Krypton Radio has become the world’s most popular ‘geek culture’ sci-fi radio station and it just celebrated its tenth anniversary.
It all began in 2009 when online gamers, Susan Fox and Gene Turnbow, lamented over not being able to find a decent sci-fi radio station to listen to while gaming. The thought ‘why not?’ and created an outlet of their own!
By 2011, the booming station was a hit and they decided to turn it into a full-fledged business. In 2013 they became incorporated. The business was self-sustaining in 2015. Krypton Radio has fans all over the world in 194 countries!
Fortunately, the station’s founders, Susan Fox and Gene Turnbow, were already established in the media industry—Fox as managing editor for an elite media event listing guide called Hollywood News Calendar, and Turnbow as lifelong practical FX artist, game programmer, and CG animator. Together they created Krypton Radio.
Gene Turnbow stated,
“To start with, everybody who worked for the station were volunteers. The station began as a hobby, as many things like this do – but it became something more when Susan and I realized that not only were we the only ones around doing it, but that there had already been others in the meantime that had tried to do what we were doing and already failed at it. One guy even tried to steal our business outright, not understanding how complicated a project like this is. You can guess how well he did.
It’s kind of like – I don’t know if you’ve heard the phrase: ‘If you don’t surf, don’t start.’ You have to have a pretty fair amount of knowledge of what an internet radio station is and the work it entails before you can even throw the switch on day one, let alone thrive.
That applies to the world of finance too. There are built in barriers in the world of finance, meant to keep the money in the hands of the people who already have it. It’s been a long slow climb, because we were underfunded from the beginning – and without having people on the board of directors with past successes building profitable companies, we couldn’t even get a sniff from angel investors. We had little choice but to make the project into a crowdfunded venture, and we chose Patreon.
But there we were, still standing, and the longer we stuck around, the more of a fixture in this role we became, and the harder it was for anybody to come up from behind and overtake us. So, we started to try to make it into a real business in 2011, and until 2013 it was still a side hustle, at which point we incorporated and got some minimal investing going on. Susan became majority shareholder, so it’s a woman-owned company. By 2015 we were profitable.
Now, four years later we’re hitting stride with our ten-year anniversary newly behind us, and starting to become an international phenomenon. Out of a group of any dozen fans, chances are pretty good that at least one of them has heard of us.”
The station was a curiosity to listeners at first. Most sci-fi fans are surprised when they discover that Krypton Radio is on all the time all around the world. There are diehard listeners who tune in and leave the station on all the time.
Science Fiction Fandom has been popular for nearly a century. Now it is joined by fans of fantasy, comic books, gaming, and much more!
The fans write their own stories. They make costumes, and music. They make their own comics, podcasts and movies, too. The 10-year anniversary of Krypton Radio relates something powerful about the genre, and about fandom itself. The people who collaborate to create the Krypton Radio experience continuously strive to make something wonderful, because “that very creative act helps build the future we all want to live in.”
Krypton Radio web site: https://kryptonradio.com
Debe Branning has been the director of the MVD Ghostchasers–a Mesa/Bisbee, AZ based paranormal team since 1994. The team conducts investigations of haunted, historical locations throughout Arizona and has offered paranormal workshop/investigations since 2002. Debe has been a guest lecturer at Ottawa University, Central Arizona College, Arizona State University, Scottsdale Community College, and South Mountain Community College. She has been a speaker at science fiction conventions such as Phoenix ComiCon, CopperCon, FiestaCon, HauntedCon and AZParacon. Debe has been the guest speaker at many historical societies and libraries talking about historic/haunted Arizona.
She has appeared in an episode of “Streets of Fear” for FearNet.com which aired October 2009 and on an episode of TRAVEL CHANNEL’S “Ghost Stories” about haunted Jerome, Arizona in July 2010. She recently appeared as an extra in the 2017 horror movie “The Covenant”. She enjoys assisting in the research field for various Travel Channel TV shows such as ‘Ghost Stories’, ‘Haunted Highway’, and ‘Deadly Possessions’ and MTV’s ‘Fear’. She has traveled, toured and investigated at haunted locations across the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland and Mexico.
Debe is the author of “Sleeping With Ghosts-A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to AZ’s Haunted Hotels and Inns” (2004), “Grand Canyon Ghost Stories” (2012), “The Graveyard Shift–Arizona’s Historic and Haunted Cemeteries” (2012), “Dining With the Dead–Arizona’s Historic and Haunted Restaurants and Cafes” (2017) and a series of three children’s books, “The Adventures of Chickolet Pigolet: 1. “The Bribe of Frankenbeans” —-2. “Murmur on the Oink Express” —-3. “You Ought to be in Pig-tures”. For 7 years Debe penned 3 columns for Examiner.com titled: “Phoenix Travel Adventures,” “Arizona Haunted Sites” and “Haunted Places” so travelers could know where they might find a ghost or two when they visited Arizona and the United States. She was the Managing Editor of “Paranormal Investigator Magazine.” As a paranormal travel writer, Debe traveled to Europe to cover haunted castles, jails, ships, inns, cemeteries and ghost walking tours. She has been the guest of several US tourism departments such as Carlsbad, Historic Hotels of the Rockies, Salem, and Biloxi.
Debe is a preservation activist with a special interest in preserving historic cemeteries. She is on the board of directors of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association and the Arizona Genealogical Advisory Board. She is also one of the co-hosts of the Association of Gravestones Studies in Arizona.
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