The Gainesville Sun reports that unhappy fans of the classical music aired until recently on WUFT have been, um, scanning the dial for alternatives — and finding cause for offense. Like WUFT, Gainesville’s Rock 104 is owned by the University of Florida. Former WUFT listeners have been turning to Rock 104, and they’re complaining about a morning show that airs on the station. What this article doesn’t explain is why these classical fans would turn on a rock station and then feel let down about what they find there — as if this weren’t entirely predictable. What did they expect? I’m baffled.
Meanwhile, the newspaper is still running letters from the miffed classical fans.
Across the country, KAWC in Yuma, Ariz., has removed most music programming — including classical — from its FM signal and put it on an AM station. KAWC management arrived at this decision after some strategic planning funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Information we got through the grant and strategic planning indicated that news and information programming is the most valuable service we provide,” said KAWC General Manager Dave Riek in the Yuma Sun. “We have to put that on our most powerful signal. It doesn’t make sense to bury that service on our AM, which is certainly not our strongest signal.” A KAWC press release also discusses the format change.
Bill McGlaughlin will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Audio Engineering Society convention in New York. McGlaughlin is host of WFMT’s Exploring Music and American Public Media’s Saint Paul Sunday.
And finally, the Sag Harbor Express features an interview with Wally Smith, g.m. of WLIU in Southampton, N.Y. The station’s license is in danger of being sold. I like Smith’s answer to the interviewer’s final question:
What would be your ideal radio station as a listener?
Well, since I am the program director at WLIU as well as the general manager, I think I am creating it. I am one of the few managers that believes radio should offer an eclectic offering of programming, various kinds of music, talk and news. I think it is abnormal to listen to one kind of radio — people never get a chance to discover something new … To me, that is what public radio should be doing, not providing one kind of thing.
“People never get a chance to discover something new.” Giving something new to a listener, something really worth hearing, comes from the gut, and from love — things that can’t be measured by Arbitron’s terms.
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“…KAWC management arrived at this decision after some strategic planning funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting…”
It’s troubling to note how often such CPB studies–and Public Radio consultants–provoke decisions hostile to Classical Music listeners and programmers. AM radio barely has the fidelity needed for good listening to Country music, never mind Classical’s subtler dynamics.
May the trend reverse,
-Robert Ready
Burlington, VT
“People never get a chance to discover something new.” Giving something new to a listener, something really worth hearing, comes from the gut, and from love — things that can’t be measured by Arbitron’s terms.
Amen to that!
This issue of what happens with terrestrial radio is getting really old and tired. This is especially true with the demographic in most colleges and universities. The only time this demographic is listening to a real radio is in their cars. That is a por venue for Classial music and for Jazz.
I did a time study which I started with KUSC. I started with them because part of their pitch was thsat they never played bits and pieces, that they always played complete works. Well, the average piece of music during the drive times of morning and afetr noon was about five minutes. The same was true at WCPE. Brenda Barnes at KUSC told me that if I did the same thing with practically any Classical music station, I would come up with the same results.
The paradigm for seious listening has shifted to the computer. No one is stuck with local offerings. From right here in Central New Jersey, I was listening to KUSC, Los Angeles, WCPE, Winston-Salem, NC., and WCNY, Syracuse, NY. I was also listening to Birminghammusic from Birmingham, England, and Venicwe Classical Music from Italia.
People can look at http://publicradiofan.com. They can look at http://www.shoutcast.com. iTunes has a whole dadanase of Classical stations.
There are great streams from stations like WGBH, Minnesota Public Radio, WFMT, WKSU, WETA, whatever.
There is plenty of Classical music available, maybe more than ever, and I don’t mean Classcial 24 (a service of mpr.org).
One of the best stations I have ever used is WPRB, Princeton. It is seventeen miles from my home and I can not pick it up in the house even though I have a huge antenna for FM on my roof. I listen to it “on the radio’ only in my car. Otherwise, at home or at work, it is on the computer.
