KDRT Wins 2021 Hometown Media Award
DAVIS, California ─ KDRT 95.7 FM has received a 2021 Hometown Media Award from the Washington, DC-based Alliance for Community Media (ACM) Foundation. Station representatives will accept the award for “Overall Excellence in Community Radio” at a virtual ceremony June 30, 2021. This is an inaugural year for this award, and was awarded to three stations of different sizes.
KDRT is a project of Davis Media Access (DMA), the only nonprofit community media center in Yolo County. Founded in 1988 and based in Davis, DMA carries out its mission of providing alternatives to commercial media through partnerships across Yolo County.
The radio station—whose motto is “Where the Grassroots Grow”—launched in 2004 and has been broadcasting from the DMA facility at 1623 Fifth Street 24/7 ever since. In fact, DMA's original incarnation - Davis Community Television--was the first public access center in the nation to launch a Low-Power FM radio station.
With 34 local programmers, the station provides an eclectic mix of music and public affairs programming, with live streaming and podcasts available, and listeners around the globe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of its volunteer programmers learned how to record from home, keeping the community well connected despite distance and isolation.
“The Hometown Awards are prestigious and competitive, honoring the best in community media from around the country,” said Jeff Shaw, a DMA senior staff member who sparked the drive to launch KDRT, and also serves as GM for the station. “To be specifically honored for doing good work in a time of crisis means a great deal to us all.”
DMA’s entry—a short version of which is available here https://youtu.be/YTSkf86fRWY--highlights the many ways the station pivoted to meet community need during the pandemic, and at a time when KDVS, the longtime campus radio station at UC Davis, went dark.
The national Hometown Awards program was established to honor and promote community media, community radio, and local cable programs that are distributed on Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) access cable television channels, and by extension, their related media projects. The ACM is a national, non-profit membership organization committed to ensuring access to electronic media for all.
Each year, nearly one thousand entries are submitted. These entries, or programs, are evaluated on several factors, resulting in over 100 award winners. A panel of judges from the industry evaluates the entries. Awards are presented to the most creative programs that address community needs, develop diverse community involvement, challenge conventional commercial media formats, and move viewers or listeners to experience media in a different way.
“The Hometown Media Awards celebrate both the excellence of work and the diversity of media that appears on community channels being produced around the country. The ACM Foundation is proud of their achievement and of how they represent their communities in their work,” said Mike Wassenaar, president & CEO, Alliance for Community Media.
For information about DMA and KDRT’s work, visit https://davismedia.org. To stream programming and get specific programming info, visit https://kdrt.org. ###