The project is one of 22 across the United States sharing $22.7 million
to meet the urgent challenges local newsrooms face.

7/16/25 – Announced today by Press Forward, Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) will receive $1 million to create a shared engineering staff, providing the network’s 21 community radio stations across four states with access to mission-critical broadcast engineers, thanks to this national initiative to reimagine local news. 

The funding is part of Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure, which is providing $22.7 million to 22 projects that address the urgent challenges local newsrooms face today, including this effort by RMCR to address a shortage of broadcast engineers throughout the Mountain West region.

Community radio stations in the Mountain West face a shortage of broadcast engineers due to retirements and limited new talent. As technology ages and natural disasters increase, access to reliable radio is critical. Small stations can’t afford full-time engineers, despite ongoing repair and maintenance needs for live radio and studio engineering systems.

The RMCR network of member stations is responsible for the maintenance of 70 unique tower sites, in addition to transmitter and repeater sites, and collectively manage over 67 studios where live newscasts, musical performances, community affairs programming, and other radio production takes place.

“This engineering initiative aims to celebrate a collective approach to a critical problem, which will increase our engineering capacity, grow each member station’s ability to resolve technical problems efficiently, and reduce deferred maintenance and broadcast interruptions,” stated Breeze Richardson, President of the Rocky Mountain Community Radio coalition. 

With this major investment, RMCR will create a pilot program to share engineering resources across its 21 Mountain West stations by hiring dedicated engineering staff to travel among stations, employ an administrator to coordinate scheduling and oversee program design, and create an equipment pool for emergency repairs in the event of equipment failure. Partnerships will strengthen talent development and career pathways through apprenticeship and station staff training to support the next generation of broadcast engineers.

Jennifer Ferro, CEO of KCRW in Los Angeles, reacted to the news, stating: “I commend RMCR’s thought leadership. They are highlighting how vital it is to maintain the knowledge base for our critical, physical infrastructure. KCRW launched an Engineering Apprentice Program two years ago to train up our next generation of engineers. RMCR is building on this idea with a collaborative model that other stations can emulate.” 

RMCR joins an impressive group of awardees, including recipients working to protect a free and independent press, ensure newsrooms have safety protocols in place, build mental health services to help reporters heal from trauma and burnout, and create legal resources to face challenges to their reporting. Others are strengthening newsrooms’ sustainability – tackling revenue and operations challenges so the field of local news can thrive long-term.

The full list of recipients is available online.

About Rocky Mountain Community Radio
Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) is a coalition of more than 21 non-commercial radio stations in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Most of our stations serve rural western communities, and each represents and reflects the unique and diverse nature of their own community through local news reporting and other culturally-relevant music and public affairs radio and digital programming. In addition to producing local news for each individual station, RMCR member stations collaborate to produce news reports and stories that connect our communities. The coalition was first formed in the late 1980s to share content among independent, community radio stations all throughout the Western Slope.

About Press Forward
Press Forward is a nationwide movement to strengthen our democracy by revitalizing local news and information. Press Forward’s growing coalition of funders has committed to invest more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news and scale infrastructure the sector needs to thrive. Press Forward is housed at The Miami Foundation.