience, the more expensive the bandwidth for them. Once you build a radio station, put up the antenna and turn on the signal it costs the same to broadcast to 10 people or 10 thousand.

We at Common Frequency see a fundamental lack of public participation in the stories being told about our world over the public airwaves. If you're at this gathering today, you don't me to tell you how important it is for democracy to have widely accessible information that's accurate and timely. But maybe I can help you quantify just how bad things have gotten.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism: Over 14,000 journalists lost their jobs between 2001 and 2009 – that means roughly 25% of the industry’s news workforce disappeared in the last decade. And here's a statistic that's nothing new, minorities represented less than 9% of the radio work force in 2009 despite making up at least 34% of the population.

Drowning under massive debt and desperate to cut more costs, Clear Channel laid off over 2500 employees in 2009 alone. Program directors, morning show hosts, production pros, news anchors -- one newspaper called it a "bloodbath." Clear Channel execs cut $400 million in wages. Guess what the estimated value was of Rush Limbaugh's new eight-year contract signed that same year: $400 million.

As writer Eric Boehlert of Media Matters pointed out at the time:
Clear Channel basically decided to give Limbaugh a 40 percent raise, which included writing a $100 million signing bonus check to celebrate his contract extension which could have saved maybe 1,000 Clear Channel jobs last year alone.
In the US and out of more than 1500 commercial talk format stations, there are now less than 30 doing "all news." Can you believe that? And here's the one thing I'll say about this which might seem controversial to some of you. NPR sets the broadcast quality standard for radio news, they are professional and fairly accurate but it is primarily a closed system. We need more.
So what do we do about it? We think volunteer-run participatory community media is the wave of the future. Of course it goes beyond radio, but we don't want to pass up the opportunity to hold a whole lot of pieces of the spectrum.

“This is public media’s moment,” activist Libby Reinish of Free Press wrote in October on NewPublicMedia.org. “We must rebuild the charred remnants left behind by commercial media’s slash-and-burn tactics, and we need all hands on deck in order to raise a new foundation for American journalism in its place.”

Common Frequency just received a $12,000 grant in December to do targeted outreach for LPFM to community media access centers (you know, public access like Wayne's World) but Prometheus is focusing on reaching out to communities who lack a voice in local media, who are the most passionate about issues deserving of coverage in the press.

WHEN YOU PICTURE A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMED, WHAT DO YOU THINK PEOPLE NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT TO GET US THERE? HERE'S THE CHECK LIST FROM PROMETHEUS FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN STARTING A STATION.

    •    Global Justice
    •    Cultural Expression
    •    Economic Justice
    •    Environment
    •    Immigrant Rights
    •    Labor
    •    Native Rights
    •    Police Accountability/Prison Issues
    •    Racial Justice
    •    Youth Empowerment

The Local Community Radio Act will lead to the largest expansion in the number of community radio stations in US history, but before local folks get to take a crack at navigating the FCC application process next year, let me point your attention to the work already well underway by the Radio For People Coalition.

Economic hardship is holding back many of the groups pursuing FM launch, and from the day a group is granted a permit, they have 36 months to build their stations and put a signal on the air, or they lose them! It's such a tough time for funding though, you know?
If you're wondering about the economic value of a radio license these days ask the students of Rice University in Houston, whose college just secretly sold their station KTRU for $9.5 million. Or ask the students at the University of San Francisco, whose college just sold KUSF for $3.75 million. People in suits literally converged on the station on a Tuesday morning 5 or 6 weeks back, surprising the DJ, and kicking everyone out of the building.

In the past two years, I've visited radio stations in Portland, Olympia, Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, Vancouver, Spokane, Moscow, Boise, Jackson Hole, Fort Collins, Boulder... the list goes on... It's funny, nobody tells me they're bored, or there's no good music coming out, or there's nothing happening around town worth talking about. The opposite is true.

I think the two biggest reasons why people have this sense that radio's future is bleak are the limitations on what you can say or play over the air on AM and FM and how easy it becoming to get music or news from other equipment besides radios.

Guess what the top two functions people used iPads for in 2010? News and Music! Seriously. So of course new media is the future, but FM radio can absolutely still compete.

