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2008 Studs Terkel Community Media Awards Winner, Radio Arte
 When some of your audience grew up listening to radio in Mexico City and others were raised in Little Village--not to mention all parts in between--you can expect different expectations from different listeners. How do you serve them all?
For General Manager Silvia Rivera and the staff at Radio Arte (celebrating its 10th year as an arm of the National Museum of Mexican Art), part of the answer is to keep on rocking--but another part is to provide a richer mix of news that stays faithful to the station's legacy of training Chicago's Latino youth in broadcast production and community journalism skills.
Programs like "First Voice/Primera Voz," "Homofrecuencia" and "Sin Papeles/Undocumented," as well as collaborations with other broadcasters are strengthening the station's national leadership in Latino public radio.
"We've had tremendous programming changes in the past two years," says Rivera, who said the station had to balance the loyalties of listeners who value the station's play of "rock en español" and fans of freestyle or hiphop that the station has also aired. "On top of that, injecting public affairs programming… [at first] it just seemed like we couldn't make anybody happy. So we went through a turbulent time for a couple of months, even internally."
The low-power station broadcasts at 90.5 FM to a small geographic area in the heart of Chicago's densest Spanish-speaking community--Pilsen and Little Village--on the near Southwest Side.
Rivera thought those residents who speak little English needed and deserved greater access to news and public affairs--the kind of shows public radio has made part of many radio listeners' regular diet. But she did not want to lose the traits that keep the station popular among younger Latinos who like the music and see the station as a place to learn broadcast and production skills. Many come to get into radio, and alumni of the training program work all over town. "Like half of Univision Radio's staff is from Radio Arte," says First Voice producer Dulce Mora.
Dulce, Homofrecuencia producer Tania Unzueta, program director Carlos Mendez, recently departed training director Irene Tostado and other instructors work with students to help them merge skills with what they know about their neighborhoods.
"We want them to have the facts and to have them know it's OK to use what they know and where they came from," Dulce says. When a police officer was taken off the street after a recent alleged DUI incident in which he ran over a young Latino, the story received intense coverage from Radio Arte students who knew the young man in the case. A student journalist's work for Homofrecuencia blossomed on into a report that also ran in La Raza newspaper on "Latinos on the Downlow." The article received a 2008 "Best Article" national media nomination from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation--and Homofrecuencia won special recognition from the Alliance for its news and public-affairs content.
News on Radio Arte tends to come with first-person stories and discussion of major issues, the staff say. Adding more news, they add, is an important way to serve their community. Another way the station is beefing up its public affairs is by reaching out to like-minded broadcasters across the country--such as New York-based Hispanic Information and Telecommunication Network and California-based Radio Bilingue. The three broadcasters collaborated in January on simulcasting pre-election coverage, for example. Radio Arte is also creating a new program in which it will partner with the museum and a local community group to produce stories about immigrants that promote public health.
"The Spanish-speaking community is under-resourced in terms of news," Silvia says. "While we have not lost that spirit or core value [of being] youth driven, we want to be more encompassing for the whole community. We want to give our community a taste of everything."
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