About 2RES 89.7 FM Eastside FM

2RES 89.7 FM Eastside FM

Overview

Eastside Radio, call sign 2RES, is a community radio station broadcasting on 89.7 FM from studios in Paddington to Sydney's eastern suburbs and inner west. On air since 1983, it is one of Sydney's longest-running community broadcasters, and its current website sums up its proposition in a few words: "Your city. Your sound. Jazz, soul, arts and unexpected discoveries. Independent radio from the heart of Sydney."

The station's identity rests on two commitments that have defined it for four decades. The first is specialist music, above all jazz in its many forms, alongside soul, blues, funk and world music. The second is the arts: Eastside devotes its five weekday mornings to arts coverage, a commitment its own app description says makes it the only station in Sydney to devote five mornings a week to supporting theatre, dance, film, design, literature, Indigenous and visual art and other art forms. Its afternoons turn to the community, with drive programs focused on the issues that matter locally.

Eastside is owned and operated by the Radio Eastern Sydney Co-operative Limited, a not-for-profit organisation. It is a volunteer-run station augmented by a small core staff, and it is funded through listener subscription and donation, grants and limited commercial sponsorship. Many of its presenters are working Sydney musicians, DJs and artists, and the station does not use playlists: presenters make their own music selections, which gives the schedule its deliberately unpredictable, presenter-led character.

History

Eastside Radio has been on the air since 1983, a founding-era date that places it among the first generation of Australian community stations licensed to serve a defined local community in Sydney. A 2008 profile in The Bondi View marked twenty-five years of Eastside Radio, counting from that 1983 start, and the station's own campaigning in 2022 thanked supporters for what they had helped it achieve in thirty-nine years on the air — the same chronology, carried forward.

For most of that history the station broadcast in mono. On 5 February 2014 Eastside switched from mono to stereo broadcasting, a technical milestone the station announced to its listeners at the time and one that mattered particularly for a music-led station whose jazz, soul and world music programming benefits from stereo presentation.

The station's history also runs through the cultural organisations it has helped create. Eastside led to the establishment of The Red Room Company through Red Room Radio, which began airing in 2001. The program broadcast original poetry, writing, reviews and interviews with Australian writers, and the company that grew out of it went on to create alternative forms of poetry publication across radio, video and new media. In 1999 the station received the Tony Staley Award for its Jazz Overnight system, an early experiment in automated overnight radio: between midnight and 7am the system selected tracks from a website-listed catalogue, sampled with a bias toward tracks listeners had rated highly, and added station IDs and promos at intervals. The detail is worth recording because it shows a small volunteer station experimenting with listener-driven, web-linked programming years before that became routine.

Programming and Content

Eastside presents a range of specialist music genres, with jazz at the centre: traditional jazz, free jazz, swing, Latin jazz, bebop and fusion all have a place in the schedule. Around that core, specialist programs cover soul, blues and funk, Cuban and Brazilian music, gypsy music, world music and dance. Because presenters choose their own music rather than following a station playlist, neighbouring programs can sound radically different from one another, and the station treats that variety as the point rather than a problem.

The weekday mornings belong to the arts. Eastside's arts programs range from magazine-style shows to in-depth coverage of the visual and performing arts, film, literature and interdisciplinary work, and its website's news section carries a steady flow of theatre, concert and exhibition reviews written by its own contributors — reviews of Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra concerts, theatre productions and visiting artists sit alongside features such as The Sydney Ingredient, a radio feature about Sydney jazz history that premiered on the station in September 2026. The afternoon Drive programs, on air from 4pm to 6pm, specialise in local community news and political issues, mixing an eclectic music selection with interviews with activists, politicians, academics, social commentators and musicians and coverage of events happening around Sydney. The station also offers several programs in languages other than English, and lifestyle programs, reflecting the diversity of its licence area.

Eastside has also been a long-term presenter of live music. Its signature event, Eastside Live at 505, was a monthly night at Venue 505 in Surry Hills featuring two sets from a specialist music group and a DJ set from one of the station's resident presenters, broadcast live on the station, with proceeds from ticket sales used to help fund its continued operation. Global Rhythms, its world music festival held at Watsons Bay and broadcast live, ran from 2010 with performers including Mucho Mambo, Dereb the Ambassador and The Tango Saloon alongside DJ sets by Eastside presenters.

