88.1fm UPDATE; Although Not Yet On-Air INDIE 88 Goes For A Signal Upgrade

As some of you may recall, last year the CRTC granted the 88.1fm frequency vacated by the CKLN's meltdown to a new station to be called INDIE 88, an independent group dedicated to Indie and Canadian music. And then...nothing...at least not in public. So what's been going on with that? Well here's a recent update sent out by INDIE 88 a while back;

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"* The Licence is confirmed!! Although the CRTC awarded us the licence, procedures allow for an appeal of the decision to Federal Cabinet. One applicant did appeal the decision, bringing us to a stand-still. Just before Christmas our decision was confirmed. Big collective “Whew!”

* We are starting to build our systems and put together technical plans for the studios, transmitter and antenna. It will take us several months to get all of this organized.

* We applied to the CRTC for approval to increase power- 88.1 coverage is limited due to other users of the frequency. We have negotiated cooperative agreements allowing us to increase power from 875 watts to 4,000 watts. This is a big deal for the station - as licensed our signal will be difficult to pick up in many parts of the City. With higher power we will reach most Toronto homes. You’ll also be able to hear us on car radios throughout the GTA. BUT, the power increase has to be approved by the CRTC.

Once again we need your help. You can help us get approval by sending another letter of support to the CRTC. If you’d like to help out, just reply back with an e-mail and we’ll pass along the details."
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A little back ground here; Firstly they don't say what group of entitled jerks actually tried to fight the granting of a license in court (with zero chance of success) but I can think of two possibilities. First there is Moses Znaimer who had also applied for the license and threw a public hissy fit and threatened a lawsuit (which I wrote about here) when they didn't get it. Then there was the CBC who also made a similar threat at the actual CRTC hearings which I was at. I have defended the CBC in the past but there is no excusing such arrogant behavior, assuming it was them.

Now for the more important issue; INDIE 88 originally applied for a signal at approx. 500watts. By comparison CKLN broadcasted at 250 watts, and when I worked there we had done some prepwork to upgrade to 1000 watts. So I was not surprised to hear that INDIE 88 was going for an upgrade, although making an application before even going on-air is a little odd. I guess the extra time left by the court challenge gave INDIE 88 time to kill. INDIE 88's application called for an almost hundred percent increase to 4000 watts. To keep that in perspective CIUT has 15,000 watts, CFNY (AKA The EDGE) has 35,000 watts, Q107 has 40,000 watts, BOOM 97 has 29,000 watts, KISS FM (formerly JACK FM) has 4,700 watts, FLOW has 1,170 watts, CKFG-FM (AKA CARN) has 446, CHRY has 150 watts and PROUD FM has 60 watts. Incidentally CARN and PROUD FM also applied for the 88.1fm signal. So 4,000 watts would make INDIE 88 competitive and allow them to compete with CFNY who are their obvious main competitor as well as enable them to reach the entire GTA with a good signal.



At any rate since I did intervene in support of the original INDIE 88 application with a fairly detailed 12 page submission I figured I might as well fire off another letter if support for the CRTC below; "Being a veteran of the Toronto music and radio scene as a DJ, Journalist and Show Promoter I wrote a letter of support of CIND's initial application and now wish to express my support for the proposed signal increase to 4000 watts. While the Commission's decision to grant a license to a radio station dedicated to an all-independent music station with a commitment to 40% Cancon is certainly a welcome step I am also aware that the current signal is not strong enough to adequately and consistently cover the ever growing Greater Toronto Area. The Independent music scene is not merely restricted to the downtown core but throughout the suburbs and surrounding communities. It is essential to encourage young musicians outside the downtown core with music that goes beyond that offered by the current commercial radio stations. Such a signal is also necessary enable CIND to appeal to advertisers needed to stay profitable. An upgrade capable of reaching not only the downtown core but also the suburbs is essential to enable CIND to meet it's desired mandate.

Furthermore I am aware as the Commission is that the proposal by CIND includes provisions to enable radio stations CHES and CFRH to increase and improve their signals as well along with financial support for these upgrades and would therefore have obvious benefits to the communities as well. This opportunity may not arise in the future and should naturally be taken advantage of. By it's willingness to work with and support these Community Stations I believe that CIND has shown it's willingness to be the "good corporate citizen" that any "Indie" oriented radio station must be in order to build a relationship with it's proposed audience and should be encouraged.

