NY TIMES OP ED: COLLEGE RADIO STATIONS BOUGHT OUT BY CONGLOMERATES

The New York Times recently ran an OP ED about the state of U.S. college radio as many stations licenses are being bought out by conglomerates.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12oconnell.html?_r=2
LAST Tuesday I tuned my radio to 91.1 WRVU, Vanderbilt University’s campus radio station, and heard the exact moment when college radio in Nashville died. Instead of rock, classical music was burbling out of my speakers.

It wasn’t a complete surprise: as a former D.J. for the station, I knew that after months of debate, Vanderbilt Student Communications, the on-campus nonprofit organization that controlled WRVU’s license, had decided to sell it to the local public radio station.

The sale added Vanderbilt to a growing list of colleges and universities, including Rice University in Houston and the University of San Francisco, where college radio licenses are being sold off, backed by the assertion that today’s well-wired students no longer tune in to the medium. But that misses the point: college radio is not only a vital part of the communities it serves, but it is even more essential in the Internet era.

There’s a false but widespread image of college radio as a pointless, narcissistic exercise — that it’s nothing more than a crew of campus oddballs who like playing D.J., even though no one is listening.

WRVU demonstrated how wrong that image is. Not only did it command respect and interest on campus, but, thanks to a longstanding and farsighted policy, it allowed and encouraged members of the off-campus community to volunteer as D.J.’s — and so drew on the rich cultural heritage of Music City U.S.A. as well.

My co-host and I shared the airwaves with Ken Berryhill, who calls himself the world’s oldest D.J. and played country classics; the encyclopedic Pete Wilson, who spun a mind-bending mix of old R&B, rock ’n’ roll and blues on his show “Nashville Jumps” (and had the sad honor of playing the last song on WRVU, Johnny Thunders’s “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”); and countless college students, balancing their awkward moments of dead air with delightfully original musical sensibilities.

The result was a cornerstone of the local community. Students learned from veterans, townies got to know Vanderbilt and Nashvillians got access to a chunk of the public commons otherwise dominated by big business: the airwaves.

According to Vanderbilt Student Communications, however, it was a commons that no one with a high-speed Internet connection wanted to use. And it’s true that fewer students were tuning in than before. But our off-campus listenership was always strong: WRVU was one of the only places people could hear traditional bluegrass, world music and electronica, to name just a few genres plumbed by the station’s award-winning D.J.’s over the years.

As anyone in the radio business can tell you, the Internet has not, in fact, signaled the death of radio. Ask Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity if they’d rather go to an online-only format. Besides, in a world where we can log on and find any song we want, it turns out that many people enjoy letting someone else curate a set list. College radio, free of the demands of profit and playability, is a particularly great source for such serendipity.

And it’s about more than music. Between 2004 and 2010 I was co-host and co-producer for a public affairs show on WRVU. At a time when local news was disappearing, we provided lengthy interviews with city politicians, Congressional representatives and authors. And people listened: I long ago lost track of how many times strangers, upon recognizing my voice at a coffee shop or in line at the movies, engaged me about a recent guest or news item from our show.

Vanderbilt Student Communications has asserted that WRVU will be able to move to Internet and HD radio stations. And I’m sure some listeners will tune in. But not many: few people regularly turn to Internet radio, and even fewer listen in their cars, where FM radio is a staple. And the Internet is less well-suited to building a strong local community than a 10,000-watt tower with regional range.

As a result of the $3.3 million sale, Vanderbilt Student Communications will create a new endowment to cover its other media properties, including campus magazines and newspapers, “in perpetuity,” insulating them from the university’s year-after-year budget process.

I’m sure this makes good financial sense, and there are many people on campus who will benefit from the exchange. But value, especially in an academic setting, can’t be reduced to simple economics. As a powerful forum for ideas, college radio stations are vital parts of student and community life, and Nashville will soon join other cities in discovering that their silence is deafening.

Freddie O’Connell is the former co-host and co-producer of Liberadio, a radio talk show in Nashville.
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