This week Howard Stern will depart terrestrial radio for the heavens, as the shock jock retools his show for satellite. When Stern reappears in January, well over a million listeners are expected to switch to the $12.95-per-month audio service. Radio is dying, and Stern's departure and his listeners' defection are still more assaults to radio, already wounded by iPods and the Internet.

As affluent audiences defect to digital, radio stations are forced to scrimp on content. National feeds have become the norm as local news disappears. There's little left on the dial that's fresh or local, especially in the Philly market and its urban communities. With few exceptions, local radio is already dead.

Still, as old forms die, new ones emerge—which is good news, especially for Philadelphia's underserved neighborhoods. The time is right for locally based, community-run radio services to reappear—but this time, on the Web. New audio Web services, like those by Radio Volta and the University of the Arts, are already broadcasting on broadband. And just about the time the cost of iPods and podcasting drops to discount, WiFi should be arriving at every doorstep.

More than any other audio format, community radio speaks directly to local listeners, because it is produced for and by the people it serves. Unlike video, audio is cheap and easy to use. With just a little coaching, anyone with a story to tell can do it, and often do it very well. (Hear some good examples at www.schimmel.com.)

Like other quality media, community radio is a wonderful instrument for building democracy, as it did in South Africa and is doing in Afghanistan. More than ever, especially as the Daily News declines, urban neighborhoods will need community audio to reknit a social fabric torn by violence. As Web audio arrives, nonprofit and other social-service groups should to able to create homegrown audio information services as a means to build community.

So, all praise Marconi, and pass the microphone. It's the end of radio as we know it, proclaimed one civic group called Young Involved Philadelphia (YIP). YIP got together recently to throw a wake for radio and consider its alternatives. Fortified by pink martinis at the World Café at WXPN, it was a bittersweet choice of location, because when the University of Pennsylvania tossed out WXPN's volunteer staff in the '80s, community-based radio on the dial in Philadelphia essentially died.

Two of the YIP panelists who came to bury radio know firsthand how much Philly's inner cities need local, community radio. Hannah Sassaman sets up local nonprofit audio services for audiences as varied as migrant workers in Florida and ex-Black Panthers in Africa. Sadly, Sassaman's group, Prometheus Radio, located in West Philly, has yet to find a project in its own hometown. Yet.

Bruce Warren, now WXPN's program director, also knows the power of homegrown radio, having worked at XPN when it was a community service. Good things came out of old XPN, and not just music and local reporting. It went beyond radio into community-building. In the early '80s, the radio station helped me create the City Paper, and often collaborated with us. WXPN was once a hothouse for programs and projects you could use to build community.

But the station was also dirt poor, and Penn pushed the station toward its current professional, national format. Today, primarily as a music station, there's nary a controversial word on WXPN—save for the occasional incendiary lyric.

Defending WXPN, Bruce Warren reminded us that what's local is now global, and global is now local. It's charming locution, but it's wrong in this instance—and Warren is hardly naïve. In practical terms, just like other stations, the local is disappearing as XPN's audience expands. And what this city really needs are not more megastations, but many little ones.

The new community-based radio won't need money as much as it will need vision. Sassaman and Warren offered some intriguing possibilities. Sassaman singled out Joy Butts of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, who creates news and public affairs by, for and about the homeless community. So, why isn't this service a part of the mayor's initiative for the homeless?

As Warren put it, radio and classrooms go together. With minimal training, children from 13 on up make great radio. Kids do say the darndest things, and the best comes from the Radio Rookies, sponsored by WNYC in New York. But unless you count WXPN's Kids Corner—which is for much younger children—there's no youth radio in Philadelphia. So, why aren't schools reaching out, and using audio to get into kids' headsets?

Right now, Philadelphia has an opportunity to use community-based audio to create a network of virtual public parks. It's past time to hear from those silenced by violence, and we should be able to hear them soon.