Re: NorthEast Radio Watch 3/5: We Will Never Make Fun of Boston Weather Again...

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On 7 Mar 99,  Rob Landry wrote:

> I would argue that to serve a community one must define a target audience,
> then provide programming which attracts and hold that audience. If the
> tastes of the audience are diverse, then a station may be justified in
> adopting a diverse format. However, college station programmers often make
> the mistake of thinking they can reach several different audiences, each
> of which has fairly narrow tastes, by dividing the station's broadcast day
> or week into uncoordinated segments, each of which targets a different
> audience. That doesn't work; such formats effectively target only members
> of one audience which also belong to all the others.

Well, when you are =the= station of a campus community, that's the 
community you serve, and it has diverse tastes.  And on a college 
campus, I would assume that most people would themselves have 
diverse tastes.  Back at WMUA in the 1960s, for example, we had rock 
& roll on Friday night, classics most other evenings, folk on Saturday 
(after classics), and a number of other things at other times.  And, of 
course, UMass sports whenever.  I don't think I was the only one who 
listened to a number of different things on the station at different times.

I am under the impression that WMUA has less diversity in its format 
these days, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily better.  On the other 
hand, for awhile at least, there were two other stations on campus (both 
of which, I'm told, were unlicensed and were shut down when someone 
complained), which provided the diversity that WMUA had lost.


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 A.Joseph Ross, J.D.                                 617.367.0468
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