CHIRP: Chicago Independent Radio Project

Posted by Michael A. on April 7, 2008 around 8am

To kick off our monthly spotlight on active members of the Chicago Independent Radio Project, we sat down for a conversation with Vice President Jenny Lizak. As well as being the chair of CHIRP’s Legislative Committee, Jenny is the Head Publicist for one of Chicago’s premier independent music venues, the Metro and Smart Bar, and co-anchor of the Women on Women Music Program. In a noisy bagel shop on the north side, we briefly pinned down the ever-busy Jenny on her lunch break to discuss her position with CHIRP, her passion for community radio and her recent trip to Washington, DC on behalf of the organization.

CHIRP: What is your position with the Chicago Independent Radio Project?

Jenny Lizak: I am the Vice President of CHIRP and chair of the Legislative Committee.

C: Why do you feel qualified for this position? And why do you feel you were elected for the position?

JL: I was part of a group of people who previously worked at a community radio station called WLUW, and we have all sort of known each other for a long time and worked together on a community station that was achieving some of the similar goals of what we hope to do with CHIRP. So, I think that’s how we all came together and founded it. Why I assume they elected me Vice President is that they know I work really hard, have a lot of heart and have a big mouth.

C: What is your experience in radio and the low-power FM (LPFM) movement?

JL: I’ve been a volunteer for WLUW since I was a freshman in college; so that was in 1996, twelve years. My relationship with WLUW has lasted longer than any job I’ve ever had, any relationship I’ve ever had, most friendships I’ve had, so obviously I feel very strongly about the importance of community radio. I was a DJ; I was the Promotions Director when I was a student; I’ve done publicity stuff, but most recently I’ve been doing the Women on Women Music Program, which is dedicated to female artists and feminist news.

C: Well what do you do outside of CHIRP? Where do you work? What are your career goals?

JL: I’m the publicist for Metro and Smart Bar, an independent music venue and nightclub in Chicago. And I also do a lot of volunteer work with political groups – Barack Obama’s campaign, other different referendums as they come about – and I am a contributing writer to UR Chicago Magazine.

C: Have you always been interested in publicist work?

JL: Funny you should ask. I have been coming to Metro for years, since I was a teenager, as most teenagers in Chicago who love music have, and I didn’t realize – I don’t think – that you could actually have a career working in music unless you are a musician, which I am not really. I took some piano lessons, but that’s about as far as I went. When I started working at WLUW and I became Promotions Director, part of my job was to call music venues and ask them for ticket giveaways for the radio station. In the process of that, I built several relationships with people who worked at the venues. One day, Zach – who was the publicity person over at the Metro at the time – was like, ‘hey Jenny, do you ever want an internship?’ And I said, ‘Oh… you can intern?’ So, I got my internship at Metro, and that’s where I learned the music business and decided that I would love to be a publicist. Then I worked my way up from an intern to the Head of Publicity.

C: How long have you been doing that now?

JL: I’ve been working at Metro for eight years, and I interned for about a year before that.

C: How different is it being on the venue side of things than the radio side as far as promotions?

JL: It’s interesting; there are a lot of similarities actually. It’s not that different. I think that a community radio station or a college radio station is very similar to a place like Metro, which is an independently owned small business. If I was working for Clear Channel or something like that maybe it would be very different, or if I was working for Q101, that would be very different. For some place like Metro, and in general all small and independent music venues, it’s important to have community outlets because the artists that play there are not getting played anywhere else other than small stations. I think there is a really good partnership there, and I think that’s partly the reason why my boss hired me because he knew that I understood how that worked and he was a fan of WLUW.

C: So is this why you believe so strongly in low-power FM?

JL: I think low-power FM is one of the best things that has happened in the communications field in the last ten years. It’s perhaps one of the only positive things that has happened in the last ten years. I think that low-power FM is a part of the solution to media consolidation. Obviously we all know that it is continuing to grow in a time when most Americans say that they are opposed to further consolidation, so that’s a problem. But I think low-power FM helps solves some of that by allowing the community to hear a station reflect who they are and also by allowing the community to get involved as well. It’s not just about listening to the stories, but it’s about community members becoming part of the station and saying ‘here is my story, teach me how to use the equipment and I’ll tell it.’ So I think that’s why low-power FM is so important.

C: As the chair of the Legislative Committee, what have you seen happen on the political side of this progression?

