Arriving home from a short trip, I found a letter in our accumulated mail from the Internal Revenue Service.

Yes!  They have approved us as a 501(c)3 organization!  That means contributions to WMFH-LP are tax deductible!

And it also means we are now able to apply for financial grants from foundations and such, more potential sources for the start-up funds we need.

The determination is retroactive and applies to any contributions since we have been up and running.

This is really good news.

Our local paper, the Dispatch, has written up a very good article on us.  You can view it at:

http://cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=34646

It got front-page below-the-fold exposure in the Monday, July 7th edition.  That has spawned a few emails coming in to  us and a supportive letter to the editor in the Wednesday edition of the paper.

Also, I had the opportunity to tour and talk to the folks at WMSV at Mississippi State University and at WMUW at Mississippi University for Women.  It has been very helpful to me to talk through some of our programming ideas and learn more about how other non-commercial stations in our area operate.

And finally, we have decided to pay a small fee to join the local chamber of commerce organization.  Our goal is to use their membership database to build some sponsor relationships with local businesses.

Hi,

Things are quiet here at the future WMFH-LP broadcast station, but we are still making some small progress.

After getting our 501(c)3 application completed we received back a confirmation letter in the mail from the IRS.  They say it will be approximately 90 days before we receive our “determination letter” on our charity status.  It could go longer if they have questions about our application.

But we are not standing still waiting for that.  We are also contacting local businesses in this area, trying to interest them in advertising/underwriting on our station.

So far we have not found any takers!  but we are still at it.

We also hope to grow our community presence in the next few weeks in other ways.  If you have ideas about that, please let us know!

We have done quite a bit of thinking about our broadcast schedule, weighing the  pace of new material and needed repetition so that our listeners are able  to keep up.

As you know, our content is audio books.  Some of the content is from serial works: chapters of longer books, for example.  And some of the content is stand-alone.

Radio stations traditionally work on an hourly format and things are organized in “shows” of 1-hour length.  That is what listeners expect to find.

Here’s an overview of our current broadcast schedule plan:

We will have eight one-hour shows, separating our material by content type:  History & Biography, Mystery & Suspense, Travel & Nature, Americana, Humor, Romance, General Fiction.

Each weekday (M-F) we will have 8 hours of fresh material followed by two repeats of that, to make 24 hours.  That gives us 40 hours of new material per week.  On the weekend we propose to replay those 40 hours.  And that leaves us with 8 hours unallocated on the weekend.

An hourly show would start off with one or more chapters of the book or whatever piece we are working through.  Then any remaining time in that hour will be filled with random small selections from our library.

We must have a station identification at least once per hour.  And our underwriting message for that hour will most likely fit at the beginning of the hour.