Too Small to Mess With

Years ago, in Louisville, “people just didn’t understand this concept of having a radio station where people could just walk in and play what was interesting to them, or talk about what was on their mind,” Sharon Scott told me. “This was just totally radical.” Scott started ART-FM, otherwise known as WXOX 97.1 FM, in 2011, out of her family’s living room. Her husband, Sean Selby, a carpenter, helped put it together. She served as the general manager. Soon, their son pitched in with graphic design. Scott was surprised by the response among her neighbors, how “hungry they were,” she said, “for something like this that they never even knew existed.” ART-FM aired commentary from a World War II veteran named George who DJed until age ninety-eight; three women from Iran brought frontline news alongside recipes and language lessons; later, a Ukrainian DJ aired his soldier cousin’s dispatches from the war. The whole project was possible because ART-FM is a low-power community radio station, of which about two thousand exist across the country, operating at under a hundred watts and with a narrow broadcast range.

“It’s hard, with radio, to judge how effective you’re being, and how are you really, really reaching your community?” Scott said. But ART-FM has been such a success—during Give for Good Louisville, when area nonprofits compete to see who can get the most donors over a twenty-four-hour period, the station is consistently a top fundraiser—that Scott was eventually able to move into a real studio. She now works with around a hundred and twenty community DJs. In 2023, she quite literally wrote the book, Low Power for Dummies, on how these operations work—in part, she said, because there seemed not to be a wide understanding of low-power radio, its possibilities, or its practicalities. So much of that knowledge, she told me, “is just passed along, you know, from person to person, just like oral traditions.” Now low-power people tell her it’s their Bible.