Great news from David Duff, President of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio:
This year’s MPC will be in New York City, in the Greene Performance Space at WNYC/WQXR. Dates for the conference will be April 21-23, 2010.
We’ll be reducing the registration fee this year to assist stations affected by the economy (aren’t we all?). Exact amount will be set soon.
Conference hotel will be the Four Points Soho, with a nightly rate of $179.
We will keep you posted as the agenda develops.
Four petitioners hope there’s still a chance that the sale of St. Louis’s KFUO isn’t a done deal. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported today that multiple challenges have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission to block the sale of the commercial classical station to Christian broadcaster Gateway Creative Broadcasting.
One group is made up of members of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which is selling the station. Another is a fundraising group that has helped support KFUO. I was surprised to see Patty Wente speaking on behalf of this fundraising group — she used to be general manager of KWMU, the city’s main NPR station, until she was dismissed amid controversy last year.
Two updates today on recent station-centric kerfuffles that we’ve been following. The first pertains to WUFT-FM in Gainesville, Fla., which as you might remember decided to drop classical from its primary signal and move all the music to an HD channel.
Well, the station had its first fund drive since the switch, and donations were down — by 37 percent, according to the Gainesville Sun.
It’s official: St. Louis’s KFUO-FM, that city’s commercial all-classical station, will be sold to a Christian broadcaster, pending FCC approval. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has agreed to sell the station to Gateway Creative Broadcasting for $18 million and interest.