The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

The mediageek radioshow’s informal multi-week focus on the medium of radio wraps up this Thursday with guest Jerry Del Colliano. For 28 years he published the radio industry newsletter Inside Radio, was clinical professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California and now publishes the blog Inside Music Media. Del Colliano had a unique vantage point to watch the consolidation and downfall of commercial radio, and he saw it coming. Now on his blog he documents the foundering of Clear Channel and other major broadcasters while forecasting the future of music media, with or without radio.

Tune in this Thursday June 18 at 9 PM CDT to 89.3 FM WNUR in Chicago on your analog radio or listen online at wnur.org. Of course the show will be available for podcast and download by Sunday at midnight at the radioshow site.

Continuing on the radio tip, I would like to now announce that I’ve embarked on a new group blog project focused on radio, along with two other collaborators who are both astute observers of the medium. The new blog is RadioSurvivor.com. My collaborators are the dogged FCC watcher, media historian and Ars Technica writer Matthew Lasar and Jennifer Waits, the woman behind the Spinning Indie blog and an expert on the history and vital role of college radio.

Our goal with the RadioSurvivor is to provide comprehensive coverage of radio from a variety of perspectives, from policy and regulation to technology and programming. We’re fans of radio and believe strongly in its viability as a medium with a future, despite the major commercial owners doing their best to run their stations into the ground.

Taking on RadioSurvivor doesn’t mean I’ll post here less. In fact, I think this will spur me to incorporate some new topics into the mediageek blog while I publish my more radio-centric material at RadioSurvivor.

Being a group blog our plan is to make sure RadioSurvivor has lots of fresh content every week — more than any one of us can do on our own. I hope you’ll check it out. Your comments are welcome!

Lubbock, TX loses an alternative radio voice

I very much regret to report the news of yet another college station leaving the air. This time the news comes by way of Jennifer at Spinning Indie:

nearly 50-year-old college radio station KTXT at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas was abruptly shut down on December 10th by the university. Apparently the school is shifting its priorities as far as student media go, and the station was seen as a financial drain, and perhaps, not “new media” enough for the school. What’s shocking is that KTXT is a prominent 35,000 watt FM station that has played an influential role in radio, airing music not otherwise heard in the area.

I think this comment Jennifer quotes from a Houston Chronicle article sums up the value of KTXT:

KXTX is the only things that made Lubbock more than a cow town. Please don’t take this away from the kids struggling to live there now. – Anthony Armendariz, Brooklyn NYC

One can only guess what Texas Tech has in store for KTXT now that it’s been yanked from the students and community. 35kw is an enormously powerful signal for a college station, though certainly useful in the prairies of west Texas.

The university also owns and operates a public station, KOHM-FM, which has a mixed line-up of NPR news/talk and music (primarily classical and jazz). My cynical side would predict that the university would like to repurpose KTXT as an all-music or all-news/talk pubcaster. KOHM has double the power of KTXT, so my guess is that KOHM would become the news/talk station, since that format is regarded as the more profitable public radio format, with KTXT becoming all music so as not to alienate the wealthy local geriatrics who donate to keep the unthreatening pop classics on the air.

In any event, this is another unfortunate reminder of the difference between a college station and a true community station. Most (but not all) community stations are run by local non-profit corporations with by-laws that ensure a level of democratic governance accountable to member donors. While not fail-safe, this sort of structure typically complicates efforts to shut down or radically alter the mission of a community station without community input. No such safety mechanism exists for a station owned and operated by a university or college, even a public one.

I don’t bring this up as an argument against college stations. Heck, I’m the adviser to one. Rather, it’s a reminder not to take these stations for granted, whether you’re a student, volunteer or listener. The temptations to sell of increasingly valuable non-commercial licenses or repurpose stations into supposedly more lucrative public radio affiliates are difficult to resist when you’re a college administrator faced with budget shortfalls.

