Check out the article about WVQC in the November issue of Cincinnati Magazine.
Low End Theory
WVQC 95.7 FM may have a weak signal but the studio is ready to rock.
Stay tuned for WVQC 95.7 FM.
Soon, listeners who find a sweet spot within a three- to five-mile radius of Media Bridges’s nascent low-power, noncommercial, 100-watt radio station could hear Spanish-speaking announcers, their favorite homegrown bands, a discussion of gay and lesbian issues, or any number of Queen City–specific programs. It may sound redundant to add another low-power radio station to the dial—there’s already the venerable 34-year-old 88.3 FM WAIF, a station known to loyal listeners as “Stepchild Radio” for its grassroots sensibilities and disparate programming. However, in WVQC—recently dubbed Radio Free Queen City—Media Bridges is offering The Little(r) Station That Could. Katie Finnigan, the AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteer getting the station ready to go, says that WVQC will fill a void: “There’s a lot to cover in Cincinnati and two community [stations] dedicated to it is not enough.” Radio Free Queen City is part of a larger national trend, adding to the hundreds of low-power radio licenses granted over the last decade by the Federal Communications Commission. Many of these stations broadcast (weakly) from the homes of private broadcasters, who snapped up the licenses as a result of, according to The New York Times, “a brief window of eased federal regulation intended to foster competition within the big corporate radio chains.”
