Last summer, I drove cross country. I found that in parts of the Mountain West — Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming — you can go for miles and miles and pick up just one or two radio stations.

Geography is one thing (mountains = interference), but population density is a less obvious cause of empty airwaves. To explain this, it helps to think of radio’s underlying structure as a kind of natural resource. Radio is just one sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. To borrow a phrase itself co-opted from the telecom world, its bandwidth is limited. Sections of it (frequencies) are parceled out by the FCC for public and private uses, and the metric for determining which areas get more or less is the number of people who live there. Christopher Terry, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says that most FM radio allocations were made in the 1960s and early 70s, when populations in Western states, especially the Southwest, were much lower.

But as the events of the past year have shown, when people need information about what’s happening in their communities, radio is one of the first places they’ll go. Kate Concannon, managing editor of the Mountain West News Bureau, a consortium of NPR stations that serve New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, cites the region’s “shared issues” as the reason why her team has found success and relevance across such a broad area. She manages six reporters embedded in public radio stations, plus one roving reporter who travels the region, sometimes by bike — more on that later.

“During the pandemic, we made all of our content free to smaller, community radio stations that don’t have a news budget,” says Concannon. “We also shared it with small newspapers, and we’ve continued that.” Small affiliate stations who can’t afford a reporter but want access to the bureau’s content pay fees on a sliding scale. “We’re really trying to get the content out, we’re all about collaboration and sharing.” Public land management, conservation, the environment, the fossil fuel industry, Western culture, mental health (“we have more suicides in this region than any other part of the country”) — these are some of the topics Concannon’s reporters cover. With the bureau now going into its fourth year, and getting nearly “100% carriage,” Concannon says that she and her team are finding their niche, content-wise.

Read the full article about radio news by Rachel del Valle at NiemanLab.