Capital XTRA

Capital XTRA, formerly Choice FM, is an urban music radio station owned by Global Radio. It is anchored by an FM operation in London, and is also broadcast via DAB Digital Radio, Freesat, Sky, Virgin Media and online.

History

Choice 96.9 began as an independent company in March 1990, broadcasting from studios in Trinity Gardens, Brixton. It was Britain’s first 24-hour black music radio station with a licence, covering South London. The group won a second licence (see Buzz FM) in 1995, bringing a local version of their London offering to Birmingham, on 102.2 FM - in place of Buzz FM.

The advent of digital radio in the UK saw Choice, which already had an active webstream, joining the new MXR consortium and launching a DAB service which anchored London output with news inserts produced by the consortium's news service DNN.

The Birmingham licence was sold to Chrysalis Radio in 1999 and became Galaxy Birmingham, but Choice expanded within the capital in May 2000 when a largely independent North London licence was awarded for Choice 107.1, with the intention of reaching a larger Afro-Caribbean audience outside the limited range of the coverage from Brixton. The station was now broadcasting from Borough High Street, Borough, London.

Xtra Ottawa

Xtra Ottawa (formerly Capital Xtra) was a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community newspaper published in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was launched in 1993. Unlike its biweekly sister publications Xtra in Toronto and Xtra Vancouver in Vancouver, Xtra Ottawa, which started as a monthly, is now published 17 times a year, with a publication schedule of every three weeks. The Ottawa edition had a current circulation of 20,000 copies which reach 36,000 readers.

Printed on newsprint in tabloid format from its establishment in 1993, Pink Triangle Press announced on January 14, 2015 that the paper edition will be discontinued and the publication will continue in an exclusively digital media format.

Xtra Ottawa also publishes a gay tourism map, Out in Ottawa, every spring; the Ultimate Pride Guide in mid-July; and the Index gay business directory in December.

History

Xtra Ottawa was launched by Pink Triangle Press as Capital Xtra in 1993, shortly after the organization learned that Ottawa's existing LGBT publication, GO Info, had largely collapsed and was publishing irregularly with only a skeleton staff. Brandon Matheson, then a freelance journalist working in the Parliament Hill Press Gallery, was chosen to launch the project in conjunction with George Hartsgrove, then an administrator at the University of Ottawa.GO Info briefly tried to beef up its content in the face of its new competition, but folded in early 1994.