KAXE-FM in Grand Rapids is reinventing itself in pursuit of sustainability and a larger audience.   7/16/2008 by Beth Bily

(Photo: KAXE outreach producer Heidi Holtan, general manager Maggie Montgomery and news director Scott Hall.)

Editor’s note: BusinessNorth has a news partnership with Northern Community Radio.

GRAND RAPIDS — Maggie Montgomery can relate to Mark Twain’s observation that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.

“It seems like every time a new medium comes along, there are predictions of the demise of the old mediums,” said Montgomery, general manager at KAXE-FM Northern Community Radio here. “But, the old mediums adapt.”

Such was the case with newspapers, which survived the coming of radio.

In turn, radio continued after most homes had a television.

The newest player in the mass communications game is the Internet, with seemingly endless possibilities for reaching large numbers of information consumers in a matter of microseconds. Once again, the conventional wisdom is that print, radio and television may be dying forms of communication.

Rather than viewing the Internet as the instrument of imminent doom, Montgomery and her team at Northern Community Radio are embracing the medium as a way to reinvent what they do, interact in a more meaningful way with their listeners, even create a network of citizen journalists in every community in the listening area who can write their own news rather than just passively consume it.

“The Internet now allows individuals to have the same reach as the mass media,” Montgomery said. “We have to do things differently. We have to respond to current and future audiences.”

Based in Grand Rapids with a listening area from Brainerd to Ely and Bemidji to Cloquet, KAXE will launch an Internet-based project, with individual news and information Web sites for each community in its market. Montgomery hopes to go live on the Internet in two to three communities by early 2009.

The new Web spaces will bring the concept of the community radio station — organized around the common ecology of northern Minnesota — to the Internet. “We share a certain place, so we share certain issues and cultures,” said KAXE news director Scott Hall, who doubles as community access coordinator.

KAXE already has its own Web site that allows visitors to listen to programming, check schedules or tune-in live. It might have seemed natural to create individual community Web pages within the existing site. But, those involved in the project didn’t want the new online venture to compete with radio station operations and planning.

“KAXE.org has to be a marketing Web site for the radio station,” said Heidi Holtan, outreach producer. Hall said the goal is for each community’s Web site to be its own, without the KAXE stamp on it.

Northern Community Radio is a nonprofit, which makes the project eligible for start up grants. The nonprofit received a $25,000 planning grant last year. Then in March, the Grand Rapids-based Blandin Foundation approved a $124,000 grant for 20 months (April 2008-December 2009) to help get the project off the ground.

Linda Gibeau, Blandin’s program officer, said the project won support due to its innovative nature and its match with the foundation’s strategic vision of promoting “rural voice” in the state.

“It strengthens the voice of rural Minnesota,” she said. “More and more people are turning to the Internet for news and information…(These sites) will help create a more informed and engaged society.”

Grant funding will get the project off the ground, but KAXE is working on a business model to sustain the concept, Hall said. That model likely will look a lot like the radio station’s support base, with funding coming from underwriters and memberships.

Some of the information posted to the community-based sites will be specific to the individual communities, other information will be of interest to the entire region. KAXE staff hopes to create community-based networks for art, education, the environment and business. Another project component will be news contributions, not necessarily from professional journalists, but citizens.

The concept is known as citizen journalism and it’s steadily gained ground in recent years. The coming of the mammoth “online encyclopedia,” Wikipedia, with information contributed by anyone and everyone — from academics to truck drivers — likely helped pave the way.

While Wikipedia has editorial watchdogs and high traffic to help catch false information put on its site, smaller open contribution sites don’t always have controls on content.

Concern over the quality and accuracy of information collected in the community journalism project sites has spurred a regional KAXE effort to educate its future contributors — those citizen journalists — about writing balanced and fair news stories.

“The citizen journalism part of the project is in response to concerns about the quality of information sometimes found on the Internet,” Hall said. “We want to create people who can (produce) information that is up to journalistic standards.”

Doug McGill, a former New York Times reporter, London and Tokyo bureau chief for Bloomberg News and journalism instructor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, has hosted community journalism workshops at local community colleges. Hibbing Community College instructor Aaron Brown, former editor of the Hibbing Daily Tribune, also has led workshops on blogging — Web sites with information written and maintained by an individual rather than a news organization.

The project has enlisted other partners as well. KAXE is working with the journalism program at Bemidji State University to create a journalism club. There also have been talks with public and local access television and some newspapers about how these different news organizations might partner in the project.

Montgomery said conversations on collaboration with other media partners are ongoing and KAXE is interested in any ways that teaming up can produce mutual benefit for all involved. “I’m not sure how it will all work out, but we’re open to anyway it might work out,” she said.

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