One year and one day ago today, the not-oft-heard but beloved-by-some (including me) KUSF (90.3 FM) was removed from the airwaves in a bloodless coup. The over-three-decade-old San Francisco University-based free-form radio station’s dial position was basically sold to Entercom Communications, which quickly performed some maneuvers with another oganization to move the failing KDFC (102.1 FM) “lite” classical format down to the left side of the dial. The details are inside baseball for radio nerds, and KUSF loyalists are still fighting the fight to reverse this decision. They most assuredly won’t succeed in reversing what has already been done, and I don’t think they should even try.

It’s not that I don’t believe in free-form radio. I love it. But, it’s truly a format for music nerds (like me). This type of community-based radio — as admirable is it may purport to be — never really succeeds in spreading the gospel of appreciating un-recognized and unheard artists to a mainstream audience. Would that it would. But it won’t.

One of the undisputed tenets of the Internet is that it has a fantastically long tail. If you look way down toward the end of that long tail — squint and I assure you that you will see it — you will find the other people out there like you who care about 70′s Nigerian funk and Screamo bands that are based in the greater Michigan area. This fundamental change to how people consume media is a god-send to those who feel a need to be connected to others who want to share the same passions. Guess where all the zine makers of the 90s ended up? You can bet your ass they’re all members of an online community or two.

This fundamental fact of the future that exists today means that any radio station that does not embrace the Internet as a broadcasting and community-building medium will fail. KUSF failed. Maybe not because of the Internet, but partly because it didn’t really have any Internet plan. As an arbiter of avant-garde taste, it felt to me as a listener that KUSF was too long asleep at the wheel. They were spinning records in a radio bunker for a few thousand people in San Francisco instead of growing their potential online community. They eventually managed to put up an Internet feed, but their website was hardly ever updated and there wasn’t any real public direction or way for people to participate except to pick up the phone and call in a request. I loved doing that at times, especially when DJ Schmeejay or Irwin were spinning records on their weekly morning shows, but all too often I had to wonder: What, exactly, and who, exactly, was driving the station?

College kids. Inspired, hip, try-shit-out college kids were making this Jesuit-school college station defiantly different. College kids who are presumably there to learn something innovative about how to broadcast music to people.

I won’t trot out the old “crisis is opportunity” Chinese wisdom bullshit, but the Save KUSF contingent might want to at least consider embracing the idea that building up something new is more valuable than desperately trying to save something already lost. Don’t know how to set up that Internet radio station for your university? Go down the hall and grab those nerdy dudes in the computer science class. Need some promotional materials? USF has an art program with people who desperately want to become edgy graphic designers, doesn’t it? No money? Ask the administration to funnel just a smidgeon of the direct marketing effort they put into contacting alumni members with life insurance and USF-branded credit card offers into your new Internet-only radio station (and promise them a custom-made PSA thanking every alumnus who pledges 100 dollars or more for the station).

Need someone to help get the word out about your new Internet-only radio station? I’m ready. I bet there’s a whole community of people who are, too — even if they don’t know it yet. In fact, they won’t know it until you get a group of people together and raise your voices to broadcast something new, which is, as the old Chinese proverb goes, harder to do than trying to tear something down.

If the Internet has taught us radio nerds nothing about radio, it’s that it doesn’t take a radio tower to broadcast. What does it take?