Banff Centre Radio is a week away from launching and it’s promising to be the little radio station that could.
With a staff of six, a newly refurbished studio and a mandate carried over from its predecessor, Banff Centre Radio is promising to continue what Parks Radio offered, with high-quality visitor information and programs that will appeal to locals, as well as visitors.
Banff Centre Radio offers 101.1 FM Banff Centre Radio and 103.3 FM Radio Banff Centre (the English and French stations were ported over from Park Radio) and on Monday (June 23) it hits the airwaves at 8 a.m. with a live one-hour morning show.
“We’re technically launching three networks and one Internet channel. The thinking around how to make that work sustainably and be engaging is programming a day’s worth of content that gets remixed through the week,” said Banff Centre Radio senior producer Dominic Girard.
“We’re a servant of three masters. We’re serving the community. We’re serving the three million plus visitors that come through every year and we’re serving The Banff Centre as well.”
Later this year, Girard said Banff Centre Radio plans to launch Banff Centre Radio Online and 107.9 FM, which will focus on arts and ideas at The Banff Centre and in the Bow Valley.
“107.9 is a brand new station and that is really an arts, culture, ideas, mountain culture station with lots of music, but we haven’t touched that yet. Ultimately, the stream I really want to launch is a curated stream, we pull out all of the local and hyper local information and create a 24-hour stream of storytelling from the Bow Valley that appeals to anyone around the world,” he said.
Along with the live morning show, Girard said the radio station is offering five shows hosted by volunteers. These shows include Good Sport with longtime Banff resident and the Centre’s director of customer service, Jim Olver; Base Camp, a program about climbing for climbers with Brandon Pullan, senior editor of Gripped: Canada’s Climbing Magazine and, as part of a partnership with Banff Public Library, Writer’s Range with Mojo Anderson.
“That is part of the appeal, it’s a community radio station, so we want the community to come and make radio. When we launch, the programming is coming from us almost exclusively with volunteers helping to produce content with us and to host them.
“Eventually, we want the community to come to us with ideas and we’ll help foster those ideas and be a proper community radio,” he said.
Just as Park Radio did, Banff Centre Radio intends to offer tourist information (which is the mandate of the French station) in keeping with the station’s mandate to serve Banff National Park, without necessarily duplicating what is already out there.
“So what does tourist information mean to me? There is some Visitor 101 stuff that you want to tell the tourists again and again, but now tourist information means understanding the place you are in in a human way: who lives here, who works here, how we engage with the space and what makes it so special. That’s why we do a show about athletes,” he said.
Girard said to look for a definitive list of programs this month and he’s hoping, as well, community listeners will send him feedback, information and ideas. It could be as simple as suggesting a guest or a more complex idea like pitching a show.
This can be done at [email protected].
Being a community radio station offers Banff and the surrounding area great promise as it offers an environment for experimentation and innovation and that in turn allows Banff Centre Radio to offer unique programming while operating within the station’s mandate of serving visitors to the national park.
“We’re going to make a few mistakes,” Girard said. “It is going to be rough around the edges, which has great appeal to me because I want this to be a story that everyone engages with. It’s new, it’s untested, it’s experimental.
“We’re on a campus where it’s about innovation, creativity and experimentation, so I do look forward to the opportunity when good failures happen. We tried that, super weird, let’s not do that again, but it failed for the right reasons. It was nice if we could one of those every now and then,” he said.
“If we aren’t pushing ourselves as hard as we can to try stuff, then what are we here to do?”