According to the student station manager of KTXT, having on-air fund drives was “not encouraged” by the unviersity. In retrospect that only seems like an inducement to fail, given that the financial drain of maintaining the station is blamed for the shutdown. I hope that this serves as a warning to students (and advisers) at other college stations to pay attention to that bottom line and not be discouraged from finding ways to help fund the station if need be.

I really don’t want to blog about another 50-year-old student-run station leaving the dial.

Spinning Indie, a College Radio Blog

Once in a while I get comments here on the mediageek blog, and it’s especially great when they aren’t grammatically disastrous ads for v1agrA. So imagine how glad I was to receive a comment on my post about college radio from Jennifer Waits, who writes the Spinning Indie blog which is all about college radio.

Jennifer is on a mission to visit or do virtual visits and interviews with college stations in all 50 states, and it makes for great reading. Apparently she made an in-person visit to my backyard at WNUR last month, interviewing the general manager, Taylor Dearr. I’m sorry I wasn’t around for her visit.

Thanks to Jennifer’s virtual tours I’m learning about lots of stations I’d really never heard of that are bringing great radio to places like Fargo, Fairbanks and Stony Brook. It’s helpful to be reminded of the common challenges that college and noncommercial stations face, whether it’s managing music libraries or the vagaries of streaming, and possibly picking up some new approaches.

I hope Jennifer keeps up the posting.

NY Times Discovers College Radio Doesn’t Suck… er, no duh.

It’s got to be tough to be a NY Times reporter. As the stalwart standard-bearer of US print journalism, whenever you report on a cultural phenomenon you’re responsible for ostensibly declaring it as new, or newly rediscovered, newly viable…. newly whatever. While at the same time cultural insiders view that coverage with both “no duh” knowing disdain, along with the muted pride of being noticed by the Old Grey Lady.

So, that’s my stance on the Times’ recent article on continuing relevancy of college radio, spotlighting WRPI at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and KWVA at the University of Oregon. But primarily I’m glad to see the Times taking notice of what feels like an increasingly forgotten form of radio.

I got my start in college radio at WTSR-FM at the College of New Jersey (it was Trenton State College when I was there), and I’m very glad to say that ‘TSR is still a truly student-run station. Now I have the great privilege of being the adviser to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University. Although it seems the bloodshed has slowed, during the 90s and early 00s there seemed to be quite a slate of student stations being reclaimed by college administrations in order to be repurposed into public radio stations or even sold off to the highest bidder (usually a church or christian broadcaster). It seems that things have now stabilized, and I hope that the remaining student-run stations are able to stay that way, although I fear the economic downturn again will make college-owned stations seem like tasty prospects for quick cash.

Along with community radio, student-run college radio is one of the last strongholds for independently programmed radio that is responsive to local community. Student-run stations are often criticized by students and non-students for being comparatively elitist and unrepresentative of both campus and local community. I remember in my college days the station being criticized for playing mostly indie rock that many (if not most) of my fellow students weren’t interested in. They’d tell us that they would listen more if only the station would play more mainstream pop and rock like the local CHR station. While the management of the station might have liked to believe these students, even then we all had enough of an instinctive understanding of basic political economy to recognize that our little college station was no match for the commercial CHR’s advertising and market power. In essence, it was absurd to compete with the commercial stations on their own turf, and a complete waste of the noncommercial license to even attempt it.

As an adviser to a college station in 2008 I see the same trends noted in the Times article, in that the contemporary college student listens to way less radio now than when I was a freshman in 1989. It’s no longer the case that the average college student prefers the local pop station to their college station. Rather, the average college student really does prefer her iPod.

Yet, I argue that true student-run and programmed college stations play a valuable role of cultural and political education in their communities. It’s often overlooked that most college stations are also staffed by a percentage of community volunteers who bring in both community representation and a broader range of experience. While not the same as community radio, any community that has a student-run station should be thankful that this beacon of noncommercial integrity often comes as a partial or wholly-funded gift from the college or university that sponsors it.

