Listen Up! Northwest: A Community Radio Collaboration

Short Synopsis

Listen Up! Northwest is a weekly collaborative community radio program focused on environmental, social and economic issues, creative culture and, above all, civic engagement in the Northwest. Currently aired on ten stations, it is the only regional community radio project of its kind.

Description/Treatment

Across the Northwest, many small noncommercial radio stations are serving their communities with high-quality locally-produced news and cultural programming, featuring a uniquely broad range of community voices. At the same time, these stations provide a crucial training ground for new generations of creative journalists and producers.

The reach of these stations is limited by their limited broadcast radius. Community stations lack the networking resources available to larger public radio stations. Because of this, much of these stations' best public affairs programming is aired just once, for a single community. And while national community radio collaborations such as Free Speech Radio News provide access to a wider audience for some regional producers, they do little to encourage regional collaboration among stations around regional issues.

Listen Up! Northwest was conceived by Reclaim the Media to fill this gap -- to provide a regional forum for the best community radio producers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia and Alaska, while providing high-quality, community-focused public affairs programming to grassroots radio stations in the same geographical area.

Launched in April 2008, the half-hour program focuses on a single issue each week, compiling segments from small non-commercial stations from Alaska to Oregon. The program creates a regional dialogue on environmental, social, and economic issues common to northwest communities, and on community-based solutions to shared challenges. Listen Up! Northwest has featured voices from first nations environmental activists in Canada and the US; sustainable farmers; queer youth; survivors of WWII internment; immigrants and refugees.

The program is syndicated online through the Northwest Community Radio Network, a collaboration organized by Reclaim the Media and launched in 2006 by several dozen community stations in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Northern California. The program is currently being carried by ten broadcast stations and a number of web-based stations, covering communities from Alaska to Northern California. We are on track to double the number of stations carrying the program by fall 2009. The program's podcast, available at www.listenupnw.org and through the Apple iTunes store, has had some 400 subscribers. Audience response, as measured anecdotally by emailed comments and listener feedback from stations carrying the program, has been strongly positive.

Production and distribution costs for Listen Up! Northwest are kept low by the deeply collaborative nature of theproject, including volunteer support from the RTM board and volunteers.KBCS-Bellevue/Seattle has committed toproviding studio time for production. Amajority of project funds go directly to support independent radio/audiojournalism and production training.

Overall, Listen Up! Northwest fosters local civic engagement as well as a sense of regional place and commonality, in which cultural diversity and differences are celebrated as a regional strength. As a sustained exercise in grassroots, community, or citizen journalism, the program also celebrates excellence in community media.