Audience and Reach

Eastside's broadcast area covers the eastern suburbs and inner west of Sydney. Its strongest reception areas include the municipalities of Botany Bay, Randwick, Waverley, Woollahra and the City of Sydney and the metropolitan inner west, and its signal can be heard as far west as the Blue Mountains. Through online streaming the station can be heard around the world, and its mobile app and on-demand services extend that reach to listeners who no longer listen on a broadcast schedule at all.

The audience the station describes is a loyal, culturally engaged one: listeners who come for jazz, soul, world music and arts coverage they cannot hear assembled in one place elsewhere on the Sydney dial, and who are asked, in return, to become supporters rather than remain passive consumers. That exchange — specialist, presenter-chosen programming in return for subscriptions, donations and radiothon support — is the economic and editorial basis of the station, and it shapes everything from its no-playlist policy to the role of its presenters as working members of the creative scene they cover. The station does not publish ratings claims, and none are made here.

Digital Presence

Eastside's digital home is eastsidefm.org, a site that functions as a program guide, a streaming and on-demand player, a news and reviews magazine and a supporter hub in one. Its front page promotes live listening under the banner "Live from Eastside", offers episodes, podcasts and news, and lets listeners explore shows by genre — jazz, world and soul among the sounds it foregrounds. The station's podcast series, catalogued on its site, show the range of its studio production: Breaking Waves, made by a new generation of presenters with disability and produced in association with the Community Broadcasting Foundation; How Much Do You Know?, a podcast series about HIV produced in the station's Paddington studios, also with the Community Broadcasting Foundation; Changing the Face of Jazz, profiling Australian women jazz instrumentalists; and programs of stories and poems for children, alongside its regular Drive and arts output in on-demand form.

The station also maintains a mobile app, Eastside Radio 89.7FM, updated as recently as December 2025 in its Android listing, and an email newsletter with an archive of campaigns stretching through its radiothons, festival coverage and supporter appeals. Its social and event promotion, record fairs and live concerts all feed back to the same digital centre, where the supporter sign-up at its support site converts listeners into the subscribers and donors the station depends on.

Ownership and Organisation

Eastside Radio is owned and operated by the Radio Eastern Sydney Co-operative Limited, a not-for-profit co-operative. The organisation is volunteer-run, augmented by a small core staff. Its presenters and producers include working musicians, DJs and artists at the forefront of Sydney's creative scene, people with distinguished careers in politics, advertising, journalism, science and education, and younger broadcasters at the start of their careers. The station presents its volunteer and intern program as a stepping stone to the next generation of content creators and media professionals, noting that many of its volunteers go on to careers elsewhere in media; its annual general meeting reports likewise record long service by volunteers, including presenters who have contributed for twenty years or more, and five or more years of service recognised with internal honours.

Funding comes from the standard community radio mix, weighted toward its listeners: listener subscription and donation, grants — the Community Broadcasting Foundation is credited as a partner on several of its podcast productions — and limited commercial sponsorship. Its radiothon, held with varying themes, is described as the station's main source of income and support; during radiothon, supporters are offered prizes and invited to launch parties and recognition events, and the 2022 radiothon message gives a sense of the bargain on offer, thanking listeners for thirty-nine years of events, record fairs, live jazz concerts, world music festivals, radio plays and training programs their support had made possible.

Contact and Availability

Listeners across Sydney's eastern suburbs, including Waverley, Randwick, Woollahra and the inner west, can hear Eastside Radio on 89.7 FM, and listeners anywhere can hear it through the live stream, episodes and podcasts at https://eastsidefm.org and through its mobile app. The station's studios are in Paddington, Sydney. Its published phone number is 02 9331 3000, its text line is 0431 860 335, and its support email, published with its app, is eastside@eastsidefm.org. Community members can support the station by subscribing or donating online, taking part in its radiothons, attending its live events, or joining as a volunteer or intern — the route by which, for more than forty years, most of the voices on 89.7 FM first arrived there.