Categories
Interesting read for those into college radio
KridesBrideBritt
Posts: 25,781 jayfacer
Today was College Radio Day. We supported it. Sadly, I was too sick to attend, but I was rocking my WRSU shirt.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/college-radio-day-an-sos-save-our-stations/2011/10/11/gIQApqLidL_story.html
College Radio Day: An SOS for student-run stations
Ooh, that’s right! It’s brave new radio on WPSC-FM! . . . [HISS] . . .
Everybody’s moving, everybody’s moving, everybody’s MOVING, MOVING, MOVING . . . [CRACKLE] . . .
Juniors Matt Milzman, left, and Jeremy Altman put on their show, Georgetown's After School Special.
College radio is a genre, a format that belongs on the tuner alongside all your other basic offerings . . . [HISS] . . .
My mental state is all a-jumble, I sit around and sadly mumble . . . [HISS] . . .
All right! Here we go! It’s College Radio Day!
On Tuesday, 350 stations from across the college-radio universe spoke with one unruly voice, broadcasting an all-day celebration of eclectic music and the student-run, pizza-stained stations that play it.
Quirky, loud and unpredictable, college radio has dwelt for a half-century at the left of the dial, a youthful counterpart to public radio. The genre seeded protest in the ’70s and launched the careers of U2 and R.E.M. in the ’80s, but now finds itself under siege. Over the past decade, the economics of radio have pushed more than a dozen major stations off the airwaves.
One by one, universities are selling off stations to raise cash. FM licenses in major markets are worth millions. Recent sales include KUSF at the University of San Francisco, KTRU at Rice University in Houston and WXEL at Barry University in Miami.
Locally, the University of Maryland, University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary still own broadcast radio stations that are largely student-focused. But students at other schools have lost their access to the airwaves, including those at Georgetown and American universities in the District and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Georgetown sold its feisty radio station to the University of the District of Columbia in the 1970s for a dollar; UDC turned around and sold it to C-SPAN for $13 million in 1997. Johns Hopkins sold WJHU in 2002, spawning the professional public-radio station WYPR (88.1 FM). American University lost its student-run station in 1997, when the AM counterpart to WAMU (88.5 FM) shut down.
Students at all three schools fought to get back on the air. Instead, the universities moved the stations online. Students are mostly happy with the new format — although they’re lucky if a streaming show draws 20 listeners.
“It’s an incredible freedom that you get, if you’re a freshman in college, to have an hour time slot to talk about whatever you want to talk about, to play the music you think people should hear,” said Caroline Klibanoff, 21, general manager of WGTB at Georgetown, which operates solely online.
Howard University’s WHUR (96.3 FM) has evolved from a laboratory for future broadcasters into a professional outfit. Howard students must make do with an AM station.
United they stand
A group of station managers organized College Radio Day in hope of generating enough support and positive pressure that universities won’t pull the plug.
“College radio is a very, very important medium. Don’t take it for granted,” said Rob Quicke, general manager of WPSC-FM at William Paterson University in New Jersey. “Because if it vanishes, the voice of an entire generation of students will vanish with it.”
Quicke said the idea of a unifying college-radio event came to him last winter as he watched the film “The Social Network.”
Tuesday’s event drew 350 official participants, including six broadcast and Internet stations in Virginia, and three each in Maryland and the District. WTJU (91.1 FM), U-Va.’s station in Charlottesville, marked the occasion by broadcasting a series of student testimonials about the power of college radio. WGTB broadcast public service announcements about the event and posted an essay penned by Klibanoff. DJs at U-Md.’s WMUC (88.1 FM) were instructed to work college-radio talking points into their shows.
Airwaves in age of Pandora
College radio dates to the 1920s. Student-run stations diversified FM radio by playing free-form set lists as commercial stations settled into tightly scripted formats. Many acts admired by critics broke through on college radio; the pattern became so pervasive in the 1980s that the decade is often termed the “college radio era.”
But many college students today don’t own a radio. With the help of iPods, shuffle buttons and “smart” Internet stations such as Pandora, they build their own stations.
“We are one of many voices at this point,” said Alex Rudolph, 22, general manager of WVAU, an Internet-only station at American. “College radio is not the be-all, end-all as far as getting the next Sonic Youth out there.”
Leaders of the college-radio industry embrace Internet stations, but not as substitutes for traditional broadcast stations, which have greater reach. And with the number of those stations shrinking, they felt it was time to unite.
“The hardest part for college radio is letting people know that it’s still here,” said Peter Kreten, general manager of WXAV-FM at St. Xavier University in Chicago. “And if you give us a shot, you may hear your new favorite band.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/college-radio-day-an-sos-save-our-stations/2011/10/11/gIQApqLidL_story.html
College Radio Day: An SOS for student-run stations
Ooh, that’s right! It’s brave new radio on WPSC-FM! . . . [HISS] . . .
Everybody’s moving, everybody’s moving, everybody’s MOVING, MOVING, MOVING . . . [CRACKLE] . . .