While I recognize that it is unusual for a radio station to ask for a signal upgrade before it has actually gone on the air I believe that the unusual challenges set by the unexpected opening of the 88.1FM frequency and the short deadlines for application made this unavoidable in this case. I have read the Supplementary Brief offered by the Applicant and I believe they have answered the concerns that the Commission may have concerning this issue. I therefore ask the Commission to approve the proposed signal upgrade.

(Signed) Daibhid James

The hearings will be sometime in April. They'll be in Ottawa so I won't be there however but I'll post the CRTC decison when it comes in.



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As I allude to in my support letter one of the byproducts of INDIE 88 applications is that it also allowed for signal upgrades for two other stations; CHES and CFRH. This is because they share the 88.1 frequency outside the GTA and therefore INDIE 88 had to get their permission to upgrade their signal since to do so would (or could) interfere with their signals. CHES is a small non-campus Community Station in the small town of Erin west of Toronto, CFRH is a French language community station in Penetanguishene. Both have been trying to get a signal upgrade for a few years now. To do so they would have needed the co-operation of the then holder of the 88.1fm frequency, CKLN. While I was working there back in 2008 there were working out a deal in which both CKLN and CHES and CFRH would be able to mutually support each other in getting signal upgrades for all of them. After the Ryerson Coup seized CKLN in 2009 the new supposedly community based leftist junta in charge of CKLN scuttled those agreements with two community stations in favour of a vague dream of getting a 1000 watt upgrade for themselves. Of course that was delusional since CKLN was at that point already busy being dragged in front of the CRTC hearings and have their license yanked.

Ironically it turned out that CKLN's shutdown was good news for everyone since once INDIE 88 got their application they quickly set to work on an agreement with CHES and CFRH which involved not only license upgrades for the two smaller stations but also INDIE 88 giving a large sum of cash to enable CHES to afford a more powerful broadcast antenna. CFRH has not actually applied for an upgrade yet, although they will probably do so at some point. CHES on the other hand has hit the ground running and applied for a signal upgrade simultaneously with INDIE 88. So I figured I might as well fire off a short support letter for them as well.



See below;

"I am writing in support of CHES FM's application for a signal upgrade. Although I am a resident of Toronto I have many years of experience in Community Radio and am well aware of the importance of such a station to it's local community. I am also aware that CHES has struggled to reach much of it's surrounding area with it's current signal and the requested increase seems both necessary and appropriate to it's mandate. A signal increase which allows CHES to reach the entire area would obviously be of benefit to that community as well as allowing CHES an opportunity to reach potential advertisers. I am also aware of CHES's previous attempts to address this issue were opposed by the now defunct CKLN. Since that station has now been replaced by CIND, a station which shown a greater ability to work with it's neighbors. This has allowed both stations to come to an arrangement which allows both station's to increase their signals for the mutual benefit of both audiences. It would therefore be wise to take advantage of this arrangement and grant both applications and I ask the Commission to do so."
(signed) Daibhid James

Toronto Radio; Out with the Old, In with the New

This spring Toronto had one radio station finally go off the air for good while another finally won it's battle to go on the air. Still another once proud radio icon engaged in yet another one of it's revolving door format changes.

First the deceased;



CKLN 88.1fm was a campus/community radio station based at Ryerson University since 1983, or earlier depending on who you ask. Over the years a lot of good programming went on there and the station was quite influential on the Toronto music scene. Some talented people got their start there, Handsome Ned, Mean Steve Piano, Sucking Chest Wound, Jill Heath, Brian Taylor, Bill Grove, David Scurr, James Bailey, Arnie Achtman, The Blue Demon, Mike Hanson, Gerry Belanger, Charles Watson, Jaymz Bee, DJ Barbie, Dave Neudorf, Michie Mee, Freedom in a Vacuum, The Tape Beatles, Chris Twoomey, Ian Danzig. A bunch of people who later went on to The Flow and CBC and Exclaim Magazine. Oh and I did a show there too for several years before moving to CIUT.

