Radio Free Brookings

BROOKINGS — For the first time in a long, long time, locally owned and operated radio is coming back to Brookings.

Longtime Brookings Radio manager Cami Powers — along with her husband Derrick Powers and her brother, Chad Hogie — formed a group to buy back the local stations from their most recent owner, Connoisseur Media.

According to Cami Powers, the deal is done in principle, but needs federal approval before officially closing.

For Powers, it was a longtime dream come true after a turbulent few years.

“It’s always been a dream of mine, doing the radio stations. And I think when we got bought by Alpha Media, I didn’t think it would ever happen, because we were part of such a big group of stations that I just forgot about the dream,” she said. “But when Connoisseur bought the group from Alpha, I started hearing rumblings that they were peeling off a lot of the smaller markets. And the one thing I wasn’t really excited about with corporate ownership was they didn’t really understand small market radio, and they didn’t really appreciate small market radio, so it’s like you were working for somebody that didn’t really believe in what you were doing.”

That dream probably never seemed so far away as two years ago, in May of 2024, when Alpha Media laid off eight local broadcasters as part of a nationwide cost-cutting initiative. Powers called it “one of the worst days of my life.”

So when the new corporate ownership started selling off some smaller stations, Powers blurted out what would soon become a plan, and then reality.

“They sold Madison, South Dakota and Luverne, Minnesota,” she said, “And I made a comment to my boss, and I said, ‘I wish he would just let me buy Brookings.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you ask?’

“And within five hours, I had a call scheduled with the owner of the company. And we were doing pretty well the way it was. But he called me and he gave me a price. He said Brookings wasn’t really for sale, but if I was interested in purchasing it, he would sell it to me. And the next day I met with the bank.”

Powers said the process started in November and she was able to announce the sale officially on Tuesday. She hopes it will end sometime in June when the FCC officially approves the sale.

The new company — Brookings Radio, LLC — will officially purchase the five radio stations that have been operating in Brookings and the surrounding area: Brookings Radio KBRK-AM, KBRK-FM, KDBX-FM, KKQQ-FM and KJJQ-AM.

Powers said listeners might not notice big changes immediately, but they would be coming soon as the stations revert back to a locally owned, locally operated mindset.

“We want to get back to some excitement in the building, having fun with radio,” she said. “It’s a fun industry to be a part of, and it just seems like that fun got zapped out of us two years ago. So I think all of us are just excited to bring it back to what we used to do.”

Brookings Radio News Director Jay Roe echoed those sentiments.
Roe was one of the people laid off in 2024. He smoothly transitioned to a news reporter role at the Brookings Register newspaper, until that paper’s corporate ownership shuttered the doors in August of 2026. Roe went back to radio and is excited to go even further back, to local ownership.

“Local ownership means accountability in the best kind of way,” Roe said. “When the people running the radio station live just down the street from you, they can’t afford to ignore community issues or mislead their friends and neighbors.

Plus, they’re more likely to shine a spotlight on small businesses or nonprofits, to follow the local sports teams or just to play music requests from listeners.”

Powers said the changes listeners would hear would follow that same local-first mindset.

“We know what our community and our clients want, and now we can provide that the best way we know how and how we want to do it, and in the ways we want to do it,” she said. “So I don’t see any major changes. I think we might do a little bit of tweaking of formats, and maybe bringing some voices back that maybe people haven’t heard in a while.”

Both Powers and Roe mentioned a long-running joke at Brookings Radio that everyone who works there once ends up coming back again at some point — because they love what they do, despite the stress.

“It’s going to be a team effort,” Powers said. “This isn’t about me, it’s not about Chad. It’s about our team who has been with us through thick and thin, and how they want this to look.”

“You still work hard when you work for a big corporation. But there’s a difference between striving to achieve good spreadsheet numbers for an out-of-state owner versus giving it your all because you’re part of a team you believe in,” Roe said. “Brookings Radio is a family, and each of us wants to see our radio sisters and brothers succeed.

Likewise Brookings is our home — it’s where we live, shop and raise our families — and each of us wants to see the community we love continue to thrive and prosper.”

Powers said the overwhelming initial response to the news confirmed she made the right decision of betting on Brookings.

“It’s radio stations for the community now,” she said.

“It’s not about us; it’s about what they want. The amount of support we got yesterday was just overwhelming. I barely got anything done — my phone was ringing off the hook. It just it made me feel really good about the decision that we made,” Powers continued. ”And that’s part of the reason that I wanted to do this, not just our team, but our community. I feel like Brookings supports anything that we do as a community — they come out in full support. We help each other, and I think that makes a real difference.”

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes comments at BrookingsBeacon@@gmail.com