More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About KEXP

There's a great article in the Seattle Weekly (not a typo) this week about Seattlest's favorite little radio station that shines just a little bit of light into the previously dim corners of the station's management. You know about their DJs, their playlists, their events, their membership drives and their website. Did you know that KEXP is actually owned by someone, though? Actually, Seattlest did know that. We knew that the station belonged to the University of Washington, but it was still interesting for us to see the names of all the governing board and advisory council members. Pillars of the community one and all.

The main point of conflict that writer Nina Shapiro builds this KEXP business profile around is the expansion into Tacoma and the financial strain that it put on the station. Ok, even the most uneducated of observers could have spotted the KXOT fiasco as a trouble spot from a mile away. However, we'd like to point out that this uneducated observer did spot the KXOT fiasco a mile away and posted about it here a month ago:

We don't pretend to know enough about the inner workings of KEXP to deliver any actual facts here, but it seems apparent that a battle has been waged on the inside of KEXP pitting geographic, FM expansion vs the internets

So we'd like to thank the Weekly for learning a few things about the inner workings of KEXP and delivering actual facts. Thanks for picking up our slack, guys.

From the article "The Expensive Expansion of KEXP" :

Three governing board members, including Chair Ron Johnson, and Nordstrom, the advisory council's president, say they did not know that all the directors were against taking over KXOT. But Johnson, UW vice president for computing and communications, says Mara had indicated that the deal "was not necessarily a popular thing, and that we had to decide whether the risk was worth it."

The board, along with Mara, decided it was. "These frequencies are almost never available," Johnson explains. Since deregulation in the 1990s, available radio frequencies have been snapped up. Says Johnson: "We had with KXOT a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."