ProudFM vacates the Village

Eighteen staff members at ProudFM spent Monday afternoon boxing up their office and moving from their longstanding home at 65 Wellesley to the Etobicoke headquarters of their parent company, Evanov Radio Group.

When it launched in 2007, Proud was Canada’s only radio station to target the LGBT community exclusively, but it isn’t the first neighbourhood business forced out by prohibitively pricey rents—program director Bob Willette cites institutions like Pink Triangle Press and Zelda’s as other cost-of-living casualties. “The village is losing some of its vibrancy,” he said. “If rent was lower, we might have stayed. Who knows?” He says their rent was in the vicinity of $10,000 a month.

Most staff are leaving, but the station’s broadcasting facilities will stay put for now. Willette says they’ll still have some presence in the community—even if the wider LGBT community, like the station itself, is increasingly less bound to the village.

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Randy

It’s not the high rent its the low revenues that joke of a LGBT radio station suffers from that are the problem. Do you see other downtown stations moving? You still can’t hear this station even after they begged us two years ago to sign petitions to get their signal increased. What happened to that? The quality of the hosts never recovered after Shawn Proulx and company were stupidly fired; after all, the music they play is exactly the same as any other radio station. This isn’t a story about high rents in the Village its a story about how a promising gem of a gay media outlet was run to the ground by mostly straight idiots trying to make a buck of the gay back. I think someone told me they’ve gone through an excess of 65 staffers since they hit the airwaves.
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7:11 am on February 9, 2012

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Jesse

Right in the heart of Ford Nation!
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12:55 pm on February 8, 2012

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