Also known as: Plains Media (from April 2025)
Frequency: 96.9FM
Coverage: Canterbury-wide
Location: Madras Street, Christchurch (Ara campus)
Format: Community access radio
Founded: 29 February 1988
Active: 1988–present
Website: plainsfm.org.nz
History
Plains FM was born on 29 February 1988 — a leap day, which made for a founding date as unusual as the station itself. That first broadcast on 96.9FM marked the arrival of something new in Canterbury: a radio station where the community was not just the audience but the broadcaster. Rather than content shaped by commercial imperatives or state mandate, Plains FM was built on a simple democratic principle — that ordinary people should have access to the airwaves to speak, in their own voice and their own language, to whoever was listening.
The station emerged from discussions between Christchurch Polytechnic’s Media Centre, Radio New Zealand, the Independent Broadcasters’ Association, and the Canterbury Communications Trust — a charitable entity that would become the governing body for the station. From the outset, the Trust’s role was to keep the station free from the editorial pressures of commercial broadcasting, providing infrastructure and oversight while leaving the content entirely to the community. Tony Simons served as the founding station manager, with Sarah Ayton as programme director and David Glenn as studio operator, supported by a group of volunteers whose commitment to community access shaped the station’s earliest character.
The first programmes to go to air reflected the breadth of voices that Plains FM was designed to serve: Schizophrenia Fellowship, Overeaters Anonymous, Unemployed Rights, and the Netherlands Society all had shows in those earliest weeks. Within the first year, the first Pacific Island programme broadcast on the station was presented in Tongan by Viliami Halaifonua — a moment that pointed toward what Plains FM would become: a multilingual, multicultural platform unlike anything else on the Canterbury dial. The Broadcasting Act 1989 formalised the sector’s landscape shortly after the station launched, and the Broadcasting Commission began funding Plains FM as an access radio station — a recognition that community broadcasting required public investment to survive alongside its better-resourced commercial competitors.
Located on the campus of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT) on Madras Street — now Ara Institute of Canterbury — the station built its physical home in the heart of the city. The polytechnic connection was not incidental: the station’s founding purpose included distance learning and student education alongside community broadcasting, and over the years it trained thousands of people in the basics of radio production. This commitment to access and skills development became one of Plains FM’s defining characteristics, distinguishing it from both commercial stations (where the microphone belongs to professional staff) and student radio (where it belongs to the university community).
Through the 1990s, the station expanded steadily. By the early part of the decade it was broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second production studio opened, extending the station’s capacity to accommodate more shows. The Chinese Voices programme won a Mobil Radio Award for Best Access Programme — an early sign that Plains FM’s community shows were achieving a quality that the wider broadcasting industry noticed. The station launched its website in 1996, one of the earlier New Zealand radio stations to establish an online presence. The station also pioneered mobile studio broadcasting: it became the first in New Zealand to broadcast live from schools via a mobile setup, at one point travelling as far as Mountain View High School in Timaru. A joint broadcast with Linwood High School was described at the time as a world-first concert transmitted simultaneously via the internet and radio.
By 2008, when Plains FM celebrated its twentieth birthday, the station had become a firmly established part of Canterbury’s media landscape. It had accumulated a roster of programmes across dozens of different communities — ethnic, cultural, social, and interest-based — and had built a reputation as one of New Zealand’s most active access radio stations. Echo Radio, the station’s longest-running programme, had been on air since the early years and continued as a testament to the durability of Plains FM’s community relationships.
The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 tested the station in ways it had never anticipated. After the 4 September 2010 Darfield earthquake, Plains FM communicated emergency information in multiple languages — a capacity that no commercial station could match, and which demonstrated the irreplaceable role of a multilingual community broadcaster in a civil emergency. By that point, the station was hosting 68 programmes presented by community volunteers in 14 languages, and the first broadcasters back on air after the earthquake were the hosts of the Samoan radio show. When the far more devastating 22 February 2011 earthquake struck, however, the station faced a different problem. The studio building on Madras Street was green-stickered and structurally safe, but it sat just inside the cordon drawn around the city centre. Staff and broadcasters were locked out for five weeks — unable to access equipment, unable to broadcast. The experience underlined how tightly the physical and social fabric of a station are bound together, and how a community broadcaster’s capacity to serve is directly dependent on its ability to occupy its own space.
Plains FM is one of twelve stations that make up CAMA — the Community Access Media Alliance — the national body for community access media in Aotearoa New Zealand. The other member stations stretch from Planet FM in Auckland to Radio Southland in Invercargill, with Plains FM as the Canterbury representative. Each station operates independently, governed by its own trust or board, but connected through CAMA’s shared advocacy for a funded, sustainable community access sector. NZ On Air provides annual funding support to Plains FM as part of its access radio obligations, supplemented by airtime fees from show producers, grants, sponsorship, and donations. The funding model is deliberately mixed, ensuring that no single funder can determine the station’s editorial direction.
The station’s music programming has long reflected its commitment to local voices. During New Zealand Music Month 2024, Plains FM ran the Ōtautahi Music Hour — a dedicated slot at 8am every Wednesday and Thursday devoted exclusively to music by Christchurch-based bands and musicians. Described as a celebration of the city’s creative diversity, the programme was produced in partnership with RDU 98.5FM and SaltBox Studios, with SaltBox providing live-to-air sessions that captured local artists in a high-quality recording environment. The Ōtautahi Music Hour embodied Plains FM’s broader ethos: that local voices, given airtime and production support, can produce content that stands on its own terms.
In April 2025, after 37 years as Plains FM, the station rebranded as Plains Media. The announcement was made on 4 April 2025 at a launch event at the Multicultural Recreation and Community Centre, bringing together more than 120 multicultural content creators and supporters. Station manager Nicki Reece explained the reasoning directly: the station had outgrown its name, and Plains Media captured the full scope of what the station did across radio, online, and through its community engagement. The geographical anchor remained — Plains, for the Canterbury Plains — but the medium-specific suffix gave way to something broader. The rebrand was accompanied by a new website and refreshed visual identity, and came at a moment of broader media reform in New Zealand, with Reece noting the station’s desire to ensure that any new funding framework would continue to support community and regional voices.
By the time of the rebrand, the station was producing more than 100 shows in 15 languages each week, with its podcasts extending its reach well beyond Canterbury. The transmitter at Sugarloaf on the Port Hills broadcasts across Christchurch city, north to Cheviot, south to Ashburton, west to the Southern Alps, and into Lyttelton Harbour on Banks Peninsula — a coverage area that encompasses much of the Canterbury region. In its 37 years of operation Plains FM has trained thousands of people, provided a platform for communities that mainstream media rarely reaches, and maintained a commitment to open access broadcasting that has remained essentially unchanged since the founding volunteers went to air on that leap-day afternoon in 1988.
We’ve outgrown our name as we’re so much more than just an FM station. Our new name, Plains Media, captures the full scope of what we do on-air, online and through our broad community engagement.
Nicki Reece, station manager, Plains FM / Plains Media, April 2025