MISCmedia for 2/3/00
I've Got the (Low) Power

JUST DAYS AFTER the AOL/Time Warner merger announcement caused a raft of speculation about even further monster media consolidations, the Federal Communications Commission made its first forward-looking move since possibly the Ford administration. It agreed to license as many as 1,000 "low power" FM radio stations to local noncommercial interests around the country.

At last!

Years of lobbying and petitioning by "microradio" advocates (community leaders, "new urbanists," religious-right broadcasters seeking new syndication outlets for their shows, and pirate-station operators wanting to "go legit") finally won over the commissioners, over the continuing hue and cry of Big Media's lawyers and publicists.

Some reasons why this is so Damn Utterly Cool (at least until some jerk messes it all up):

• The new stations will all be local. Unlike regular AM/FM fare, which the FCC's allowed to fall under about a dozen huge chain operators (each running as many as seven frequencies in one metro area), each micro station will be licensed to an independent, locally-based outfit.

• The new stations will all be very local. Depending on available frequencies in any particular area, the new stations will range from 10 to 1,000 watts. In flat places (i.e., not Seattle), that means signals will reach no more than a 3.5 mile radius from the transmitter.

• The new stations will be cheap to run. Digital electronics already means equipment costs for microradio will be way low (as they are now for pirate stations). The lower-wattage stations won't even need to have transmission towers.

• The new stations will be noncommercial. Mind you, I've nothing against advertising per se (unlike the Adbusters folks). But commercial radio's gotten so damned tiresome since the FCC let huge national station groups gobble up every single existing frequency. And I've already written here a lot about the hyper-bland NPR patricianism smothering most major "public" stations.

• The new stations will be an unpredictable blast. Micro-stations' neighborhood focuses and volunteer staffs may never create slick programming blocs that flow seamlessly from one element to the next. But they're bound to be a lot more fun that way.

  (There's nothing in the proposed rules, at least in the tiny summaries of them I've seen, that would prevent micro-stations from picking up syndicated shows or even 24-hour Net-fed audio. I'm just hoping the movement won't devolve into just another centralized national network arrangement.)

Competition for available micro-frequencies could be fierce, particularly in already signal-crowded urban zones. So all ye who've dreamt of making real community broadcasting happen, ye who've wanted to run a pirate station but were afraid of getting caught, ye who've long insisted what the airwaves really need is non-Republican religious fare or non-corporate news or local hiphop or booming drum-'n'-bass DJing or Asian-immigrant-language talk shows or neo-cruster punk rock or avant difficult-listening music or whatever--NOW is your time to get together with like-minded folks, form coalitions with some of these other programming interest groups, form a tax-exempt organization (or find an existing one to operate under), and get ready to file your license petition.

TOMORROW: The rise and rise of a media cliche.

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