As a relative new kid on the block, David Pakman's voices goes out to the stars. Not the celebrity kind.

As he's pushed his "Midweek Politics with David Pakman" into the lineups of 70 radio and cable TV stations, it has slipped often into the wee hours. Pakman's goals for 2010 and beyond: More daytime slots. More stations (100 by year's end?) And success of the dollars and cents kind.

Pakman, 26, just added another outlet this weekend. Radio station WHMP-AM in Northampton started airing the show at 1 p.m. Saturdays.

Through the force of his personality – soft-spoken, positive, moderate, intelligent – Pakman is already succeeding in winning audiences far beyond the Valley. In coming months, he hopes to persuade the kinds of groups that sign on as public radio underwriters to lend their names to short segments in his program.

Pakman will need both audiences and backing if he is going to talk his way to another goal: taking the show daily.

"I think that's how we're going to springboard to something bigger," he said in a visit at the Haymarket Cafe last week.

It was here in Northampton that Pakman, then an intern at the Media Education Foundation and student at UMass, joined the group creating Valley Free Radio, a low-power FM station that broadcasts at 103.3 FM under the WXOJ call letters.

He started his show and then he did something unusual for people of his age. He stuck with it and made it better.

Today, "Midweek Politics" is produced in the Valley Free Radio studios in Florence by Pakman's three-member team: radio producer Lou Motamedi, video producer Natan Pakman (David's brother) and Pakman. The brothers grew up in Northampton.

David Pakman admits it was rough at the start. But it is now measured and well-produced. By making the hour-long show available for free, Pakman has placed it into an impressive number of markets. He doesn't know the size of his viewing and listening audience, but calculates that the 70 stations can reach 7 million people. Thousands of people are downloading podcasts of the show, or catching episodes on YouTube.

Despite the show's title, it is not always about politics. Last week's episode included an interview with a former FBI agent, Eric O'Neill. Even though the program is carried mainly by small, non-commercial stations, plenty of guests want to get on it.

The other day, Pakman was reflecting on comments from listeners who asked him not to turn into one of those aggressive radio guys. In a recent string of shows, he found himself with guests who needed a little correcting, including one who expressed the view that psychology was developed by Satan. Another espoused anti-gay views. Pakman pushed back.

"We shouldn't have booked them back-to-back," he said. "My thing is rarely to scold. ... I don't want that to be the perception."