On 'secret' radio stations nationwide, a decades-old news service has survived the move to digital
A few years ago the staff at Aftersight, a nonprofit radio service based in Boulder, Colorado, got an angry call from a man whose child was trying to watch Barney on PBS Kids.
“All we can hear is you guys reading the paper!” the man said.
His child had accidentally switched the audio channel on their TV, and the family had stumbled onto a form of broadcasting that, for the most part, remains hidden away by design: They had discovered a radio reading service.
When color television arrived in the United States, it quite literally transformed the way we saw the world. It was the product of many technological breakthroughs, but the one most relevant to our story is the sideband, or subcarrier: a modulated radio wave that can, in essence, carry more information on the same frequency. Color TV worked by sending a black and white picture in the main band of a frequency and a color picture in the sideband, and the two bands would then be recombined in the tubes of a color TV.
Radio reading services work on the same premise, except instead of pictures they transmit a radio broadcast. Where color TV brought more vibrant pictures to living rooms around the country, radio reading services, which are also called audio information services, have almost the opposite audience: every day, across the country, hundreds of volunteers read newspapers, magazines, and books on the radio for thousands of listeners with blindness or vision loss, bringing them access to local, national, and international news around the clock.
“I always tell folks we’re on super-secret radio stations,” said Bekah Jerde, executive director of Radio Talking Books Service, a reading service based in Omaha, Nebraska. She’s also the vice president and treasurer of the International Association of Audio Information Services (IAAIS) a collective of 39 audio information services that are mostly based in the U.S. (and one in Australia). The stations are “super-secret” because they are designed to be used by people with vision impairments and other disabilities that can make reading or turning pages difficult. Thanks to a provision in copyright law, copyrighted materials like books, magazines, and newspapers can be reproduced for free for the sake of accessibility.
The first radio reading service debuted in Minnesota in 1969 as a side-channel on KSJR — the birthplace of Minnesota Public Radio. That first “Radio Talking Book” schedule included two hours of the Minneapolis Tribune newspaper in the morning and two hours of the Saint Paul Dispatch in the evening, with readings from magazines and books in the intervening hours. More than 50 years later, the live morning newspaper reading — now from the Minnesota Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press — remains the service’s most popular programming.
Today there are 79 of the services across the country, many of which partner with local public radio or TV stations to carry their broadcast, hidden in a little side pocket of their airwaves. In the past, listeners who wanted to tune into those super-secret stations would have to send in an application for a radio that could pick up their signal or, as the man in Colorado learned, switch their audio language on certain TV channels. But streaming has come for the radio reading services, just as it has for TV.
“We went online three years ago, which did wonders for our listenership,” said Michael Benzin, executive director of the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading service in Buffalo, New York. “The big restriction we always had was that our listeners needed one of our radios, so we were managing a large inventory of radios, picking them up and dropping them off all the time. But now anybody with an internet connection can play our live feed on a tablet or a cell phone or a computer.”
The majority of the listeners for these services are over the age of 65 and have aged into vision loss or other disabilities that prevent them from reading the news on their own, Jerde told me. That means they often don’t know how to use technology like screen readers, which don’t play well with many websites anyway. The radio reading services provide their listeners with an experience that’s hard to replicate with a computer: reading a newspaper or magazine from cover to cover, including comics and grocery ads.
Many of them read local papers, because their listeners are interested in local news. But the local news downturn has forced the reading services to adjust their programming as well.
“We used to not be able to get through the entire paper,” Jerde said. “Most days now we’re supplementing [local papers] with things like the Wall Street Journal, because both of the local papers are owned by the same people so we get crossover in content.” When a cyberattack disrupted the operations of Lee Enterprises, the Niagara Frontier service had to figure out how to fill an extra hour of time after the Buffalo News delivered a smaller paper than usual.
For many people, especially in rural areas with poor internet access, the reading services’ radio and TV broadcasts are essential lifelines to the outside world. Some of the services even allow people to listen by dialing a phone number.
“Part of our goal is to go out in different parts of the state, especially the rural areas, and ask how people are getting their information,” said Kim Ann Wardlow, executive director of Aftersight and president of the IAAIS. “We’re trying to figure out if there are other things we should be reading to best serve folks who are seeking hyperlocal information that isn’t necessarily in the traditional newspaper anymore.” Both Aftersight and the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service have started offering programs in Spanish, for example — something that has been helped by the internet, which allows them to create multiple radio and podcast feeds for different languages.
Every service in the network is tiny, often run on a shoestring (usually) nonprofit budget: Benzin, in addition to making programming decisions, told me that part of his job as executive director includes mowing the lawn, vacuuming, and washing the windows at the Niagara Frontier service’s office. IAAIS has a program share, similar to the Public Radio Exchange, that allows member stations to share content to help fill the schedule. And while each has its own ways to raise funds, Wardlow, Benzin, and Jerde all told me one thing is the same across the country: the volunteers are incredibly committed to their work.
“I’ve got volunteers who’ve been coming in every week for thirty years,” Benzin told me. “I’ve been working in the nonprofit world for going on 40 years, and I’ve never had a volunteer base this dedicated.”
The impacts of the services reach far beyond keeping listeners up to date with the news, Benzin told me. “Our listeners are more engaged in their community,” Benzin said. “A lot of people with visual impairments can become shut-in, and we found that people who listen to their local publications tend to get out and do more. They’re more engaged in their neighborhood. They vote, which obviously is important, and they’re more confident.”
That creates a deep-seated sense of community. During the pandemic, the staff at the Niagara Frontier service would often check in with listeners to see if they needed anything from the local health department or doctors. And volunteers, Wardlow said, transitioned easily to recording from home — even though they had some initial trepidation about learning the technological ropes.
That dedication from both staff and volunteers makes Jerde feel confident there will always be a place for services like theirs, even as AI tools like automated text-to-speech on articles or Google’s NotebookLM, which can auto-generate a podcast out of documents, change the broader news landscape.
“The challenge is staying current,” Jerde said. “I do believe that even though newspapers are shrinking, there is always going to be news media somewhere. Computer-generated voices have been around forever, and they’ve yet to work us out of jobs. But I think that any sort of accessibility is amazing and great. Everybody needs something a little bit different; it isn’t one size fits all.”