Founder Shawn Campbell has been encouraged by the listener feedback she’s gotten during the first week of nonprofit Chicago Independent Radio Project’s (CHIRP) online station
Live hosts on the volunteer-run station play a mix of musical styles 21 hours a day and they’ve received comments like “this is the first time I’ve listened to radio in years.”
“There’s been a real need for a station that focuses on all the great music that is out there, local and otherwise, that rarely gets played on commercial radio,” Campbell says.
“At a time when so much radio has become bland and faceless, full of syndicated shows and voice tracking, we are true believers in the idea that radio should be live and local, clearly based in a community.”
Campbell was program director at Loyola University’s WLUW 88.7 FM until she was laid off in 2007 as part of the station’s shift away from a broader community focus and toward a more university-centric model. She started CHIRP largely to replace the void left after WLUW’s changeover.
A volunteer tech team built the station’s still-evolving infrastructure using DJ software to manage the digital library. Breaking from the convention of genre-specific programming blocks, CHIRP’s programming is avowedly eclectic throughout the day.
CHIRP is funded through donations, events like its annual record fair, and grants from the Crossroads Fund and the MacArthur Fund for Arts & Culture at the Driehaus Foundation.
“We were fortunate enough to be very successful with our fund-raising before the station was up and running,” Campbell says. “Now that we have an actual station, not just a concept, we anticipate that we will be seeing even more individual donations of all sizes.”
