Community radio station KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz, California has posted the date for its next Board of Directors meeting: July 13 at the Aptos Community Foundation building at 6 PM. I presume that it is at that meeting or soon following that the Board will decide what kind of format to adopt for the station. “It is expected that a decision on a path forward will be made by the board in July,” a station notice says, “and a public announcement of the decision immediately thereafter.”
As we have reported, KUSP has been in crisis mode for months over its future. Insisting that the operation faced unsustainable debt, the Board even proposed selling the license, then stepped back and launched a veritable forest of alternative proposals (all with tree names like Maple and Fig), and now has whittled them down (so to speak) to three: a mixed news/information signal with NPR content and volunteer music shows (not dissimilar to the present model), a mostly music, volunteer-oriented station, or “a conventional public radio music station” similar to KCRW in Santa Monica or WXPN in Philadelphia.
I think I might even drive down to Santa Cruz for that gathering to see what happens.
Meanwhile, happy 20th birthday to rock oriented community music station Fantasy 97 FM of Devizes, United Kingdom. Devizes is a market town in Wiltshire County of South West England. It is located about 15 miles west of Bath and 35 minutes from Stonehenge. The license started operating in 1995 out of the town’s Corn Exchange, an old Victorian commodity trading building. It ran on short term permits until 2012, when it got full time papers from Ofcom, the UK’s broadcast regulator. Fantasy has no less than 24 volunteer presenters.
“Fantasy was the very first radio station for the people of Devizes,” its station manager told the area’s Gazette & Herald. “Not from Swindon, Bristol or London, but from Devizes for Devizes.”
Speaking of Ofcom, the regulator is accepting applications for new community radio stations in South East England outside of the M25, aka the London Orbital Motorway. This is a lot of space (see area 9 of the map below). It includes Oxford, Salisbury, the Isle of Wight, and Southhampton.
