The National Campus and Community Radio Association/L'Association nationale des radios étudiantes et communautaires (NCRA/ANREC) is a non-profit organization of campus radio and community radio stations in Canada.
Campus radio is a type of radio station that is run by the students of a college, university or other educational institution. Programming may be exclusively by students, or may include programmers from the wider community in which the radio station is based. Sometimes campus radio stations are operated for the purpose of training professional radio personnel, sometimes with the aim of broadcasting educational programming, while other radio stations exist to provide an alternative to commercial broadcasting or government broadcasters.
Community radio is a radio service offering a third model of radio broadcasting in addition to commercial and public broadcasting. Community stations serve geographic communities and communities of interest. They broadcast content that is popular and relevant to a local, specific audience but is often overlooked by commercial or mass-media broadcasters. Community radio stations are operated, owned, and influenced by the communities they serve. They are generally nonprofit and provide a mechanism for enabling individuals, groups, and communities to tell their own stories, to share experiences and, in a media-rich world, to become creators and contributors of media.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres, making it the world's second-largest country by total area. Canada's southern border with the United States, stretching some 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world's longest bi-national land border. Its capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. As a whole, Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its land area being dominated by forest and tundra. Consequently, its population is highly urbanized, with over 80 percent of its inhabitants concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, with 70% of citizens residing within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the southern border. Canada's climate varies widely across its vast area, ranging from arctic weather in the north, to hot summers in the southern regions, with four distinct seasons.
It works closely with other regional, national, and international radio organizations to: provide developmental materials and networking services to its members, represent the interests of the sector to government (particularly the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)) and other agencies, and promote public awareness and appreciation for community radio in Canada. Since 1981, it has affected changes to national radio policy, helped lower tariffs affecting radio stations, and has helped stations open doors while preventing others from closing. Core initiatives include GroundWire, Dig Your Roots, !earshot, Women’s Hands and Voices, the Community Radio Fund of Canada, sector-wide listservs, and an annual radio conference. The NCRA recognizes the cultural and social diversity of the Canadian population and is committed to facilitating the expression of this diversity and vitality within the campus and community radio broadcasting sector.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is a public organization in Canada with mandate as a regulatory agency for broadcasting and telecommunications. It was created in 1976 when it took over responsibility for regulating telecommunication carriers. Prior to 1976, it was known as the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, which was established in 1968 by the Parliament of Canada to replace the Board of Broadcast Governors. Its headquarters is located in the Central Building of Les Terrasses de la Chaudière in Gatineau, Quebec.
Community radio in Canada is a legally defined broadcasting category governed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). It is distinct from the other two categories, commercial broadcasting, and public broadcasting. Community radio can be considered a subcategory of alternative media. Community radio exists worldwide and is often broadly similar around the world, however, it can have variations in the government regulations that they are required to follow, the national or regional contexts in which its developed and the specific culture, goals or methods they adhere to.
Dig Your Roots/Découvre tes racines is a Canadian series of compilation albums, released by the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA/ANREC) in the 2000s to promote new and emerging artists. The project was launched in 2002, utilizing development funding that Corus Entertainment provided to the NCRA/ANREC as part of a benefits package relating to a major radio acquisition transaction.
The head office of the NCRA/ANREC is located in Ottawa. A majority of English-language campus and community radio stations in Canada are members of the NCRA.
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It stands on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec; the two form the core of the Ottawa–Gatineau census metropolitan area (CMA) and the National Capital Region (NCR). As of 2016, Ottawa had a city population of 964,743 and a metropolitan population of 1,323,783 making it the fourth-largest city and the fifth-largest CMA in Canada.
History
In February 1981, the first National Campus Radio Conference (NCRC) was held in Ottawa, hosted by CKCU. At that conference, the National Campus/Community Radio Organization (NCRO) was formed to exchange ideas, share experiences, publish a regular newsletter, and work on networks to promote campus radio across Canada. In August 1983, NCRC delegates voted to formalize the structure of the NCRO further and to establish a volunteer office to carry out a variety of services for member stations. The office initially operated from CKCU-FM, at Carleton University in Ottawa. That year the Alternative Radio News Service, a regular mailout of alternative news and information to campus and community stations, was started at CKMS-FM at the University of Waterloo.