Juniors Matt Milzman, left, and Jeremy Altman put on their show, Georgetown's After School Special.
College radio is a genre, a format that belongs on the tuner alongside all your other basic offerings . . . [HISS] . . .
My mental state is all a-jumble, I sit around and sadly mumble . . . [HISS] . . .
All right! Here we go! It’s College Radio Day!
On Tuesday, 350 stations from across the college-radio universe spoke with one unruly voice, broadcasting an all-day celebration of eclectic music and the student-run, pizza-stained stations that play it.
Quirky, loud and unpredictable, college radio has dwelt for a half-century at the left of the dial, a youthful counterpart to public radio. The genre seeded protest in the ’70s and launched the careers of U2 and R.E.M. in the ’80s, but now finds itself under siege. Over the past decade, the economics of radio have pushed more than a dozen major stations off the airwaves.
One by one, universities are selling off stations to raise cash. FM licenses in major markets are worth millions. Recent sales include KUSF at the University of San Francisco, KTRU at Rice University in Houston and WXEL at Barry University in Miami.
Locally, the University of Maryland, University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary still own broadcast radio stations that are largely student-focused. But students at other schools have lost their access to the airwaves, including those at Georgetown and American universities in the District and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Georgetown sold its feisty radio station to the University of the District of Columbia in the 1970s for a dollar; UDC turned around and sold it to C-SPAN for $13 million in 1997. Johns Hopkins sold WJHU in 2002, spawning the professional public-radio station WYPR (88.1 FM). American University lost its student-run station in 1997, when the AM counterpart to WAMU (88.5 FM) shut down.
Students at all three schools fought to get back on the air. Instead, the universities moved the stations online. Students are mostly happy with the new format — although they’re lucky if a streaming show draws 20 listeners.
“It’s an incredible freedom that you get, if you’re a freshman in college, to have an hour time slot to talk about whatever you want to talk about, to play the music you think people should hear,” said Caroline Klibanoff, 21, general manager of WGTB at Georgetown, which operates solely online.
Howard University’s WHUR (96.3 FM) has evolved from a laboratory for future broadcasters into a professional outfit. Howard students must make do with an AM station.
United they stand
A group of station managers organized College Radio Day in hope of generating enough support and positive pressure that universities won’t pull the plug.
“College radio is a very, very important medium. Don’t take it for granted,” said Rob Quicke, general manager of WPSC-FM at William Paterson University in New Jersey. “Because if it vanishes, the voice of an entire generation of students will vanish with it.”
Quicke said the idea of a unifying college-radio event came to him last winter as he watched the film “The Social Network.”
Tuesday’s event drew 350 official participants, including six broadcast and Internet stations in Virginia, and three each in Maryland and the District. WTJU (91.1 FM), U-Va.’s station in Charlottesville, marked the occasion by broadcasting a series of student testimonials about the power of college radio. WGTB broadcast public service announcements about the event and posted an essay penned by Klibanoff. DJs at U-Md.’s WMUC (88.1 FM) were instructed to work college-radio talking points into their shows.
Airwaves in age of Pandora
College radio dates to the 1920s. Student-run stations diversified FM radio by playing free-form set lists as commercial stations settled into tightly scripted formats. Many acts admired by critics broke through on college radio; the pattern became so pervasive in the 1980s that the decade is often termed the “college radio era.”
But many college students today don’t own a radio. With the help of iPods, shuffle buttons and “smart” Internet stations such as Pandora, they build their own stations.
“We are one of many voices at this point,” said Alex Rudolph, 22, general manager of WVAU, an Internet-only station at American. “College radio is not the be-all, end-all as far as getting the next Sonic Youth out there.”
Leaders of the college-radio industry embrace Internet stations, but not as substitutes for traditional broadcast stations, which have greater reach. And with the number of those stations shrinking, they felt it was time to unite.
“The hardest part for college radio is letting people know that it’s still here,” said Peter Kreten, general manager of WXAV-FM at St. Xavier University in Chicago. “And if you give us a shot, you may hear your new favorite band.”
Comments
he has a metal show on the OCC campus
very tough industry to get into
End Transmission: Are These the Final Days of College Radio?
By Marc Hogan
National College Radio Day came and went earlier this week, a new, non-Hallmark holiday to honor students' "unique and fearless programming" on the left of the dial. Despite the involvement of Coldplay and more than 350 student-run stations, you might not have noticed. College radio has always been a home for diverse sounds, ideas, and ways of awkwardly transitioning between songs when the CD starts skipping, but as Gawker points out, the format has recently fallen on hard times.
From coast to coast, universities have been shuttering their student-run stations, as financial woes, the shifting media climate, and other factors push administrations to find another use for their highly valuable FM licenses. Rice University sold its KTRU-FM for $9.5 million in May, while Vanderbilt University and the University of San Francisco each have $3-4 million deals of their own in the works, according to USA Today. Soon, those schools' stations could go the way of the student-run frequencies at Texas Tech University, Augustana College, and Chattanooga State Technical Community College, among others.