Unfortunately like a number of other campus/community radio stations in Canada CKLN was also full of professional DJ's and show promoters who used CKLN to make money on the side and also became a haven for a cadre of fanatical left wing activist types who engaged in their usual vicious sectarian infighting that inevitably tore the place apart. In 2008 the left wing groups staged coup to seize control of the station. After a year long campaign of harassment, slander, nuisance lawsuits, frivolous complaints to the CRTC, threats and occasional violence backed by the equally leftist Ryerson Student Union (RSU, who also withheld the station's funds to force it into bankruptcy) the leftists got their way. But only after the RSU actually seized the station itself, changing the locks and forcing it off the air for seven months. Unfortunately for them after getting the run of CKLN it turned out that left wing activists didn't know the first thing about running a radio station. So after several months of jaw dropping incompetence the CRTC finally called hearings to decide if the whole sorry embarrassing mess should be allowed to continue. The hearings happened in December 2010 and I testified as a witness. There is no room here to go into the hilarity of the proceedings and the awe inspiring ineptitude of the new CKLN management but suffice it to say the CRTC was not impressed and ordered the station shut down for good. CKLN tried to fight this shut down order in court and via a public campaign claiming "corporate censorship". To the surprise of absolutely nobody the court challenge failed and the public campaign fizzed out and CKLN finally went dark this April.

The Torontoist had the best article about the CKLN debacle which I can't improve on so here it is;

"Timeline: Why CKLN Radio's Broadcast License Was Revoked
by Steve Kupferman on January 28, 2011 3:30 PM

Today the CRTC revoked the broadcasting license of radio station CKLN—an independent community-run radio station located in Ryerson University's campus (and largely funded by its student union) but not officially affiliated with that institution—citing the station's failure to comply with federal broadcasting regulations for the past three years. The decision document announcing the revocation is an epic catalogue of alleged violations, some of them outrageous in their negligence. But the document is long, and you have stuff to do. So we've boiled the whole thing down to a series of key points.

August 13, 2007: The CRTC renews CKLN's license for a term of seven years.

Between August 2007 and March 2009: CKLN is riven with internal disputes. The station fires staff and volunteers, and eventually elects competing boards of directors. (A case concerning the competing boards is currently underway at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.)

The Palin Foundation, the building manager for Ryerson's Student Campus Centre (where CKLN has its studio), locks staff out from March 2009 until October the same year. During the lockout, rather than its usual programming, the station plays a recorded loop of a jazz program, complete with spoken commentary. CKLN is denied access to its transmitter at First Canadian Place, so broadcasts are intermittent.

July 2, 2009: After hearing complaints about CKLN's alleged "ongoing difficulties with its governance structure," CRTC staff sends a letter to CKLN requesting responses to the accusations.

September 14, 2009: CRTC staff members meet with representatives of CKLN to discuss the station's compliance difficulties. Face-to-face meetings of this kind are not something the CRTC typically does.

September 17, 2009: CRTC staff sends another letter to CKLN, requesting information on the station's operations and governance structure. The letter informs CKLN management that the station hasn't filed its required annual returns with the CRTC for the past two years.

October 6, 2009: CKLN files its response to the CRTC's letter of September 17. It promises to hire paid management staff and resolve its internal difficulties.

February 10, 2010: The CRTC sends CKLN a letter requesting tapes, logs, and program schedules relating to the week of January 10, 2010. CKLN sends the tapes on time, but files the schedules and logs almost two weeks late. The tapes are full of static, and they don't match the logs. Later, the CRTC reiterates an unfulfilled October, 2009 request for tapes and logs from June 2009 (which was during the lockout period) and again CKLN sends them after the deadline. When a CRTC staff member asks why the material is late, a CKLN representative says that the person responsible for sending the stuff was "in the Caribbean for a month.

March 1, 2010: In response to the CRTC's continued insistence on receiving those required annual returns, CKLN sends a letter saying that it has "no knowledge as to why the returns had not been filed," and that they'll be in the mail within a few days.

May 12, 2010: The CRTC adjourns a public hearing on CKLN's alleged regulatory violations, but requires CKLN to file monthly reports beginning June 14.

July 7, 2010: A scheduled host doesn't appear at the station for his or her show, and so a CKLN volunteer broadcasts the online stream of a Seattle, Washington, jazz radio show as a substitute. The CRTC takes this and other lapses as evidence that the station's infighting is ongoing. CKLN has not hired management staff and is still controlled by a "working board."

September 14, 2010: CKLN tries to file its annual return for the broadcast year of 2006/2007 with the CRTC, but sends in the wrong form.

October 13, 2010: CKLN tries to file four years' worth of annual returns with the CRTC, all at once. But the data for each year goes only until April 30—the CRTC requires data ending August 31. CKLN promises to file corrected returns within a month, then doesn't.

December 8, 2010: The CRTC reconvenes the previously adjourned public hearing on CKLN's alleged violations. Ron Nelson, head of the station's working board, tells the CRTC that the board has no experienced guidance. "We have never been a program director at a radio station before," he reportedly said. "So we had to do a lot of consulting with the NCRA and other radio stations and their program directors, such as CHRY and CIUT, to find out how to do our job properly."

