Follow on Twitter
Email A Friend
Colin Beere wants letters, lots of letters, to support an application for a broadcasting licence for an access community radio station in Tauranga.
Access Radio BOP Charitable Trust has a transmitter and several possible locations; it just needs to provide over 100 letters in support from the Tauranga community.
Colin Beere needs 100 letters to gain the licence needed to operate access radio.
“I have put an application into the government, but they have come back and said I have to show the community will support it,” says Colin, the charitable trust’s acting chairman.
He has about 37 letters last count, including the support of Tauranga MP Simon Bridges and Mayor Stuart Crosby, plus the city’s ethnic council and a number of cultural societies and organisations.
The application resulted in the government sending the Access Radio BOP Charitable Trust about 300 pages of requests of what has to be done.
“A lot of it we were able to tick fairly quickly,” says Colin, “but we still have a couple of things to go, but we are just about there”.
A frequency has been allocated; they have a transmitter and some possible locations in the city’s central business district.
“We want to link up with the polytechnic and the university,” says Colin.
It’s a project Colin’s been working on for a couple of years now.
He originally hoped that Village Radio would step up to a more active community role.
“The old people don’t want to get involved with it, they just want to play scratchy old records, nostalgic music,” says Colin.
“We have had to reapply and get together another consortium and go that way.”
An access community radio station is a non-profit radio station run by,
for and about the community. That means any non-profit organisation or community group or service, school, church group, ethnic group social club is able to create their own programmes for broadcast to the community of Tauranga and across the Bay of Plenty. Access radio is in all the main centres of New Zealand except Tauranga.
“We are set to go in six months’ time – it will take about that for the paper work to get through.”
The station will operate on 50 per cent government funding, with the rest coming from the community.
A good model of a successful community radio station is the one in Hamilton, says Colin.
http://www.communityradio.co.nz/
“If you like the idea of a non-profit community radio station in Tauranga that you could be a part of, please send us a letter of support or even an expression of interest,” says Colin.
“It doesn’t have to be long, it just needs to be on letterhead and have a signature of someone representing your organisation.”
You could send a scanned copy of your letterhead indicating your support to artauranga@gmail.com
You can also post a letter to:
Access Radio BOP Charitable Trust Inc.
C/- 28 Bell Common Close
Bethlehem
Tauranga 3110
Or post to:
PO Box 10198 Bayfair, Mount Maunganui
If you have any questions at all please feel free to contact Colin on 027 531 1307
Or (07) 578 7336 after business hours or email colinbeere@xtra.co.nz
Example Letter One
Dear Colin,
I have noticed that you are looking for expressions of interest. On behalf of … (your interest group) in Bay of Plenty, we express an interest in producing programmes and broadcasting in order to express and inform the … (your interest group) in the Bay of Plenty of upcoming events.
I feel if we do this in accordance to the NZ standards authorities we will be able to inform the community about our organisation and detail dates that are important to us and also expand the knowledge of new Zealanders about … (your interest group) with our music and articles. We fully support this community initiative.
I hope we get the opportunity to help our community further.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us in the future.
Thanking you,
Posted on 11-02-2012 07:20 | By Locals
As the owner of Kiss-FM I want to encourage Colin Beere to create Access Radio. We need more diversity on the Bay’s airwaves and we attempted to work with Government in 2011 to achieve this outcome. We were not successful. So we wish Colin well. However there needs to be informed debate about local radio in the Bay and in particular Access Radio. Currently the economic climate and broadcasting environment is in decline. Independent stations have closed (BOP-FM, X105-FM, Pulzar-FM, Big-FM) within 12-18 months of launch finding the high Government imposed compliance costs, high overheads and declining advertising revenue killed off any hopes of sustainability. Mainstream independent radio is also struggling needing $43m of taxpayer support to pay licence fees last year and in the Bay 5 radio stations closed in 2011. The stations that have survived since new licences were issued in 2008 are all Access Radio stations. Why have they survived when others haven’t? Because they suck $2.4 million from the public purse annually. This figure will go up if Tauranga Access Radio is successful. Our estimates put such a venture between $150-300,000 to start with seeding money from NZ-on-Air and then running costs in excess of $200,000 annually. Where is that money coming from? The taxpayer. Access Radio is our view is worthy but costly. But it is an old format derived from a time when ethnic and community groups did not have access to the media. Facebook changed all that. These groups are now networking 24/7 globally and have no need for 60 minutes of airtime once a week on local minority interest radio. They can communicate ’by, for and about’ themselves with far more ease using social networking than they can on air. And they are doing just that! At the centre of the issue of who gets local licences and what format should be allowed to broadcast, is the 1989 Broadcasting Act. Our view is this legislation is well past its shelf life and it needs radical reform. The Act does not recognise the substantial changes in digital technology (making broadcasting simple/affordable for entry level broadcasters), changing listener preferences or the impact of the web on broadcast media. It is an old Act and it shows. The cost to broadcast is minimal - the cost to meet Government costs to broadcast is substantial. At Kiss-FM we said from the beginning we don’t want tax payer or ratepayer funding. We think a low overhead ’Pandora’ style model of local radio is sustainable. All we want is ’the air’ and the chance to stage a Pilot Project to build this new model of community radio. Whether or not Access Radio is viable, there are frequencies here that should be allocated for use to encourage musical and creative culture and heritage in the Bay. We have some of the finest musicians in the country and the turnout at Blake Park last weekend showed the level of support for our local musical taonga. Kiss-FM stood for these musicians right to be broadcast and to be heard on our own air. We feel any new station in the Bay needs to be independent of the taxpayer and it has to be valued by the community. As SunLive columnist Winston Watusi said in his appeal to MP Simon Bridges; " the Bay doesn’t need Access Radio, it needs music radio.." (November 4 2011 SunLive) Today Kiss-FM is an on-line station only and significantly, it is the only truly local station listed at Tunein.com http://tunein.com/search/?id=r101738&filter=live: We broadcast on-line still with the hope that the 1989 legislation will change in recognition of the changing times in which we live and broadcast. We need our own local MPs to stand up, be vocal and to be counted on this issue. This is our air, not Wellington’s. This is a political issue with a political solution. I challenge our MPs to work together to create a broadcast mandate and a solution for local community radio in the Bay. And while we hope fellow community broadcasters in the Bay find an easier road than Kiss-FM did, we do so also with the hope that the taxpayer is not the one footing the broadcast bill. Max Christoffersen www.kissfm.co.nz