Yet another college station going NPR?
The Hartford Advocate reports Wesleyan University in Hartford, CT is considering getting into the NPR business: "They call it free-form radio, which station manager Jesse Sommer describes as "more of a philosophy than anything else. The DJs and the talk show hosts have complete reign over what they play and say."
WESU 88.1 has been a free-form station since 1988. However, that wooly-booly spirit may soon give way to the regimented format of National Public Radio. On Sunday, Oct. 31, Wesleyan President Doug Bennet told a group of students that he intended to devote the hours from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. to an NPR feed out of Sacred Heart University's WSHU.
The decision at Wesleyan could be a threat to WNPR, the Hartford-based public radio station broadcast on 90.5.
Kim Grehn, WNPR vice president, said that WESU's picked-up NPR feed "will offer us increased news competition for the same news audience we've been cultivating for some time."
WSHU has two NPR feeds; one AM and one FM. It is the AM programming that would be picked up, and could include "Talk of the Nation" "Fresh Air" and even the BBC World Service, which are broadcast now on WSHU-AM.
Grehn said that WNPR, which plays classical music weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., has "been considering a move to talk format." The competition from WESU's NPR feed would not necessarily stop WNPR from pursuing those plans, Grehn said.
Adopting the feed would generate approximately $50,000 for the university, and make the station financially self-sufficient. Money's not the sole motivation for the move, though.
"The school wants the station to have an educational value," Wesleyan spokesman Justin Harmon told the Advocate. "Right now, the station is almost entirely student-based, and our feeling is that it should have more public-affairs programming."
Under the plan, the broadcasting voice of the students wouldn't be entirely crushed. "Students would have a primary voice in the [non-NPR] programming," Harmon said. However, many of the students involved with the station see the president's proposal as an assault on their autonomy."
RBR observation:
Why on earth would Hartford, like so many other cities these days need multiple stations playing the same NPR feed - - often at the exact same time? How does that serve the public interest?! The Washington, DC market is another example - - no freeform college radio (except 10-watt U of MD's WMUC-FM that covers the campus well but not much else for most), although there are plenty of college stations. How can college students become interested in radio if their job is, "Oh press this button for the NPR feed and sit down for three hours." It's no wonder groups like Reclaim the Media are up in arms. One way to solve the cries of 'no community radio' left anymore: Allow communities to buy time on some of these hurting college stations (some do!). Then LPFM stations may not be quite so necessary.
Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