January 28, 2011: The CRTC revokes CKLN's broadcast license, effective February 12."



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On another note, not an entire radio station but rather the last remaining shred of a once respected radio station's glory years. In the 1980's CFNY was Toronto's Alternative, Toronto's New Wave. Then at some point in the late 1990's they changed formats, substituting new wave for Madonna and (gasp) Phil Collins. There were protests, mass firings and resignations, an ownership change and CRTC hearings, which I also testified at come to think of it. The new owners promised to bring back the old format and foster new talent. Instead there were more mass firings and a re-branding as "The Edge 102.4" whatever that means. One of those few from the glory days who managed to survive was DJ Alan Cross. But only just. In 1992 he was given the choice of doing a new project of doing a historical retrospective show called "The Ongoing History of New Music" which would give The Edge some CFNY gravitas. Or Cross could dust off his resume. He reluctantly chose to do the show and given his deep musical knowledge and research skills honed when he had earned a history degree he was able to turn it into a much respected show. Recently he was unceremoniously dumped off the Edge who have long ago learned that gravitas doesn't sell nearly as well as marketing. Sometime this year CFNY also closed their street level audience friendly studios at the Eaton Center. Speaking of which this year Q107 also closed their street level studios across the street at the Hard Rock Cafe. Why in an age when radio is under challenge from newer user friendly media forms these corporate geniuses would want to isolate themselves from the public I'm sure I don't know. But then again I also couldn't for the life of me figure out why CKLN's far-leftist fanatics wanted to turn that place into an insular sectarian cult either. Hey how did that turn out again? Oh right.

Alan Cross in action;





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Now for the new;

The Caribbean Radio Network (or CARN) has been pushing laboriously for a license since 2002 and after having been shot down a few times finally got permission from the CRTC to broadcast at 98.7fm in June. CARN Had to get past objections from the CBC (because of their fears that CARN's 98.7fm signal would interfere with the CBC's 99.1fm signal) as well as unrelated objections from Rogers, Astral and CTV (because they're dicks). Also Ron Nelson from the soon-to-be corpse of CKLN also complained on the air calling CARN "vultures" for having the temerity to claim that CARN would be "The Voice of the Black and Caribbean Communities in Toronto" a role that CKLN had claimed. It has been noted that once upon a time The Flow made the same claim only to abandon that role to become a more mainstream (and more profitable) station. For that matter the same has been said about CFNY and Proud fm so we shall see. CARN is not actually on air yet and there will be a delay while they get ready, they will also probably have different call letters.

On another note there is the never ending saga of 1050 CHUM am. Once the powerhouse of Toronto rock radio from the 1950's to the early 1980's. CHUM ruled the roost in Toronto for twenty years presenting everyone from Elvis to the Beatles and could claim the title of "The Voice of Young Toronto". The CHUM Top 30 charts became a fixture and eventually branched on to a television version as well. The owners of CHUM Group also started a CHUM FM sister station as well. I have fond childhood memories of all of it. However times were changing as AM lost ground to FM and top forty lost ground to more specialized rivals like the avowedly hard rock Q107, the new wave CFNY and more eclectic campus/community stations like CKLN and CIUT. CHUM seemed not to notice times were changing until suddenly in the mid eighties it's ratings finally tumbled dramatically. In 1986 they switched from Top Forty to Adult Contemporary Soft Rock and Pop, then in 1989 they went to Golden Oldies. When that didn't work they suddenly gave up on music entirely in 2001 to become an all sports station, ignoring the fact that Toronto already had an all sports station. That turned into a disaster and the ratings cratered completely so they desperately switched back to golden oldies only a year later.

They never recovered from this debacle and in 2007 when the network was sold the new owners, CTV, abruptly switched formats again to a 24 Hour news station, once again ignoring that Toronto already had such a station. This time it was widely assumed that the new CHUM was just making time by running a shell station since there was no actual programming at all, just a direct feed from the Cable Pulse 24 television channel, which led to some odd moments when the television announcers referred to video images that the radio audience (assuming there was one) could not see and long unexplained silences. This year brought another change back to...wait for it...another all sports station. This time they took the time to plan it out and got a fair amount of press attention for the big switch over to what they are now calling TSN Sports Radio. Whether there is still any point to having another sports station in Toronto remains to be seen. At any rate the long winding road of CHUM and CKLN is a unique one in the history of Canadian radio for better or (eventually) worse.