You know what, though, after so many years in low-budget radio I'm convinced that the chilling effects of fines from the FCC on what we play could be the biggest reason why young people are tuning out of traditional media. It is old-fashioned to think kids today haven't heard George Carlin's 7 Words You Can't Say On Television. They may not know who George Carlin was, but they know the words. And when an emcee writes a song about how bad Isht is F-ed Up, there's a good chance the message will never get through. I personally never had time to edit about 50 tracks I liked that came out in 2010 for radio airplay, so I never spun them once.
To my knowledge there have been no new indecency fines issued under Obama's FCC. But under George W Bush's FCC, KBOO in Portland was fined $7K because the FCC felt "Your Revolution Will Not Happen Between These Thighs" by Sarah Jones was QUOTE "designed to pander and shock."

What was really funny about these incidents was that after legal challenges the FCC changed their minds and withdrew the fines. You gotta love this quote from an FCC enforcement bureau guy about the Sarah Jones' song: "We disagree with our initial analysis and now conclude it was not patently offensive."

When I got one minute with Obama's new FCC general counsel Austin Schlick immediately after a panel at South By Southwest in March, he was careful not to say anything I could write about. But he made it sound like he viewed the Bush-era FCC's legal cases against broadcasters as a hassle. And in 2011 he will very likely be taking the issue back to the Supreme Court, since Federal Appeals Courts keep throwing bogus FCC language police cases out.

On my radio show January 19th, I asked Casey Rae-Hunter from the Future of Music Coalition about Bad Words on the Radio - He said:

"At the end of the day, the problem is basically with the FCC's vague and arbitrary policy... it's not that you shouldn't have an indecency policy its that this one is like impossible to enforce." Bottom line he said, is "the chilling effect that this has on expression and creativity."

So let's end with suggestions for what you can do.

Here in LA I encourage you to spend some time listening to the other local nonprofit radio stations in addition to KPCC and KCRW. Please choose who else to support and donate.
 
Follow up with Common Frequency for info about the new radio stations launching here in CA.

Lastly, tell everyone you know in the entire country about the upcoming LPFM opportunities. And go to PrometheusRadio.org for more information.

• On Saturday, January 29th, Access Humboldt hosted its first Community Radio Day, featuring representatives from the region's non-commercial community radio stations.
• The event included a community journalism workshop led by KMUD News Coordinator Terri Klemetson, a keynote presentation by Common Frequency Community Broadcast Coordinator Gavin Dahl, and a round-table discussion with North Coast stations. 
• Go here to see the video. 

Common Frequency staff Todd Urick and Gavin Dahl, along with board members Jeff Shaw and Tracy Rosenberg (welcome, Tracy!) journeyed to the Reno, NV area for presentations and workshops at the annual conference of the Alliance for Community Media's Western Region. Here Gavin smiles after a plenary with advocates Sue Buske and Richard Chabran. Tracy is on the right.

The real point for Common Frequency was kicking off outreach for LPFM application opportunities we hope will be available in late 2011 or early 2012. Jeff and Todd rocked out at workshops including Why Radio Should Be Part of Your Community Media Center and Distributing Local Programming.

 
People-powered radio is buzzing in upstate New York thanks to the dedicated volunteers launching WGXC in Greene and Columbia counties. The twelfth barnraising organized by the mighty Prometheus Radio Project took over forgotten factories, a youth center and a Catholic academy in downtown Hudson as hundreds of radio activists gathered throughout the weekend to learn and build and geek out.

Click here to gain insight into the annual National Federation of Community Broadcasters conference that took place in St. Paul, MN. Meet new NFCB president Maxie Jackson, hear Amy Goodman's address, get a scoop from legendary broadcast attorney John Crigler, listen to audio from the Future of Music panel, or check out new FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. Other characters include fine folks from Democracy Now, WFMU, Pacifica Radio, Prometheus Radio, Austin Airwaves, WNYU, and host station KFAI. Plenty of audio included.

Two Northern California and one Southern California non-profit recently received construction permits (CP) for new non-commercial radio services.  Common Frequency helped all three organizations through the entire process of licensing over the past three years.