The Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) has launched Frequency, a new platform showcasing local news from campus, community, and Indigenous radio stations across the country, along with Fréquence, a companion site focused on francophone news.
Introduced on World Radio Day, the site’s origins lie in funding from the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), aimed at supporting journalism in under-served communities. Content produced by LJI journalists is being made available to media organizations free of charge through the use of a Creative Commons license.
With 48 anglophone contributors and 30 reporters contributing francophone content, the sites primarily feature short and feature length audio reportage spanning local politics, health, housing, sports, and culture, among other topics.
The sites are also home to the CRFC’s Viewpoints and Points de Vue podcasts, a half-hour weekly overview of what’s happening in communities across the country in a 30-minute format that airs on 70 community radio stations.
The CRFC told Broadcast Dialogue in an email that many community stations have been impacted by Meta’s move last summer to begin blocking links to Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram, saying that it hopes the news sites will offer “strength in numbers and increased visibility of the incredible work being done on the ground at all of these radio stations.”
“Some stations also do not have a website that is capable of hosting daily news content and this allows the content to be heard other than live over the airwaves,” the organization added.
With the hope of renewal funding, the CRFC says it’s looking to expand the scope of the sites to share more community radio station content with a national audience.
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