Getting Vancouver voices onto the airwaves was a formidable challenge for the scrappy radio startup KXRW-FM in March. But now that the station is on the air, its creators want to see it take new strides.
A mix of excitement and relief fills the voice of Susan Galaviz, chair of KXRW’s board of directors, when she looks back on the milestones KXRW hit last year. The struggle to find an acceptable radio transmission tower, coping with the fallout of January 2017’s epic snowstorm right when it was time to mount the station’s antennae, navigating the bureaucratic gauntlet of the Federal Communications Commission — the list goes on.
“We came one week away from this not happening,” Galaviz said.
But in spite of it all, they met all their deadlines to start broadcasting on March 1.
“So many things fell into place at the last minute,” added Mike Selig, board member and a program contributor.
KXRW is Vancouver’s only local radio station, a kind of lone beacon, beaming out Southwest Washington voices on a radio spectrum that’s otherwise dominated by Portland content.
Living in a city with a sparse media landscape and in an era where social media website algorithms are built to create a kind of echo chamber for our own beliefs, the folks behind KXRW believe that the old-fashioned radio can help get the Vancouver citizenry earnestly listening to different perspectives.
“We believe communities are stronger when they work together, support each other and know about each other and listen to other voices,” Selig said. “That’s why we want to be that connector.”
To make that happen, the people behind KXRW in the upcoming year hope to grow their station.
KXRW gets its content on the air through its Portland-based sister station XRAY.fm. While KXRW is a separate entity with its own governing body and FCC license, it streams a lot XRAY content interspersed with the four hours of content KXRW volunteers produce every month.
While XRAY’s content is a mix of music and progressive talk radio, KXRW prides itself on being a kind of amplifier for Vancouver’s nuanced political landscape and the local nonprofits that need to get the word out about their work. The station currently runs three locally focused shows, which are recorded in home studios, but they hope to expand their offerings to at least six hours of new content every month in the near future.
To do that, the KXRW board wants to find a brick-and-mortar recording studio where a growing number of volunteers can go to produce more hours of content such as interviews and live musical performances. Ultimately that requires enlisting more administrative volunteers and financial supporters to help the station cover its overhead.
“If people want to see us expand we need community support because it’s been community supported so far,” Galaviz said. “Radio is yours, we say.”
Listeners can hear KXRW at 99.9 FM, or on XRAY’s 91.1 and 107.1 FM, but because their stations are low-power, they urge people to download the XRAY.fm app. More information is available at kxrwvancouver.org.
