Some notes from the Cabin Radio audience feedback survey

About 300 people took the time to fill out our 2025-26 audience feedback survey. Here’s a snapshot of the data and some answers to thoughts and questions people raised.

We asked people for some basic demographic data like their location and age bracket, got them to list the ways they interact with Cabin Radio (like the website, the app, the audio stream, the events guide and so on), and asked which of the things we do they liked and didn’t like.

There was also an opportunity to provide longer-form feedback, and we asked people to tell us about their broader reading and listening habits in the northern broadcast ecosystem. Where else do you go for news? What else do you listen to?

That kind of market research is actually vital because it isn’t available anywhere else.

Yellowknife is not a “metered market,” meaning there is no company regularly surveying residents to find out who is listening to which radio station. That service exists in many southern cities, but not in the NWT.

The data we gather through our survey carries an obvious selection bias: the people filling it out are Cabin Radio’s existing audience. We’re polling people who are already choosing to visit our platforms. (It’s much harder to reach people who have never visited, or did so previously but no longer come back.)

Even so, it helps us build a picture of how northerners consume news and listen to radio, and what they’d like to see improve.

Headline figures

Of 293 responses, 15 percent said they were aged 30 or under, 49 percent were aged 31 to 50, and 35 percent were aged 51 or over.

Seventy-five percent said they live in Yellowknife. Fifteen percent live outside the NWT and eight percent live in smaller NWT communities. (A few people didn’t fill out this box.)

The journalism on our website is the thing virtually all respondents said they engaged with in 2025. (The popularity of X, meanwhile, has cratered in the past 12 months. A year ago, 16 percent of our audience used our X channel and five percent said it was the number-one thing they valued. Now, just 0.3 percent of people place it first.)

Also of note from our data:

• Under-30s are more engaged overall. They had 4.5 touchpoints – different products they use – versus 3.0 for people aged 51-plus.
• TikTok shows the starkest age divide. Twenty-nine percent of under-30s use our TikTok channel, versus two percent of those aged 51-plus (a difference we had expected to see).
• Events and contests skew young. Forty percent of under-30s are fans of our contests and want us to hold events they can attend, versus 17 percent of those aged 51-plus.
• News on our website is nearly universal for our under-30 audience, 98 percent of whom (from 45 responses) access it.

This chart illustrates why this year’s move to FM is important for us.

We’re really happy to have plenty of people already listening to Cabin Radio through our app or website, but the number who will try Cabin once it’s on FM demonstrates a real growth opportunity for our news and shows.

And with that, let’s get into some specifics about what we heard in the survey and what we’re planning.

Cabin Radio on FM

One respondent wrote: “Get on solid FM ground with news and music, then consider moving into some of the ‘other possible things’ you could be doing.”

We would argue we’ve spent eight years getting on solid ground with news and music, and that’s the part we’re excited to move onto FM. (Remember, Cabin Radio already exists as a listening option online, so you can hear what you’ll get on FM!)

We’ve reworked our music catalogue over the past few weeks. We aren’t making major changes to the kinds of artist we play, but we’re fine-tuning how our music is selected, how brand new music gets introduced, and what you hear in the daytime versus at evenings and on weekends.

Meanwhile, we’ve started work on improving our audio newscasts once we reach FM. You’ll see those changes as FM arrives, which we expect to be in the first half of 2026.

(The planning going on behind the scenes is intense. It’s a lot of work and a lot of money, but it’s also a lot of fun and we’re excited to go live on your dial! The survey results above really bear out what we’ve heard from you for a long time, which is that FM matters a lot to Yellowknife residents in terms of accessing what we do.)

Feature content

This was the number-one item when we asked what else you’d like us to work on, and it cropped up multiple times in the longer-form comment fields of the survey.

“I have enjoyed the niche NWT history stories,” one person wrote. Another said: “Over the holidays your drone footage of YK was so great that I sent the link to friends outside Canada who also liked it.”

While we do have a lot of plates to keep spinning in 2026, our aim is to gradually introduce more journalism and videography that helps Yellowknifers and NWT residents see more of – and understand more of – the world around us in the North.

For example, later this month we’ll roll out a series that explains more about how power generation works in Yellowknife. How does electricity get here, what’s actually happening when there’s an outage and we’re waiting in the dark for a fix, and is there really a set order in which Yellowknife homes get their power back? (Yes, yes there is.)

Our focus will be less on feature content that is totally disconnected from the news, and more on features that help unpack topical issues or demonstrate a real connection to the North and feel right for the moment.

The app

More than 30 percent of respondents use our app for news and more than 20 percent use it to listen to Cabin Radio, so it’s getting good use. The app is on about 5,000 devices, our internal statistics show.

However, some respondents would like improvements.

“My only suggestion is to optimize the Cabin Radio app for Android,” one wrote. “The newest update is showing text only with no thumbnail images next to articles.”

“I’m not a fan of the new app layout,” wrote another. “I liked it better when I could see the news articles separated better and a glimpse of the photos with the article.”

Said a third: “I like the idea of using the app, but it is still annoying to use.”

The new app, launched last summer, solved a couple of major problems (like the absence of a “back” button when trying to read a news story) and greatly improved the experience of listening while driving.

But we agree that the news experience through the app can improve and we’ll see if we can work on that this year.

Events guide

“A comprehensive events guide would help me move even further away from Facebook,” one person wrote, and we heard that sentiment multiple times.

At the moment, our events guide works primarily through people adding their own events to it. People really like it, and our survey suggests about a third of respondents are regular users, but it relies on residents adding events rather than us scouring the web.

Several people used the survey to ask if we can take a more proactive role in ensuring the calendar has every event in it, not least so they can cut remaining ties with Facebook.

That’s a resource-heavy request as it requires people to check daily across the web for events, but we’re working on a way to more closely monitor the events guide and make sure it isn’t missing important stuff.

Acronyms

“Acronyms (esp. MACA, CIRNAC) should be all capitalized!!!” one person wrote, expending their annual quota of exclamation points at the earliest opportunity.

We’ve dealt with this before. Cabin Radio’s style guide specifically caps down some initialisms if they are supposed to be sounded out.

Maca and Cirnac, for example, are pronounced as words (“mack-ah” and “sir-nack” respectively). But the GNWT, also an initialism, is not pronounced “guhn-whut,” so we use capitalization to differentiate between an initialism people pronounce letter by letter and one usually said as a word.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but it holds for most initialisms – from Nasa to Norad and Undrip to Unesco. We also think it makes some sentences slightly easier to read than a barrage of capital letters if multiple initialisms are in use.

(We’re not alone in this approach. Some major newsrooms do the same thing, though not all.)

‘Please open a Whitehorse studio’

To our surprise, this feedback arrived from multiple respondents.

We have no plan to establish a presence in the Yukon – figuring out FM in Yellowknife has taken practically a decade, one step at a time – but this was nice to hear and never say never.

Respondents from smaller NWT communities generally expressed a desire for more coverage of life outside Yellowknife, and that’ll be our biggest priority in geographic terms if we can find the money to do it.

Speaking of which, if you value our work, we encourage you to support us with a small monthly donation. All donations received go directly toward our journalism.

Thanks for reading, listening and supporting us in 2025.