Your Government, Up Close And Personal

(Fred Weinberg/The Penny Press) – We’ve been busy the past month.

As many of our regular readers know, we have had and continue to have extensive investments in Nevada radio.

Our newest project is KNNR, 1400AM in Sparks,Reno,Carson City.

This station was—to put it bluntly—a loser. To the best of our knowledge, it never made anyone a dime.

If you were in the area and happened to tune it in last weekend, you heard oral arguments from the United States Supreme Court. We were dialing in the audio links from our new studios to the transmitter, so there were some gaps, which is why we didn’t tell too many people—call it a soft launch.

The cases we picked were those argued recently over the Obamacare individual mandate, the Arizona immigration law, the “fleeting expletive” case involving Fox Television and the recent case involving the Nevada Ethics Commission.

When we launch the station for real, it is going to sound like a local version of C-SPAN.

(Comedians in our company have started calling it FREDSPAN, but I don’t think that’s a very catchy name.)

The idea here is that there are now so many radio stations available, at least one of them ought to concentrate on simply bringing you your government up close and personal.

Will it be boring?

Sometimes.

It’s hard to make a zoning battle interesting. Unless you happen to be the one who lives in a neighborhood where somebody wants to put an all night liquor store right next to your house.

On the other hand, an interim legislative finance committee raising taxes on you in between legislative sessions ought to be broadcast and rebroadcast until everybody has heard it and made up their mind one way or the other.

Our broadcast day will be a mix of state, county, city and Federal meetings, hearings, speeches and gatherings.

Let me be clear.

This isn’t about the left, the right, conservative, liberal, Republican or Democrat.

This is about sunshine, which is the best disinfectant.

We will have other radio stations in the metropolitan Reno market. They will probably be much more partisan in their approach.

But this one exists to inform and let the listener make up his or her own mind.

And now, a shameless commercial plug.

KNNR is a commercial station. We believe that there is a commercial market for what we are doing. Advertisers can support us in one of three ways.

They can buy commercial spots between the programs. Selling things is the most American of activities.

They can sponsor specific programs. If you like listening to oral arguments from the United States Supreme Court or the Nevada Supreme Court, you can, as an example, sponsor the show. Or the Reno City Council meeting, the Washoe County Commission meeting or anything else we cover.

And they can join Friends of 1400, a not for profit foundation set up to allow us to do programs and hire people which we might not otherwise be able to afford. More on that in a few weeks.

Our audience may not be huge, but we believe that they will be hugely influential. Think about it. The people who listen to this radio station will be people just like you—in fact, those of you who live in the area will probably be our first listeners. People who are involved in the community, who care about the world around them. Those people tend to be the exact group which advertisers want to reach.

We will also be available as a stream on the internet at out new website, 1400governmentwatch.com and we will, at that site, archive everything we broadcast.

We’re still putting the final touches on everything and, oh yes, still building the other radio stations as well. If I get to take my wife on a vacation this year it will probably be a very short one.

But I, and everybody who works with me, love what we do and this is going to be as much fun as you can have in this business—trying something new and making it work.

It is my personal definition of doing well by doing good.