JL: I’ve done a lot of activism and political volunteering in my life – basically my entire life because my parents are involved in politics too. This is probably the most interesting thing I’ve ever worked on, because I have never seen things move in such a positive direction as quickly as I have with the Local Community Radio Act. When we first started CHIRP, we began to collect letters of support that people would send to their Congress-people and to the FCC asking them to expand low-power FM, particularly in Chicago. We found that first of all, people were more than willing to write those letters, which isn’t always the case when you have different political issues. Not everyone is willing to put their name down to anything. We found overwhelming support from people from all walks of like that said, ‘yes, this is a great thing.’ Shawn Campbell [President and founder of CHIRP] and I were able to go to Washington, DC as part of Low-Power FM Leadership Days and lobby on Capitol Hill, which was a very interesting experience and something I had never done before. First we met with staff members of the FCC, and sort of presented to them our situation, along with other low-power FM advocates from around the country. And they were very receptive to it, which the FCC isn’t always very receptive to everybody’s ideas. So that was a very great experience because we could tell them directly like, ‘this is how this affects us.’ You need to expand this to cities if you want to help us, otherwise we’re just sitting here. I think that we made them understand it in perhaps a way they had not thought of before. And that afternoon we went to Capitol Hill and met with staffers for Senator Durbin, Senator Obama, Congresswoman Schakowsky and Congressman Lipinksi. In each of those meetings we had very positive experiences, which again I think is not necessarily always the case when you are lobbying. As a result we were able to get both Senator Durbin and Senator Obama to sign on as co-sponsors of the Local Community Radio Act, and Representative Schakowsky has already been one of the co-sponsors in the House for many months and was very supportive of us. She even said some very nice words about us in the Chicago Tribune, so she was very excited we were able to meet with her and thank her, and she promised to help get more people in the House to sign on. So we had a really good experience. It reminded me that this is what democracy is supposed to be like: I ask you to do something, and you say yes. So we are very hopeful with the chances of the bill.

C: Have you met with any similar coalitions that are as well attempting to push this through?

JL: We have. We were in Washinton, DC for the Low-Power FM Leadership Days; it was organized by the Prometheus Radio Project, who are full time organizers for low-power FM across the country. That’s what they do: they will give you advice and they will help you and support you in every way they can down to physically coming and helping you build your antenna when you actually get approved. They are great people, and organized this day. They brought us in contact with a number of low-power FM advocates from across the country, and we met all of these people from vastly different walks of life. It was very interesting to see everybody in one room talking about it and lobbying for it. Knowing that we are not the only people who want that, and people have done it in other places, and that it’s doable for us. We met with people from Radio Free Nashville, who worked for nine years to get their station, and they were very supportive of what we’re doing. They do a similar thing with music on their station that we would like to perhaps explore with CHIRP concerning local music. We met with a gentleman who started a low-power FM station on the Pasqual Indian Tribe Reservation in Arizona. He told us how literally transformed the lives of the people on that reservation… so much so, that there is actually a group of senior citizens who live in the retirement home on the reservation that now have decided they want their own station too. And they are going to apply for another license so they can have two stations on the reservation and one can just be run by the seniors. Part of it that which is really cool is that they are going to speak in the traditional language and try to pass it along. We met a guy from Alabama who does a station through his church, where they play old time gospel music that doesn’t get played any place else. We just met a lot of people from across the country with very different political backgrounds and very different beliefs and musical interests and perspectives, but everybody agreed at how much this would help. It was a very, very interesting and quite inspiring experience.

C: For Chicagoans, what can they do to get involved in CHIRP, especially on the legislative side of things?

JL: Of course, we are always looking for people to join CHIRP as members. They can go to chicagoindieradio.org to find out more information on our meetings and such. In terms of legislation, there are two things that we need to have done. First we need to have the Local Community Radio Act passed in Congress. Both of the Senators in Illinois have signed on as co-sponsors, and that’s a pretty great achievement because we are the only state that has that. We need to work on our representatives in the House. So we need people who live in districts where the House representative has not co-sponsored the bill to write to them about that. You can find those letters on chicagoindieradio.org. The second thing that we need is people to write to the FCC, because after the bill passes, we still need the FCC to change the rules so that they would prioritize new local low-power FM stations over translators – which are basically repeating signals of distant broadcasts. So for example in Chicago, there are twelve translators that are repeating the same signal from a church in Montana. We would like the FCC to prioritize new local stations over just repeating distant broadcasts. So we need people to write to the FCC, and you can find the link to that on our website.

C: And what about people interested nationally?

JL: They can still go to our website, since it’s the same links, and they can just adopt it for their own town. We do need people who are interested across the nation to write letters to their Congress-people too, because it can’t be something that just happens in Chicago, it’s federal legislation and it’s something that is going to benefit people from coast to coast. It’s really important that if you are interested in low-power FM and you are reading this from outside of Chicago, find out first is there a low-power FM in your community and get involved with them. If there is not, see if there is anybody looking to form one, and get involved with them. This bill could open up potentially a thousand new stations, so there will be a lot of opportunity. If you can’t find anyone looking to do it in your community, get some of your friends together and form a group and build your own station.