Our Mission
FSRN reports the international and domestic stories the corporate press routinely overlooks, and puts the voices of the people most affected by the news at the center of the story — not on the sidelines.
A Brief History
Free Speech Radio News was founded in 2000 as an independent, nonprofit, listener-supported news wire, affiliated with the Pacifica Radio Network. For seventeen years, FSRN produced daily and weekly newscasts carried by independent, community, and college radio stations across the United States and Canada — reporting on labor, environmental, and human rights stories that mainstream outlets often missed entirely.
FSRN aired its final newscast in 2017.
Why This Site Exists Now
FSRN’s archive went dark when the organization ceased operating in 2017 — seventeen years of independent, listener-supported journalism, offline. James Blake founded this site to change that: to restore the archive, keep it publicly accessible, and make sure that reporting doesn’t disappear from the historical record. Blake brings ten years in independent media to the work.
How We Handle the Archive
Stories on this site dated 2000–2017 are original FSRN reporting, restored from the Wayback Machine and republished under FSRN’s original Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license, with attribution to the original reporters. We do not alter the substance of archived reporting; each piece is checked against its original archived version before republishing. See our Licensing Policy for full detail.
Because archived stories reflect reporting from the date they were originally published, facts and circumstances they describe may have changed since. They should be read as historical record, not current news.
What We Cover
International · Policy & Rights · Environment · Labor & Economy · Community Radio
Corrections
If you find an error in an archived or current story, or believe something needs updating, contact us and we’ll review it.