During the two and a half years it’s existed the Chicago Independent Radio Project has taken a lot of forms—a Facebook page, a record fair, logo buttons attached to jackets and messenger bags, booths at street fairs and music festivals—but so far none of them has been an actual independent radio station. That’s about to change. Two weeks ago CHIRP began webcasting to a select group of testers from its headquarters in the North Center neighborhood. At noon this Sunday, January 17, that webcast goes public at chirpradio.org, and CHIRP is celebrating with a show the night before at the Empty Bottle featuring the Yolks, Hollows, and Rabble Rabble. If the Senate passes the federal Local Community Radio Act—which the House approved last month—the station may soon take to the airwaves too.
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WLUW’s eclectic, high-quality music programming had earned it a devoted audience of about 25,000—impressive for a station its size—and Campbell was convinced that this was largely due to its responsiveness to its audience. A station run by and for students, she feared, wouldn’t speak the same way to the community in which it was embedded (and in fact WLUW airs university-specific content much more often now). Hence, CHIRP. “I wanted to make sure that there was a true community radio station in Chicago, where people could be involved—that it wasn’t based on, you know, paying tuition,” she says. “It’s amazing—Chicago is the biggest city in the country that doesn’t have a true community radio station. There are people who are hungry for that type of programming, with lots of independent music, local stuff, and a real sense of place in the city where the station is located.”
This may be changing soon, though. The FCC and President Obama both support the Local Community Radio Act, meant to open up airwaves to low-power broadcasters, and Campbell hopes the Senate will follow the House’s lead to pass it. If the bill becomes law, she says, “what the FCC can do is have a little more flexibility on things.” In Chicago even a two-click rule might not do much good, but the FCC could use a method called contour mapping—in which engineers measure stations’ actual, as opposed to idealized, coverage areas—to find spots where a small broadcaster might fit without interfering with other stations. “What we’re hoping,” says Campbell, “is that the FCC will consider using contour mapping for big cities, to find these little holes where they will be able to plug some low-power FM even in the biggest cities in the country.” She’s an old hand at lobbying politicians like Senator Dick Durbin, and if the bill passes, she says CHIRP’s next step will be to convince the FCC to do more than just consider this approach.
This local focus is what Campbell sees as CHIRP’s key virtue at a time when radio listening in general is widely seen as on the way out. “People didn’t leave radio,” she says. “Radio left people, by having all of this consolidation and all of this commercialism, and losing its strengths, which were always localism and immediacy, that it was live and right in your community. You felt like you knew the person who was on the air and you trusted them. They talked about going to this show on Saturday night and you might have been at that show too. So you felt that real sense of connection, and I feel like so much commercial radio has lost that.”
