Jim Bear leans back in his chair on a rainy Sunday at the outdoor Maplewood Mall in Germantown. The owner of Gtownradio.com is preparing for his weekly radio show, Neu-Matic, in the front bedroom of a second-floor apartment that has been converted into a makeshift Internet radio station affectionately referred to as “the studio.”
Since AM and FM stations are often called terrestrial, Internet-only stations like Gtownradio.com are considered extraterrestrial.
“One of the first big things that really started this was a radio station in West Philadelphia that was called Radio Volta,” Bear says. “It started out as a pirate FM station and from there it became repurposed as this media outlet during the Republican National Convention in 2000. Then it was a 24-hour webcast. It was a collection of activists, anarchists and people on the fringes of society who decided that they wanted to create this new kind of content.”
Bear’s interest in producing radio content came out of a dislike for what radio was currently offering. When he was in his early 20s, Bear started discovering new sounds like rockabilly, techno and underground hip-hop that mainstream radio stations were ignoring.
Gtownradio.com’s humble beginning was one of a 24-hour automated playlist that ran from a computer under a desk in Bear’s apartment. After a bicycle accident left him with a broken jaw that was wired shut for six weeks, he started a webcast to occupy himself. That quickly escalated to buying software to automate the webcast. Then came a website and next the call for programmers in fall 2006. Nine months later he launched a program schedule. The first programmers hailed from the Radio Volta days as well as members of the community who responded to ads in local newspapers and on websites.
“I trained in parallel about 15 shows over the summer of 2007,” he says. “So, we had all these people that were learning this stuff in the studio for the first time.”
The very first show on Gtownradio.com was a hip-hop show called Stereotronics with three local hosts. The show is no longer on air, but one of the members, Tyree Singleton, now co-hosts Team 87 Presents: Urban Sports Talk, a sports show that airs on Saturdays at 4 p.m.
Just like Internet radio in general Gtownradio.com is an evolving process.
“Internet radio is usually very niche,” says Bear. “It’s about West African hip-hop, it’s about political right-wing or left-wing news. It’s usually one topic. We are inverting that and focusing on the community and the many aspects of the community.”
Gtownradio.com expresses that interest in the community in many ways, whether it’s continuous presence at one of the many summertime festivals Germantown offers such as last month’s poetry festival or making plans to involve members of the community in some of the shows.
Kevin Paige, co-host of Team 87 with Singleton, has his eye on the next generation. “I’m interested,” he says, “and I think Ty may co-sign with this, in getting involved with the local kids – you know, youth sports, high school sports.”
Most of Gtownradio.com’s programmers come from Germantown as well as from the surrounding area. Singleton and Paige grew up in nearby Logan and Singleton now resides in the neighboring East Falls section of the city. The personal ties to the Germantown neighborhood are important to Bear, a 13-year veteran of the neighborhood.
“My father grew up in Germantown and my family moved out of the area before I was born,” he says. “It just so happened that when we moved back into the city – my girlfriend and I at the time – we realized only after the fact that we were about five blocks from my grandfather’s house where my father grew up.”
Although the ties to the community make the job rewarding there are still a number of challenges in attempting to penetrate the virtual airwaves.
“A lot of Philadelphia doesn’t have a saturation of Internet access and Germantown is definitely part of that,” Bear says. “This is still a foreign concept to people. It’s about getting people to embrace new technologies that make it easier to listen.”
But, sometimes it’s just a matter of educating your audience. As Singleton says, “Everyone is always asking ‘How can I listen to it?’”
“Listenership is all over the place as far as demographics and numbers,” Bear says, which is evidence of the fact that Gtownradio.com reaches a large audience because it doesn’t fit a specific niche. As Gtownradio.com grows Bear plans to stick with a wide variety of offerings not offered on mainstream media outlets.
Cultivating an Internet-savvy audience is especially tough for an organization is comprised of all volunteers and is the definition of grassroots. The burden of finding a listenership lies squarely on the shoulders of the hosts themselves which is why some shows have 10 listeners and others have 100. The behind the scenes and technical aspects such as recording and posting podcasts – a habit that has not yet been picked up by all shows – also lies with the hosts.
According to Reade McCardell, host of Fewsh on Monday nights, Bear’s intention to be community-based has given Gtownradio.com the endearing feeling of being “The little engine that could.”
And one way that engine can is by providing a wide range of audio offerings like talk shows such as Passing the Torch hosted by Malcolm Cain, who was 15 years old when he started the show three years ago and according to Bear “has, hands-down, the most impressive list of guests.” Another talk-focused show that has been with the station since it’s inception is The Wreck.
It’s like a variation on morning radio,” says Bear, “but with a focus on arts and entertainment and a lot of off the wall or off-color topics which are always fun to discuss.
“We are building an organization which really isn’t so much technology based, but it’s community based,” Bear says. “We are doing things that aren’t done anywhere else – it’s one big experiment.”
Listen at Gtownradio.com.
Be the first to comment