June 2011. Radio by the People, For the People

There is a lot of chatter on the Baton Rouge airwaves but a dearth of local voices. I sat down with Alexander Perlis, Racheal Hebert and Lillian Gray, part of the crew behind WHYR, a new community radio station in Baton Rouge, which is looking to change all that.

What is a community radio station?

Alexander Perlis: Community radio is an infrastructure where people in town can propose shows to have mostly locally-produced programming. The best example of that is what WBRH [Baton Rouge High School’s radio station] does on the weekends and we would like to have that be all the time. We’d lower the bar as far as for anybody to get a show, have lots of time slots available and have a wide variety of locally produced programming.

Racheal Hebert: I’d add that community radio is by the people, for the people, non-hierarchical, consensus-driven. Like Alex mentioned, we are only building this infrastructure. We are setting up the equipment and getting everything in place, but it’s the community bringing us what they want to hear. Whoever wants a radio show can get one; we set it up so it can happen.

Where did the drive for this come from?

RH: As far as this specific project goes, it started about ten years ago out of an organization at LSU called the Progressive Student Alliance, which as students graduated morphed into the Baton Rouge Progressive Network, the 501c3 that applied to the permit from the FCC back in 2001 and it was granted back in 2004. Since then we’ve had back and forth legal issues.

There was another station that had the same license?

RH: It was another station that began broadcasting on the same frequency. They were not licensed, they took our frequency, so when we were granted the license in 2004, we weren’t able to build the station because someone had taken over the frequency. And it became a legal battle with the FCC—trying to convince them that it’s not us—so it wasn’t until 2010 that we were granted eighteen months to get the station started up so that’s where we are now.

Add Comment