"Building a Radio Station from the Bottom Up: WERU, Blue Hill (Maine) and Community Radio in the 1980s"

In response to the privatization of national and local radio in the United States and the bipartisan politicization of radio during the 1980s as neoliberal policies were implemented, local progressive activists came together with the Downeast and Midcoast communities of Maine in order to build the first grassroots radio station in the state. WERU Community Radio, founded in 1988, began to broadcast at 89.9 FM reaching a small coastal listening audience and by 2018 it had reached an audience that extended across a radius of sixty miles, reaching other minded audiences that wanted to be freed from the limited options offered by commercial radio. This paper describes the importance of grassroots collaboration in the development of independent radio programming, and its impact on the diversification of the American radio industry at the local level, while building community, strengthening local culture, and providing local listeners with an opportunity to connect with the global system. This paper argues that WERU became an important outlet for the current interconnectivity between local and global dynamics, providing its listeners access to global content through its vastly diversified world programming at a time when American commercial radio maintained its own listening audience contained in its national constructs. Ultimately the paper demonstrates that WERU used its outreach as an instrument of democratization and internationalization, while reinventing the business of radio stations in the United States.