Utah FM Celebrates One Year

In January 2008 KRCL announced they were changing the format. After 28 years,they were canning the daytime volunteers and replacing them with three paid DJs. Community members cried foul at the station’s decision. People lamented that their beloved community station was giving itself a “corporate makeover.” Ultimately the format change wasn’t as bad as expected, and resulted in the birth of a brand new volunteer-based online radio station known as Utah Free Media.

“It was founded [because] a group of KRCL volunteers/DJs and the public [were] outraged at the Board of KRCL violating its own mission statement and core values,” says Babs Delay, Utah FM volunteer DJ. Delay was one of the many volunteers who lost their position as a result of the change. She was the host of Women: The Third Decade for 28 years––the longest-running women’s music program in the country. Although listeners have stopped tuning to 90.9 to hear her show, they can still catch her every Thursday from 9 a.m. to noon streaming on iTunes from UtahFM.org. If you aren’t near a computer at that time, you can listen to the program through the station’s new iphone application or at your own convenience through their online archives.

Mike Place, Babs Delay and Patrick Commiskey in the Utah FM Studio.
Photo: Katie Panzer

“Utah FM started with a phone call between Troy [Mumm] and I,” says Mike Place, co-founder and technical director of Utah FM. “From there, it grew into a loose band of volunteers. It wasn’t too long before we had studio space and donations started to come in.” The station takes up three once-vacant rooms in the basement of Urban Utah Homes and Estates. The space was donated by Delay––the Principle Real Estate Broker for Urban Utah. The technical infrastructure of the station was donated by XMission––where Mike Place works in Research and Development. “[It’s] absolutely essential in making the station work,” Place says, “We simply couldn’t exist without the support of [XMission CEO] Pete Ashdown and the rest of the group over there.”

The station launched on May 12, 2008 with “almost no money, about 20 music programs and not much else to speak of,” says Place. On their first day they had 200 unique listeners.

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