Radio Silence – Building Resilient Local Media Centers
Here we are on the cusp of 2010 – less than three weeks away. Yet this week my attention was drawn to the fact that both the House and the Senate may be passing an expansion of the Low-Power FM (LPFM) Radio Service Act (Local Community Radio Act, HR1147 and S592) before returning home for the holidays. You know “radio”, that 100 year old technology that seems so quaint in these days of satellite connected, geographically aware, supercomputer like devices that we can carry in our pockets (see my Droid review from Friday). It is feasible that we should still care about radio, and local community radio at that? Not only should we care, but we need to take action by contacting various representatives to support the expansion of the LPFM act for the following reasons:
1. The Mega-Media Conglomerates that purchased your local radio station back in the 90’s are failing hard today. It didn’t take long to see that the Clear Channels of the world, in tandem with a few religious syndicates, were buying up thousands of radio stations across the country and in essence eliminating any local radio personalities, engineers and journalists. They would install software that would in essence make your local station a relay for their content as determined by someone in Texas or California, while still being able to insert your “local” ads for revenues. The problem is that most local radio stations are not really very “local” any longer – with the exception of the ads. It no longer cares about your local community, your local weather, high school sports scores, elections or public service events because that stuff is hard to do over a network of 1,000 radio stations. So “local” went away, right around the time same time that the two major satellite radio options launched. People were already not getting local news/events/sports, so why not switch to something with better programming and no commercials? And pay monthly for that privilege.
2. The FCC still rules the Airwaves: Despite the issue of airwaves being freely available to the “public interest”, the FCC still has a tight grasp on who can actually (legally) broadcast over the air. Just this week I read about Pirate Cat Radio receiving a fine for $10,000 their “extra-legal” FM broadcasting that’s been happening for 13 years in San Francisco. While the station is no longer available via FM frequencies within their local geography, they continue to broadcast using an audio stream available anywhere on the web, as well as having the majority of their shows available as podcasts. This completely volunteer run radio station has lost its voice among the local citizens and the true public service it provided to local FM listeners, because of the FCC. And “true” public service is at the core of what I’m getting at here. We don’t need more reality/celebrity news or another Tiger Woods Whore-board. We need volunteers and journalists covering local politicians, school board meetings, fund-raising efforts, interviews with local entrepreneurs and teachers, coverage of the local arts and local music, broadcasts from Sunday church services as well as the Friday night high school games. And not just audio (radio) either, we need video channels and writers as well to provide a digital replacement for the local papers that didn’t shift with technology trends. We live in a world now where my home is in one community and my work is in another, and I travel frequently, but I still want to use web technologies to keep me informed of what’s happening locally back at home.
3. Increase your local community resilience: As we continue to develop more and more sophisticated means for communications, we continue to push the bounds and leave ourselves exposed for potential failures of infrastructure. Whether this means an outage from your cable company, or bandwidth provider or your power, water or worse; one thing that should be at the core of every community is a simple communications channel. Communications could mean the difference between anarchy and true community, especially during severe weather conditions or other unforeseen changes to food/water/power delivery infrastructure. Having the ability to turn on a battery-powered or hand-crank powered radio in order to understand and comprehend what’s going on, is critical. Relying on a national emergency system or, worse, a national media giant who’s eliminated that majority of staff at your local radio station seems like a bad bet for your future. The time is now to do something about it.
So, after you call and urge your representatives and senators to take action and expand the LPFM act NOW, then what? I’ll post a follow-up soon on creating a local media group within your community once we all receive this important Christmas gift.
-pjc