CKCU-FM is a Canadian community-based campus radio station, broadcasting at 93.1 FM in Ottawa, and offering live and archived on-demand audio streams from its website. The station broadcasts 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Carleton University is a public comprehensive university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, a private, non-denominational evening college to serve veterans returning from World War II, the institution was chartered as a university by the provincial government in 1952 through the The Carleton University Act. The legislation was subsequently amended in 1957 to give the institution its current name. The university moved to its current campus in 1959, and would expand rapidly throughout the 1960s amid broader efforts by the provincial government to increase support to post-secondary institutions and expand access to higher education.
CKMS-FM, branded as Radio Waterloo, is a Canadian community radio station, broadcasting at 102.7 FM in Waterloo, Ontario.
In the early years, the NCRO published a monthly newsletter and alternative album chart. It also made presentations to the CRTC on a number of issues relating to community radio in Canada, including efforts to reduce content restrictions the CRTC had placed on the limited form of commercial advertising allowed on campus and community stations at the time. The organization was also actively involved in assisting the growing number of campus-based radio groups applying for FM radio licenses in the early 1980s.
In July 1986 the NCRO was incorporated as the National Campus and Community Radio Association Inc./L'Association nationale de radios étudiantes et communautaires Inc. (NCRA/ANREC). In the early 1990s, there was a national office and executive director for a short period of time, but due to lack of stable funding, among other problems, the office closed after less than one year. In February 2002, a new office was formed in Montreal with a national coordinator, which moved to Ottawa in May 2005, where it currently operates.
Chart and !earshot
The Canadian music magazine Chart was founded as an internal NCRA/ANREC publication; when it incorporated as an independent newsstand title, the NCRA began publishing !earshot, which is a regular supplement in Exclaim!. Many campus and community radio stations continue to file airplay charts with both publications.
Exclaim! is a monthly Canadian music magazine that features in-depth coverage of new music across all genres with a special focus on Canadian and cutting-edge artists. Content is based on the monthly print publication, which publishes 9 issues per year, distributing over 103,000 copies to over 2,600 locations across Canada. The magazine has an average of 361,200 monthly readers. Their website, exclaim.ca, has an average of 675,000 unique visitors a month.
Dig Your Roots
In 2001, after Corus Entertainment, a major broadcasting company in Canada, bought out a number of radio stations across Canada, the CRTC required that they put a total of 6% of the assets from this transfer of ownership towards artist development. (This is a requirement for all transfers of ownership for radio broadcasting companies in Canada.) After a year of lobbying and negotiations, the money was given by Corus Entertainment to the NCRA/ANREC to start up and maintain the Dig Your Roots/Découvre tes racines project. Dig Your Roots concluded in 2007.
Corus Entertainment is a Canadian mass media and broadcasting company. Formed in 1999 as a spin-off from Shaw Communications, it is headquartered at Corus Quay in Toronto, Ontario, and has prominent holdings in the radio, publishing, and television industries. Corus Entertainment's voting majority is held by the company's founder JR Shaw and his family, and a 40% stake of Corus stock is owned by Shaw Communications.
Dig Your Roots/Découvre tes racines aimed to develop and promote new Canadian music from the four corners of this culturally diverse and musically rich country. It was an exploration of independent talent from the Canadian underground. Its scope was wide ranging and focuses on original forms of music that are currently under-represented in the Canadian music scene. The project featured a series of genre-specific compilation albums that coincided with live concert simulcast broadcasts. For each compilation, there was: a nationwide call for submissions; an online promotion involving artist MP3s; an esteemed panel to choose the compilation artists; and a nationwide "tour" of the compilation. Rather than artists going out on the road, this tour involved live coast-to-coast broadcasts of regional concerts on radio stations across the country. Compilations were: Hip-Hop (2003); Spoken Word (2004); Electronic Dance/Danse électronique (2004); Roots (2005); Aboriginal/Autochthones (2006); and Experimental Jazz project (2007).
National Campus and Community Radio Conference
The NCRC is an annual national gathering of community-oriented radio broadcasters who provide alternative radio to a diverse audience. It has been offered every summer since 1981, and it is one of the core activities of the NCRA/ANREC. It is usually hosted by a different radio station in different locations each year. During the conference, delegates attend workshops, seminars, the annual general meeting of the NCRA (during which board members are elected, the treasurer's report is approved, the business of the association is accomplished by the membership, and the next conference's host radio station selected), seminars, live shows, and feature presentations. To celebrate 25 years of late nights, learning, and valuable networking, the NCRA/ANREC itself hosted the silver anniversary edition of the conference in Ottawa.
National Women in Radio Conference
Up until 2012, a Women in Radio Conference was held during the national conference. This was replaced with the Equity Radio Day to be held on a weekend during the conference.
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