KPCW broadcasts local news, NPR programming, and 80-plus hours of eclectic, DJ-curated music each week from Park City, Utah, serving Summit and Wasatch counties on 91.9 FM. You can listen free anywhere in the world on Radio Shuffle.
Five Founders and Sixty Years of Radio Experience
KPCW traces back to 1978, when five people with a combined six decades of radio experience began dreaming up a local station for Park City. Blair Feulner, Dan Wilcox, Tom Bock, Jay Meehan, and Rebecca Widenhouse became known as the "founding five," and their work paid off on July 2, 1980, when Feulner signed the station on air with the words "This is KPCW 91.9 FM, the station that Park City built," according to KPCW's own history page. The station joined NPR as a member station in 1992, adding national headlines and programs to a schedule that had started as an entirely local, volunteer-run effort.
A Studio Built for Sundance
Park City is best known outside Utah for hosting the Sundance Film Festival every January, and that annual influx of national media attention shaped KPCW's own facilities. After roughly thirty years operating out of the historic Marsac Building, the station relocated in 2008 to a new two-story building, with KPCW taking the second floor above a state liquor store, according to Radio World's coverage of the move. The new space was built specifically sophisticated enough to support NPR-level festival broadcasting while staying simple enough for volunteer DJs and local high school students to use, with floor-to-ceiling windows in the air studio looking out over Swede Alley and the surrounding mountains.
A Full Schedule Beyond the Music
KPCW runs what public radio calls a "full-service" format, mixing local news with wide-ranging talk and NPR staples. Local programs include the Local News Hour with Leslie Thatcher and The Local View with Claire Wiley, while the weekday Public Affairs Hour rotates through Mountain Money for finance, This Green Earth for environmental coverage, The Mountain Life for health topics, Cool Science Radio, and The Community Campfire, a segment built around local storytelling and live musical performances. National programming fills out the rest of the schedule with shows like Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Alt.Latino, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, and Marketplace.
Music Built by Local DJs
Outside of news and talk blocks, KPCW hands its airwaves to local DJs who curate more than 80 hours of intentionally eclectic music programming every week. That volunteer DJ tradition is the same one the station was designed to serve back in 2008, when its new studio was built to work equally well for a Sundance broadcast crew and a first-time high school radio host.
Tune In
More than four decades after five Park City residents pooled their radio experience into a single frequency, KPCW is still the primary source of daily local news for Summit and Wasatch counties, wrapped around NPR programming and hours of locally curated music. Stream it free on Radio Shuffle to hear what a mountain town built for itself.