Too Small to Mess With

What a great article this is! The excerpts and snippets below will probably wet your appetite enough to give it a full read, or if not, just the excerpts below are pretty fascinating by itself

Too Small to Mess With
October 7, 2025 By Lucy Schiller
https://www.cjr.org/feature/public-media-funding-cut-low-power-radio-lessons-community-broadcasting.php

Sharon 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.” ... ... ..

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— .... .. 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.

... “The Low Power FM movement is a small but energetic alliance,” Scott writes in her Dummies book.  ... ...

....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. ... .. a controversial move, one that was strongly lobbied against by the National Association of Broadcasters, and opposed by National Public Radio. ... .. ..

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. ... ...

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. .... ...

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.” .... ...

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. .... .....

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. .... ...

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.) ..... ...

Community radio, though, is something else. These stations are used to being stretched, and are tiny, passionate, and “scattered,” .....

Too Small to Mess With

https://www.cjr.org/feature/public-media-funding-cut-low-power-radio-lessons-community-broadcasting.php