Christian station pulled

Management works to revive youth-oriented FM broadcast

PATRICK ERSKINE
Special to CW
— Winnipeg —

Winnipeg's first 24-hour Christian radio station abruptly disappeared from the airwaves four days before Christmas, but the management group contracted to run CFEQ (FREQ 107) last year is working to reinvent the station.

Tom Hiebert, whose company handled daily operations, says it will take "a few hundred thousand dollars" to reapply for a license and relaunch the station. But on-air staff decided after Christmas to dedicate themselves full-time to that task, largely because of strong email response from the station’s young listeners and their parents.

Volunteers who envisioned a radio outreach to Winnipeg youth worked three years to birth the station. Jason Ryan was involved from the start. He used his company, Christian Solutions Group, to apply for a specialty broadcast license and contracted with Hiebert, another volunteer, to run the station shortly after its October, 1999 debut.

Simmering dispute

Hiebert, who sold his computer business and bankrolled much of the project, says advertising was covering an increasing portion of its operating costs. But to become financially viable, the station needed to build a larger audience.

How to attract new listeners became the subject of a simmering dispute between the license-holder and the management group that came to a head December 21, just before the operations contract was due to expire.

Ryan envisioned using music and friendship evangelism by on-air announcers and over the phone or Internet each day. Hiebert favoured an "indirect ministry" approach, where lyrics and lifestyle of the musicians and “cool” DJs would reach out to the youthful target audience without being preachy.

Since the September launch of another Winnipeg station, CHVN, which targets adult Christians across Manitoba's Bible belt, FREQ concentrated on featuring Christian-based lyrics in a format that urban non-Christians would find appealing.

The ratings tell us that [top 30 format] Hot 103 is the choice of 61 per cent of 12-24 year olds,” says Hiebert. "We decided to change to that sound and have doubled our audience in that age group. Our hearts are to reach younger listeners with a rocky sound, and we have a ton of emails that tell us we’ve had an impact."
The day after he returned the broadcast license to the CRTC, Ryan told CW that "my wife, family and I are burned out on this." He faces a personal debt of $70,000 and his security company is in limbo. He says he’s been trying to "give" the license to Hiebert, asking only to be reimbursed for expenses and to have the option of buying it back for $1, should Hiebert ever consider selling.
Hiebert says Ryan asked for $125,000 cash and turned down an offer to pay monthly interest on that amount until the station became profitable. Ryan alleges he was expected to declare CSG bankrupt, leaving creditors on the hook for unpaid bills—something he couldn’t do in good conscience.
Simply ending the arrangement was not an option. A termination clause stipulated that "net losses or gains" ($384,000) would be converted to a demand loan on the terminating party. Although the validity of the clause after 2000 is questionable, Ryan didn't have the resources to pursue it.

Attempts to mediate the dispute were unsuccessful and other investors have not been willing to come on board.
Pulling the plug, says Ryan, is "a lose/lose situation that provided the least amount of hurt and destruction." He claims that moving to a business-oriented approach with more secular music would trigger a CRTC moratorium on issuing specialty licenses that could last three years, delaying Christian format licenses in other markets. A CRTC official told Ryan it would be viewed as a back door entry into the mainstream fray.

Hiebert says the CRTC allows a five per cent deviation from the "religious non-classical" category used to define the contemporary genre. "FREQ was within that limit and planned to continue to be."