Indie Radio Lives!

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In the U.S. kingdom of corporate media, is there still a place for independent speech and creative energy in the world of radio? Not if you listen to Clear Channel. But all interesting and interested parties have not been silenced. I talked with several rising stars in the independent radio world at last year?s Third Coast Audio Festival and came away feeling that the future of non-commercial broadcasting was in good hands.

Audio expatriate extraordinaire Gregory Whitehead crafts sound in innovative and thoughtful ways for the BBC. His work is funny, intellectual and at times sheer genius. Whitehead says the way non-commercial radio is funded in the United States tends to encourage mediocrity. ?The problem with the funding situation in the U.S. is that as the pie gets smaller, mediocrity rises to the top. Why? Because producers hone their grantmaking skills more than their production skills, [and] those with genuine talent drift away to other media, leaving professional fundraisers as the last producers standing,? he says.

?The work that emerges is mediocre,? he adds, ?which in turn justifies shrinking the pie even further. There are, of course, many exceptions, and some great producers out there, but they are exceptions to a game set up to guarantee mediocrity.?

Whitehead himself works exclusively on a contract basis, but notes that ?radio is not the medium for someone cursed with the desire for vast fortunes.?

Jaime York, an independent producer in New York whose ?Sonic Memorial Project,? a poignant audio memorial collage from the World Trade Center and 9/11, has received critical acclaim, says it?s hard to finance independent projects. ?The Sonic Memorial was sort of a free-for-all,? he explains. ?There were lots of grants written all over for that. The one I got was an ?Emerging Leaders? grant from the Ford Foundation, but they had never done anything like it before, and they made it really clear that they weren?t going to ever again. This was an experiment for them. They took all the money and gave it to the loan officers? assistants to give away, not the loan officers. They thought that the younger staff would be more in tune with what was happening today, and so most of the money was given to social justice causes.?

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