We are soon going to have this issue as a local issue when WNYC accedes to 105.9 and “becomes’ the new WQXR at 600 watts. There is much moaning and gnashing going on. But, even now, at 93.9 and full power, whatewver that is, on-air people at WNYC have recommedned the computer because of the interference of buildings inthe New York City Metropolitan area.
So, folks, that’s where it’s at. We need to get used to it. Satellite radio or mp3 players in cars, computers at home and at work.
Sorry if I am stepping on toes.
Sorry for the awful typing above.
>>RSM
“What this article doesn’t explain is why these classical fans would turn on a rock station and then feel let down about what they find there — as if this weren’t entirely predictable.”
I am one of those very unhappy people in Gainesville, so I’m in a position to know.
The university has been going through a wrenching belt-tightening process because of the economic downturn. All the colleges have had to present plans of where they need to cut back. The College of Journalism and Communications, owner of the public stations WUFT-FM and WUFT-TV, the two commercial stations WRUF-AM and WRUF-FM, and a low-powered educational TV station (WLUF), has to decide how to allocate resources for all of these properties under these straitend circumstances.
We believe that they have been making some amazingly poor choices in the process. The dean brought in a consultant, paid $10K per month, to recommend how to revitalize the stations into moneymakers. This consultant, Mike Harding, who has been a member of the college’s Telecommunication Advisory Council for more than ten years, specializes in turning around failing broadcast stations. Apart from the issues of propriety of his serving on an advisory board and then turning into a highly paid consultant to the same body which he advised, it appears that he does not do his homework. He certainly should have been in a position to know that of all of the college’s media operations, the *only* one which was not a money pit was WUFT-FM.
The April pledge drive at WUFT-FM was a record breaker. They never had a drive bring in so much money, a fact which is all the more remarkable because it happened in the lowest part of the recession. People pledged in force for music, to the point, as we understand from sources at the station, that the music pledgers not only covered the whole cost of the music but also nearly covered the costs of the news programming (for which the pledges fell short).
So what was the recommendation? Turn WUFT-FM into a repeater for the NPR news programs and hack the music programming completely away. Well, oops, there was another blip in their research: there wasn’t enough weekend NPR programming available, so the let a few of the music shows stay on the weekends.
Finally, we come to the crux of the issue with WRUF-FM, the cause of the question in your news item. The consultant’s recommendation for WRUF-FM, which has been losing more than Harding’s salary every month (we’ve heard figures from 10K to 40K per month) features the morning program Lex and Terry. This is the WRUF-FM program which causes so much dismay. The program comically–but objectionably–relies on racism, misogyny, abuse of the homeless, puerile grossness, and the encouragement of excess alcohol consumption for its appeal. It is raunch radio writ large. Recommendation? Make the programming on WRUF-FM even more edgy.
Like WUFT-FM, WRUF-FM is a 100,000 watt FM station. They are the only two maximum-power FM stations in Gainesville. We are horrified that the plan is to hope that a money-losing station can turn around by doing more of the same thing, while the only one that keeps up with its obligations has its winning format turned off almost altogether.
The reporter writing the article about WUFT-FM referenced above has, I guess, a strange sense of humor. Those of us in the WUFT listening area who miss the news/music mix on our PBS station have certainly not tried listening to WRUF as a replacement! Of course not; that’s ludicrous! Most of us had never been aware that the University of Florida owned another analog radio station, and it was brought to our attention recently, due to our efforts to understand the whole University of Florida radio situation. We were shocked about some of the programming that the station was broadcasting (namely, the Lex and Terry show every weekday morning) because it is broadcast from, and under the auspices of, the University of Florida. We’re not surprised that there are such programs on the airwaves, but we are surprised to find racist, extremely sexist, alcohol-abuse glorifying, and homeless-bashing content being broadcast from an educational establishment.
Robert: Yes, AM is really a poor venue for any music — I noted that as well. There was once talk of HD Radio making AM sound as good as FM, way back when HD was first getting off the ground — I wonder what’s come of that.