Open Radio: 3.5 months and still going

You can't plan a revolution. At least not one that requires the input of a community, ranging from a bedtime story show to a heavy metal show. It's just not the sort of thing that you can create buy-in for, and there's no playbook to go by to get people motivated.

Which is why it's all the more impressive that a group of people like the KRUU hosts, have stuck with this project for over 3 months. There's a statistic that I read someplace which said that the 3 month point is where people start losing attention. We just crossed that point, and the only thing I have to go on is that I keep hearing from random people on the street claiming they love to listen to the station. And that's pretty freaking cool! And nobody has really burned out yet - everyone seems to be enjoying doing their shows, and the quality is definitely getting better!

Last weekend of course, was pretty heady for us, with Richard Poynder's amazing article about the station, and our objectives. Check out the Open and Shut blog for that article. But here's the best part - James Moore, our venerable station manager - appears to have coined a phrase that makes us the root of a revolution: Open Radio.

There is much that can be said about the current state of commercial radio, and very little of it is good. Add to that the dwindling value of NPR who have become just another conglomerate instead of giving greater value to their local content. But every day I tune in to this upstart little community station (and I'll grant you it's because I'm a part of it), and I smile. Not because we've managed to get this thing going, but because the content is actually worth listening to and it's stuff that I love to hear!

We're learning a lot in the process, and that's going to be the topic of the next few posts - what exactly this whole "open radio" process is, and all the crap we're doing wrong :-)