Cornwall's 105 to 107 Itchy FM - Ofcom Licensing

Community partner
Management have demonstrable experience at gauging this delicate mix of spoken word issues and
relevance within youth format radio.
Itchy FM will become a key partner for the region, uniquely able to communicate with this hard-to-reach
youth demographic, which is largely overlooked by established media, and enable local businesses and
organisations to advertise their products and services to our historically difficult to reach audience. The
radio station will become an integral part of regeneration; recent developments such as the CUC
(Combined University Cornwall), Objective 1, and the Education Business Partnership underline the
importance of young people in the future of the region. Our success will be underpinned by the ability to
reflect and engage the interests of the target audience and the needs of the region it serves. Our
consultation included speaking with the Cornwall County Council with regard to the “Making a
Difference: Cornwall’s Community Strategy [Mar 2003]”, which recognised that “action is needed…to
recognise the needs of young people…in particular”. We have worked to include many of the strategy’s
recommendations and plans within the fabric of the station. We will produce issues based features
working with a variety of local support organisations with similar beliefs that youth targeted commercial
radio can act as a catalyst; one of the tools to regenerate the county.
“Young people need to be provided with a fair share of community facilities. Your plan for a youth
oriented radio station seems like an excellent initiative to help involve them in the wider community, and
for the wider community to learn more about the perspectives of young people”
Frances Truscott, Regeneration Consultant, Future Perspectives Co-operatives Ltd
For example, our social action programming initiatives to help “Increase in the proportion of young
people in employment or education” will include:
o “WorkWise” job advice and skills feature in weekday daytime schedule
o “Moving On” seasonal programming features for school and college leavers (working with
confirmed local content partners including Connexions – The Youth Service and the Education
Business Partnership)
We will also create 2 minute features on any of the businesses, organisations or charities selected to
participate in our Social Marketing Fund initiative.
• provision of locally made programming
Programming will be live and local save for 8 hours per week that will be used to ‘buy-in’ national
syndicated programmes that have a musical focus on the core demographic. This is not expected to
include syndicated network “pop charts”.
(iii) programme-by-programme weekday schedule
Itchy FM will undoubtedly provide a voice and a much needed focal point for the broad youth
community living across Cornwall County. Itchy FM is the only means for this influential and spread-out
population to be communicated to en masse, to have a local commercial radio station targeted
specifically at their tastes and lifestyle and to galvanise the current enthusiastic activities undertaken by
Cornish youth.
Our programming is often going to be talent-lead, and as such we expect our local talent recruitment
and development to significantly inform our output. A broad sample of our programme schedule is
available to Ofcom on request as developed by our Managing / Programming Director.
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