Neighborhood Radio Coming To Puget Sound

The FCC has recently approved five new radio stations for construction in the Puget Sound area and 10 more may be approved by the end of 2014. The approved locations are in Bellingham, Bothell, Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, SeaTac and Vashon Island. The locations of additional stations awaiting approval include Tacoma, Duvall and several more in Seattle.

The newly licensed radio stations will be owned by nonprofit organizations and serve hyper-local communities (those within two to 10 miles of each transmitter), depending on local topography.

This is the first time that these hyper-local community stations will be licensed in densely populated urban areas like Puget Sound, creating a new breed of media outlet called “Neighborhood Radio."

In addition to a terrestrial broadcast, neighborhood stations can expand their reach by live streaming and hosting on-demand content.

The stations will incubate local talent and have the potential to re-imagine public media. Ultimately, they will form a neighborhood layer of infrastructure for the public media ecosystem and emergency response.

Brown Paper Tickets is responsible for all local Puget Sound applicants, as well as applicants across the US. The Seattle-based ticketing company is a social business with a mission of building healthy communities as part of its business model for every ticket sold. The company hired a professional public media "doer", Sabrina Roach, more than three years ago to help spread adoption of public airwaves for community good and help make this powerful Neighborhood Radio movement even more powerful.

The concept is simple: community media bring new voices, ideas, arts and culture to the airwaves and, in most cases, content to the web. Creating this content brings communities and people together-advancing discussions and sharing ideas, all of which helps communities to bond, grow and to start working together to accomplish more for the common good.

Representatives of these tiny but potentially formidable neighborhood radio stations are the only ones in the country who have been sharing information and resources right from the very beginning of their existence, as part of a Puget Sound Neighborhood Radio Cohort created by Brown Paper Tickets.

“This group is ahead of the curve,” said Sally Kane, CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. “Although we see collaborations between community broadcasters, they often happen after those stations have already formed a culture of being very independent, and by that time they can find it much harder to share resources. The Puget Sound Neighborhood Radio Cohort is setting a tone from the very beginning that will make every radio station in their group stronger and more sustainable.”

Roach supports the PSNRC with free counsel and guidance to public and private resources, panels on fundraising and education on best practices in the industry.

“We’ve created a virtual neighborhood radio station incubator for cooperation, in addition to operation,” Roach said. “My work is part of where the rubber hits the road in the implementation of Brown Paper Tickets’ social mission to build stronger, healthier communities,” said Roach.

You can find more information on Neighborhood Radio as well as a map of current and planned stations at http://community.brownpapertickets.com/Doers/radio.html.