Published May 8, 2005 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
I thank my lucky stars I don’t work in a cubicle. I stopped at an office the other day where people worked in cubes. There was no music. There was no laughter. There were only the flimsy padded walls that block human interaction, and dignity, in the modern American workplace. The place just had no soul.
“Why don’t they flip on the radio?” I wondered. I didn’t have to ask, because I knew that your average scan of the radio airwaves yields little soul.
Local radio stations once consisted largely of local voices. We still have a few of those on stations in the Hibbing area, but most of what we hear on the radio is piped in from other parts of the country, or voice-tracked by a handful of people and played back by a computer. The slick disk jockey you hear in the morning is in another state, and the current weather conditions you hear might be based on an educated guess from several hours ago. Don’t even get me started on “the news.”
Broadcasting experts will tell you that such practices are necessary in the modern media industry, especially in smaller markets like ours. No one can afford things like local programming and news anymore.
Repeating this over and over doesn’t make it good.
Speaking as someone who’s decided to make a life in northern Minnesota, I’m tired of people telling us we have to settle for less just because we live in a place where trees outnumber lawyers. That’s true for schools and jobs, and that’s true for the radio I hear when I drive into work in the morning.
And I have proof. One local station is showing that everyday people can still produce good local radio, and that people will support it with their ears and their pocketbooks.
91.7 KAXE-Northern Community Radio is a non-profit station that serves Northeastern Minnesota, including the Iron Range, Brainerd and Bemidji and the many wooded areas and small towns that make up our region.
If you go by the books, this station should be road kill on the highway of broadcasting industry survival, crushed by 18 wheels of economic Darwinism. After all, they devote most of their energy to local programming, news, and music from across the spectrum. What saps! There’s no money in that. But in about a week, this station will go on the air from a beautiful, almost $1 million new facility on the banks of the Mississippi River in Grand Rapids, built with money donated by local businesses, foundations and everyday people. KAXE will sign off the air May 9 and return May 13, broadcasting to a vast area, providing programming you will probably never again hear on commercial radio.
“It’s always going to be a challenge to keep a small, independent radio station like KAXE going,” said Scott Hall, Community Access Coordinator for KAXE. “Our business plan, if you can call it that, is to give a voice to people in northern Minnesota – to tell the stories of our lives here, to reflect our culture and talk out issues important to us, and provide a great alternative music service. I think these new studios will help us do that better than ever.”
Most importantly (and take note those who work in bland offices), the new offices at KAXE contain no cubicle walls.
The airwaves in this country belong to the people who live here, not the people who own the transmitters. People and communities have souls, and thus need more than compartments, profits and efficiency. We shouldn’t settle for less because we live in a rural area. And if that’s true for the brutal world of broadcasting, it’s true for everything else, too.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.