Unless something happens, more college radio stations will be signing off for the last time in the months and years ahead, supporters of diversity on the airwaves say. Tracy Rosenberg, executive director at the Oakland, California-based media resource and advocacy center Media Alliance, says universities will "absolutely" keep selling off their licenses, given their budget constraints. "I think many would try to sell anything that isn't nailed down," she writes in an e-mail.
A whole lot could depend on what federal regulators decide to do about the University of San Francisco's student-run radio station, KUSF. "The future of college radio hinges on how the FCC handles the KUSF station," e-mails former KUSF DJ/producer Josh Wilson, co-founder of Independent Arts & Media, nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Friends of KUSF. "If the FCC stops the sale, my understanding is that this will mean a lot of re-evaluation by colleges and universities that previously had planned to sell."
Another flash point in the battle over college radio turns out to be Providence, Rhode Island. As Radio Survivor reports, Bryant University student station WJMF revealed this summer it would be going off the FM airwaves so a Boston public radio station could use the frequency to simulcast its WGBH all-classical station. At Brown University, where student radio dates back to the 1930s, Brown Student and Community Radio will go online-only after losing its lease on WELH 88.1 FM.
Sure, students have plenty of ways to access new music and audio these days, from online music stores and subscription services to streaming providers like Pandora and Spotify. But FM radio provides a more public forum, where people can make the accidental discoveries so essential to alternative music and culture. Factor in the power and reach of many college radio stations, as well as the widening "digital divide" between people with online access and the many without, and the importance of college-radio stations becomes only more apparent.
Supporters of student-run radio stations aren't entirely powerless. Anyone interested can use this link to write to FCC chair Julius Genachowksi. People can support their existing college radio station, if they have one, and let the administration know they value their local educational noncommercial station. Advocates can also set up "friends of" nonprofit stations, like Friends of KUSF in San Francisco, to support and fight for the college radio stations in their towns.
"I think there is a ton of hope on the horizon," says Hannah Sassaman, a senior field analyst with the New America Foundation think tank and a former longtime organizer with the Prometheus Radio Project, a major force behind last December's Local Community Radio Act. "The hope really comes from the passionate population of DJs, of community members, and the listeners. You'd be surprised how many college radio stations have passionate listeners who plug into their online streams from half a world away."
Rice University lecturer and film program manager Tish Stringer makes another point in a protest letter sent to the FCC. "I learned how to make media not in university courses, but rather at these media centers where a student could become involved in not just talking about media, but the process of making it themselves," Stringer writes. "Working in those places literally changed my life."
Dear Commissioners:
I am writing in protest of the proposed license transfer of 50,000 watt Houston radio station KTRU 91.7 FM (and its 91.5 FM translator) from Rice University to the University of Houston System (UHS). (File Nos. BALED-20101029ACX and BALFT-20101029ACY). This proposal is very definitely not in the public interest.
I am a Rice University Staff member. I work as the Film and Video Technician at the Rice Media Center. It is my job to train students to use equipment to make films and to project films at Rice Cinema. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, I was as a volunteer DJ on our college radio station, 770 AM Radio K and was a paid employee of the university's video department working at the television station and in the field shooting and producing videos. I went on to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Rice with a focus on media studies and ethnographic film. I make films myself and am passionate about teaching others how to make media. I learned how to make media not in university courses, but rather at these media centers where a student could become involved in not just talking about media, but the process of making it themselves. Working in those places literally changed my life.
KTRU is a station where a student can easily become involved in making media and responsible use of technology. In fact, it is one of the only places in Houston where a student can become involved with the programing at an FM station. Access to the airwaves is a very striking lesson in media literacy, perhaps the most powerful.
U of H already has a NPR radio station on campus and it is extraordinarily difficult for students to become involved at that station as glorified gophers, let alone actually being on the air and managing a program. As a national affiliate (NPR) station, there is less room at University of Houston's current station for local programming than there is at a student run, all locally produced content station such as Rice's. I have no reason to believe the proposed new NPR station would be any different. Moving the station from Rice to U of H would drastically reduce student and community access to the airwaves of Houston and would not give them the chance to learn to use technology to express themselves, participation in the media or media literacy skills that come from those opportunities.
The deal to sell Rice's student run radio station to U of H was done behind closed doors without consultation of the very people who put that station on the air and keep it running day after day. The tower and transmitter where this station broadcasts from and an endowment for the ongoing maintenance of them was given as a gift to the students that operate KTRU, and should not have been sold by the Rice administration without the consolation of the KTRU student and alumni workers.
KTRU is truly a unique gem and an important part of the local community, and it would be to Houston's great detriment to lose this locally programmed, student run asset. The public interest would be best served by KTRU's continued existence on Houston's FM dial. I humbly request that you stop the proposed license transfer. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Tish Stringer, Ph.D.