Yes, it may esoteric, amateurish or occasionally sophomoric, but I also know that without college radio many a community would have no jazz, classical, bluegrass, blues or experimental music on its airwaves, in addition to the more youth-associated genres of indie rock, metal, rap, dance and electronic.

Sure, many people now turn to the internet, satellite radio and downloads for the music they would have once gotten on the airwaves. But what about those without the resources, money, knowledge or wherewithal to use the ‘net or iPods? Or who want to be able to tune in anywhere without any hassle? Radio isn’t dead, even if the proclivities of the professional middle class are changing.

Yuppies (even if they look like hipsters) never listened to music radio much anyway….

On tonight’s radioshow: Chicago Independent Radio Project

While there is a lot of good non-commercial radio in Chicago, one thing the city lacks is a true community station, programmed entirely by community volunteers and funded by community donations. Of course, it’s great that college stations like Northwestern’s WNUR and University of Chicago’s WHPK actively open their studios to community programmers. However, even great college radio is not quite the same as community radio.

That’s why an intrepid group of media pioneers are trying to get a true community station on the air in Chicago, with the Chicago Independent Radio Project. The effort required is more mammoth than other smaller cities because Chicago has no vacant frequencies for a full-power or low-power station anywhere near the city. So besides the significant task of fundraising and organizing necessary to get a station on the air, CHIRP has to take on the FCC and Congress to have rational LPFM channel spacing, allowing some new community stations to join Chicago’s and other cities’ airwaves.

On tonight’s radioshow Shawn Campbell, president of CHIRP, will join me to talk about the effort, its reason for being, its mission, and the challenges that lie ahead. Tune in live tonight on the radio or online at 9 PM CDT on WNUR 89.3 FM, Evanston, IL, or at 5:30 PM CDT tomorrow, Friday, at 5:30 PM on community radio WEFT 90.1 in Champaign, IL (also online). The show will be posted to the radioshow page by the weekend, and airs on a dozen other community stations, also listed on the radioshow page.

Post-First-WNUR-Show Recap

Just finished my first hour-long mediageek on the mighty WNUR. We had some phone system troubles during the first 10 minutes or so. First I couldn’t hear my guest, John, then he couldn’t hear me. But the very able producer/engineer Andrew figured out the glitch and got us up and working for the balance of the hour.

This is the first live show I’ve done since March and it reminds me how much I love live radio. I’m not a perfectionist, so I can roll with the little tech glitches. In fact, I think they remind the listeners that there’s a real human being working in real time behind the mic. Not a patchwork of pre-recorded segments with the occasional live break to give the time, traffic and weather on the eights.

For April through last week I’ve been recording the show podcast style in my home office on my MacBook. And while that provides a little more control, in that environment I find it hard to be inspired, nevermind focused and concise. It’s a matter of personality and preference I’m sure. But I started with live radio in college back in 1989 and that’s pretty much all I’ve ever done since. Certainly many of my interviews are pre-recorded because a lot of guests aren’t easily available during the live show time. But at least with another person on the line it’s a lot more spontaneous and lively.

So while the rise of podcasting and the easy access to high quality recording tools has leveled the playing field for people to produce their own radio-like programming, I am still convinced there is no substitute for a live multi-kilowatt transmitter. Perhaps live webcasting comes close–especially in terms of spontaneity–but the reach of a WNUR in terms of broadcast listenership could bankrupt someone with bandwidth bills on the ‘net.

Despite the minor glitches the WNUR studios are the nicest I’ve had the opportunity to work in and truly blow away most commercial stations aside from the major market leaders. And the staff at WNUR are a great bunch, and I’m having a great time getting to know them. It’s a true student run station–a dying breed, as we discussed on tonight’s show–and the students proudly put on an independent, challenging, independent and interesting set of programming.

And a big thanks must go out to Andrew Gothelf who stepped up and volunteered to assist with mediageek as soon as the show got scheduled one week ago. I’m looking forward to his contributions to the program.