CPB Compliance

LOCAL CONTENT AND SERVICES REPORT 2023

1. Describe your overall goals and approach to address identified community issues, needs and interests through your station’s vital local services, such as multiplatform, long and short-form content, digital and in-person engagement, education services, community information, partnership support and other activities, and audiences you reached or new audiences.

In 2023, we worked towards two goals: use of digital platforms to grow our audiences and outreach to local high schools and universities with opportunities for internships in training and education in journalism and audio production. As a result of our efforts, we hosted our first summer journalism intern from the University of New Mexico making this our second intern from a New Mexico based higher education institution. We also hosted our second audio production intern from Santa Fe Community College. We are actively addressing the regional news desert in our rural region by emphasizing training and education by providing a needed partner to surrounding schools to help educate and train students in reporting and audio production. Our listenership appreciates in-depth interviews on a variety of topics with an emphasis on dialogue around cultural enrichment.

KSFR also supported the emergence of new volunteer voices in our community through offering them air-time for a public affairs and locally curated shows. The staff of KSFR worked diligently to post audio from talk shows to our website, providing our hosts with links to an archive of their work. This work helps volunteer hosts promote their work, gives digital listeners the chance to engage asynchronously, and centers our original audio content. The station airs weekly talk radio from four new hosts and weekly music from six new hosts who are all volunteers from the local community. At this time, 70% of our shows are all locally produced by KSFR.

KSFR management also prioritized in-person engagement, toward the goal of strengthening community ties and attracting new patrons. This engagement took the form of a remote broadcast from the city center, booths at charity events, a presence at a summer concert series, and holiday gatherings for the community volunteers.

2. Describe key initiatives and the variety of partners with whom you collaborated, including other public media outlets, community nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, the business community, teachers and parents, etc. This will illustrate the many ways you’re connected across the community and engaged with other important organizations in the area.

Key initiatives included: Participating in community events and reaching out to schools to talk about radio broadcasting to lay the foundation for establishing a school feeder program to KSFR for audio production and journalism.

Our partnerships to help promote the activities of non-profits who are associated with significant arts and cultural events in the city such as Lensic 360 Summer concerts, Pancakes on the Plaza and Santa Fe Indian Market who all provide an economic lift to the City of Santa Fe where many sectors of the area benefit from these events. We are working with Santa Fe Community College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, University of New Mexico and local high schools to expose the students to broadcast journalism and audio production. We aim to collaborate with the Santa Fe Community College Film and Television Departments to grow capacity in content creation to be offered in 2024. These partnerships will support long-term goals of providing educational opportunities through the station’s assets of personnel and technology.

3. What impact did your key initiatives and partnerships have in your community? Describe any known measureable impact, such as increased awareness, learning or understanding about particular issues. Describe indicators of success, such as connecting people to needed resources or strengthening conversational ties across diverse neighborhoods. Did a partner see an increase in requests for related resources? Please include any direct feedback from a partner(s) or from a person(s) served.

Here is a testimonial from one of our 2023 summer partners that is a good illustration of KSFR’s impact from one of our key initiatives. "Pancakes on the Plaza has been an annual Fourth of July celebration for forty years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Santa Fe charities. I was the chair of the event in 2023 and spent a lot of time reaching out to local businesses for contributions and in-kind assistance. But I didn't have to reach out to the staff of our local public radio station, KSFR; they reached out to us. Through its generous advance publicity about the event and live broadcasts from the Plaza during the event, KSFR helped us hit our volunteer recruitment target and attract the largest crowds anybody can ever recall seeing at the Plaza on the Fourth of July. Thanks, KSFR!" - Timothy Langley

There are more than 700 non-profits in Santa Fe - the state capitol of New Mexico. Because of this, KSFR partners with many civic organizations such as the Santa Fe Community Foundation, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, Santa Fe Extension Master Gardeners, to name a few, who we invite to have regular air-time to speak about what they do and how the the public can access the resources of these and other organizations who provide a public service.

4. Describe any efforts (e.g. programming, production, engagement activities) we have made to investigate and/or meet the needs of minority and other diverse audiences (including, but not limited to, new immigrants, people for whom English is a second language and illiterate adults) during Fiscal Year 2023, and any plans we made to meet the needs of these audiences during Fiscal year 2024. If you regularly broadcast in language other than English, please note the language broadcast.

Our locally produced programming relies on individual public affairs and music host/producers from the community who are a diverse group of people who help us identify the needs of groups within our listenership because of their active participation in civic organizations. For example, long running public affairs program, Nuestra America investigates workers’ issues, particularly Spanish-speaking and immigrant workers. Their most important programming this year concerned local organizing of oil and gas workers in the Permian Basin. This program airs primarily in English, with some bilingual conversations and some commentary in Spanish. Our weekly program, Barrier-Free Futures advocates for disabled and aging Americans, and is examining a national upward trend in incarceration of those with psychiatric disabilities. The show hosts publish transcripts of the episodes which are made available as links on our website. Transcripts make this show accessible to hard-of-hearing listeners.

Each year we conduct an audience survey through email that gives us a profile of some of our current listeners and their interests. We also access Google analytics reports from our website that provides us gender and age demographics and areas of general interest.

5. Assess the impact of CPB funding on our ability to serve our community. What we were able to do with our grant that we wouldn’t be able to do if we didn’t receive it.

Without CPB funding our local news and community outreach efforts would be impacted. The CPB funds helps fill in gaps in our funding that have kept the operations of KSFR afloat. We live in a city with many non-profit organizations all competing for the same bucket of monies and the CPB funds provide our station a unique resource that helps us provide a service that emanates to help those organizations who provide vital services to our region in addition to the daily, reliable education and information we provide for the general public.