Rocky Mountain Community Radio

Category: News

  • Rocky Mountain Community Radio receives national Press Forward funding to address critical broadcast engineering needs

    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.

  • RMCR Hires Inaugural Rural Climate Reporter

    11/13/24

    Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) is pleased to announce the hiring of Caroline Llanes as the network’s first Rural Climate Reporter. In this role, Caroline will focus on telling the stories of rural communities across the region, examining how climate change impacts the people, environments, and economies of the Rocky Mountain West.

    Caroline comes to the position after nearly three years as a reporter at Aspen Public Radio  where she covered local government and reported on a variety of state, local, and federal agencies, with a strong emphasis on climate and environmental issues.

    Caroline’s award-winning work has been broadcast nationally on NPR, regionally through the Mountain West News Bureau, and across the RMCR network. 

    “Climate and the environment is at the core of pretty much all of my reporting, because it’s an issue that intersects with nearly every other issue in our lives. That includes where and how we build affordable and attainable housing, how we plan our cities and transit, and the impacts on our most marginalized and vulnerable members of our communities,” said Llanes.

    As RMCR’s new Rural Climate Reporter, Caroline will collaborate with newsrooms across the coalition’s 20 member stations to report on climate change and its impact on rural communities throughout the region. She will work directly with RMCR Managing Editor Maeve Conran.

    “Now more than ever, covering rural climate issues is crucial, with our region at the heart of so many national conversations on climate-related topics,” said Conran. “I’m thrilled to work with Caroline as she shares the stories of this region and amplifies the voices of the people and communities most affected by climate change.”

    Breeze Richardson, RMCR President concurs, stating: 

    “Over the last three years I’ve had the privilege of watching Caroline grow into a remarkable beat reporter, with a passion for making climate stories accessible and relevant to our lives today. She’s going to be a tremendous asset for the RMCR coalition, with Aspen Public Radio listeners still able to hear her work thanks to our role in this collaboration as a member station.”

    The Rural Climate Reporter position is funded by a one-year grant from the Rural Climate Partnership in collaboration with Colorado Media Project. 

    “In an industry once defined by fierce competition, Colorado’s local newsrooms lead the nation in creating innovative ways to work together to better serve their communities. When coalitions like Rocky Mountain Community Radio share reporters and coordinate coverage among their member stations, they help different communities facing similar challenges and questions connect, support, and learn from each other,” added Sam Moody, Learning and Grants Manager at Colorado Media Project who helped RMCR secure the grant.

    Founded over forty years ago, Rocky Mountain Community Radio is a coalition of more than 20 non-commercial radio stations in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Participating stations include:

    KAFM – Grand Junction
    KAJX – Aspen
    KBUT – Crested Butte and Gunnison
    KDNK – Carbondale
    KDUR – Durango
    KFFR – Winter Park, Fraser
    KGNU – Boulder and Denver
    KHEN – Salida
    KHOL – Jackson Hole, WY
    KLZR – Westcliffe
    KOTO – Telluride
    KRFC – Fort Collins
    KRCL – Salt Lake City, Park City, Ogden, Provo, UT
    KSJD – Cortez
    KSJE – Farmington, NM
    KSUT – Ignacio
    KUNC – Greeley
    KUVO – Denver
    KVNF – Paonia and Montrose
    KZMU – Moab, UT

    With RMCR serving many additional communities beyond those listed above.

    For information about RMCR contact:

    Breeze Richardson
    President, RMCR Board of Directors
    Executive Director, Aspen Public Radio
    breeze.richardson@aspenpublicradio.org

    Maeve Conran
    Managing Editor, RMCR
    maeve@rockymountaincommunityradio.org 

  • RMCR Hires New Managing Editor

    5/23/22

    For Immediate Release:

    Rocky Mountain Community Radio (RMCR) is pleased to announce the hiring of Maeve Conran to serve as the network’s first Managing Editor and Producer.

    Maeve brings fifteen years of broadcast news experience as a radio news director, freelance radio podcast producer, and TV program director; and she shares a deep commitment to the success of RMCR. She has extensive experience collaborating with radio journalists in her professional career, and recently she served as the Project Coordinator for RMCR’s award-winning collaborative news project highlighting the issues facing communities as they transition from reliance on Fossil Fuels to green energy.

    As RMCR’s new Managing Editor, Maeve will collaborate with journalists and news producers at RMCR’s 18 stations on stories and public affairs programs, greatly increasing the network’s capacity to cover, produce, and distribute regional news.

    “I am so excited to be given the opportunity to work with the incredible stations that make up RMCR. Community radio is my passion and I believe so strongly in the work being done by RMCR and the member stations, I’m so honored to get to be a part of it,” said Maeve Conran.

    “RMCR is very excited to achieve one of our long term goals of expanding the impact of our collaboration. We’re pleased to have Maeve join the team to help strengthen journalism for communities in our region,” said Kelley Dole, President of RMCR.

    RMCR is a coalition of 18 non-commercial radio stations in Colorado (15), New Mexico (1), Utah (1), and Wyoming (1). RMCR stations share content and work collaboratively to produce in-depth features on regional issues.

    The Managing Editor position is funded in part by a three-year grant from the Colorado Media Project and RMCR Member Stations. Aspen Public Radio has agreed to host Conran in her new role, and so she will technically be an employee of Aspen Public Radio, an RMCR member, and will report to Brent Gardner-Smith, Aspen Public Radio’s news director. However, her mission is to serve all RMCR stations equally in her new position.