Immigrant Airwaves Reimagined: Institutional Pathways of Ethiopian-Origin Radio Journalism in the United States

This study examines Ethiopian-origin immigrant radio in the United States as a durable form of institutional journalism embedded within community broadcasting infrastructures rather than as marginal or transitional ethnic media. Through comparative historical analysis of KNON (Dallas–Fort Worth), KFAI-FM (Minneapolis–St. Paul), and KETO-LP (Denver–Aurora), the study integrates nine semi-structured interviews with founders, hosts, station managers, and producers; longitudinal analysis of broadcast recordings; institutional documents; and platform-based archives. It traces how Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya programming was introduced, normalized, and evolved within distinct regulatory and organizational contexts from the mid-1990s to the present. The findings show that immigrant journalism developed through noncommercial licensing, nonprofit governance, and sustained volunteer labor rather than commercial ethnic markets. By foregrounding institutional pathways and journalistic practice, the study challenges linear assimilation models and re-centers immigrant radio as a stable civic infrastructure within US media history.