This story is an excerpt from the new Radio World ebook “Amazing Radio Studios 2025.”
We told you about this project in an earlier story; here we delve into it in more detail and provide more photos.
In December, Educational Media Foundation opened its new six-story Ministry Center in Franklin, Tenn., outside of Nashville.
EMF is the parent company of K-Love and Air1, the largest Christian music radio networks in the U.S. Heard in all 50 states on more than 1,000 signals, it is also among the country’s top 10 U.S.-based audio streamers. In 2021 the nonprofit media company had announced it planned to relocate from Rocklin, Calif.
The dedication and ribbon-cutting event drew a crowd of about 500 people and featured Christian artists Steven Curtis Chapman and Jon Reddick.
“Tennessee has welcomed us with open arms, and we extend our gratitude to the local community for their hospitality,” said Tom Stultz, EMF interim CEO, in a release.
The 166,000-square-foot facility includes eight on-air studios, two podcast acquisition studios, two show producer studios, two news studios, eight audio production studios, two Master Control monitor/routing rooms, a Network Operations Center, three video content capture studios, one live mix control room and a worship center that seats more than 1,100 people.
The capture spaces are for artists and others to create media content. There is also space for the operation of K-Love Books, K-Love Live Events and K-Love on Demand, EMF’s video streaming platform.
Hastings Architecture was responsible for architectural and interior design. The general contractor was Brasfield & Gorrie. Kirkegaard Associates handled acoustics and integrated office AV systems. Schuler Shook provided theatrical and lighting design. The owner’s representative was construction consultant Compass Partners.
Studio work is about 90 percent complete and is expected to be finalized in the spring.
Many sacrifices
When it comes to studio technical decisions, “We have a ‘pick the right tool for the job’ mentality,” said Enterprise Architect Bill Jackson, who led that part of the integration.
“We are and have been an Axia Livewire-based shop for about nine years, with regards to radio broadcast. While that is the main form of content-over-IP for the ministry, we also utilize Dante for certain types of content creation. [We support] AES67, NDI and other forms of content over IP on a Cisco IP Fabric for Media network.
“The network infrastructure team faced a tremendous task to not only provide reliable switching routing for the content, but also a complete network infrastructure for business operations.”
The facility involves so much more than a few radio studios and production rooms.
“This was the construction of a new facility that allows for the convergence of multiple types of content, available to consumers via different forms of delivery. This endeavor is the foundation for how we create and deliver content now and new forms of content and delivery in the future. Each part of this project needs to serve other parts of the project.”
Jackson said there were countless special considerations.
“While the design and construction of a new headquarters was going on, we also had a team that worked diligently, prayerfully and carefully to move a staff all the way across the country — the people who made the sacrifice to uproot their families to continue to serve the mission of this ministry,” he said.
“This entire effort was a huge sacrifice over several years. The first team member moved from Rocklin to Franklin in the late summer of 2018. To accomplish the initial expansion, temporary facilities and studios needed to be constructed for the early team members here. That began even earlier, in the summer of 2017.”
Teams moved to Tennessee in three main phases. Some positions had to be filled because team members could not move. The pandemic played a role during the early phases and had lingering effects through the design and construction phases for the Ministry Center.
