Carson City community radio KNVC 95.1 continues to grow as it enters third year on the air

Carson City’s own community radio station, KNVC, has been quietly churning out locally curated music, news, information and talk shows for about three years now, and they’re only gaining speed as time goes on.

KNVC runs out of the historic Adams House on North Minnesota Street and, at present, boasts 31 volunteers into its broadcasting family.

According to Joe Bly, Program Director of KNVC, which can be found on 95.1 FM, the station is ever-growing with more volunteers coming in all the time to help lift up local programming to engage the niche audiences found within the Carson Valleys.

“These volunteers cover so many different aspects of the radio station,” said Bly. “We have a librarian, we have someone in the office who handles all the data base, we have people doing sound engineering; we’re building up people who want to do talk shows, or people who just want to do music shows. That makes life much easier because we all don’t have to wear the same hats.”

In the beginning of KNVC, there were five volunteers including Bly, but now, they have many, many more with more coming forward all the time.

In the three years since Bly and co-founder Brian Bahouth stood on the top of Duck Hill and plugged KNVC’s broadcast into the transmitter, the station has grown in leaps and bounds, offering a very unique and thoughtful array of programming.

Some of the locally-produced shows include Battle Born Tech, a computer and tech problem-solving show, The Psychic Communique with author and clairvoyant Sandie LaNae, Business Therapy, the Sherrie P. Show, the Western Connection, the Wild Hare and more.

For local music programs, KNVC provides niche audiences with curated music collections, including everything from Punk music to High Country Celtic Radio, Professor Hieronymus Jones’ Feel-Good Psych Hour, “Flight music,” and the most recently added music collection, “Oddities, Abnormalities and Curiosities,” which brings listeners a “steaming casserole of weird music served up special,” playing Fridays at 11 p.m.

In a modern world filled with podcasts, YouTube, and biased news outlets, community sourced and community operated radio is more important than ever, said Bly.

“Community radio is immediate, it’s local, and it serves in the community it operates,” said Bly. “A DJ will host a show, then go out in the community and speak with people. Someone might say they hated a particular song, and maybe that DJ will remember that for the next time. These shows are shaped by the community itself.”

In addition to new music and talk shows, Bly hopes to expand into community news, focusing on local stories sourced by local people volunteering their time to ask questions, and find answers.

Bahouth runs his own non-profit news focusing on regional topics, which has recently formed under the name Sierra Nevada Ally. You check out his news coverage, which is shared with KNVC online, by visiting the Ally at https://sierranevadaally.org/

Another potential idea on the horizon would be covering local sports, such as Carson High School football on Friday nights during playoff season.

Bly hopes that through it all, the station will continue to expand with support from it’s community, whether it be listeners or volunteers.

“When someone volunteers, we interview them the same we would for a job, but unlike a job, you need zero experience to participate,” said Bly. “We train everyone here, whether they want to be on the air or not. It’s a community effort.”

Bly is always searching for more DJs who may want to host talk shows or curate unique musical collections. KNVC does not play Top 40 music or generic country, since those demographics are well served by the other local stations. Instead, KNVC focuses on music off the beaten trail, such as world music, bluegrass, punk; even zydeco has its own time slot once a week.

They source specifically selected national programming in order to connect smaller local communities with their wider national counterparts, through programming such as First Voices Radio with host Tiokasin Ghosthorse, which airs Sundays at 3 p.m. and focuses on indigenous issues, concerns, cultures and customs from around the Americas, and the world.

“These voices are important because they connect our local communities such as the Washoe tribe, with the larger indigenous communities throughout the U.S. and Canada,” said Bly. “Community radio is connection, plain and simple.”

Connection is the reason community radio both exists and survives in a time of national, or even global focus, according to Bly, and why it’s especially important for small communities like our own that may not exist within a larger, nationally-focused spotlight.

You can tune into KNVC at any time by turning your dial to 95.1 FM, and you can learn more about KNVC by visiting http://www.knvc.org