Re: college radio gone dark for summer?

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 08:32 AM 6/5/2003, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
>Curiously, what percentage of college stations allow non-students on the 
>air?  It seems that doing so would kill 2 birds with one stone...allowing 
>a lot of aspiring djs a shot at an airshift, and fill in those gaps in the 
>schedule.  I've heard that many college stations are having trouble 
>filling shifts these days.  Maybe require some token payment to cover expenses?

Most colleges aren't interested in investing ANY money in their 
stations.  Whatever the bare minimum is, minus 30%, is the usual budget 
allocation rule I've seen.

Allowing non-students on-air can cause as many problems as it solves 
without good management and there are precious few student-run stations 
with good management.  We don't expect students to be experts in the 
boardroom of major companies, why do we expect it for radio 
stations???    Anyways, you frequently get more and more and more 
non-student DJ's and they stick around so all the "good timeslots" get 
"hogged" as students come and go but a community member sticks around at 
the same slot for a few years.  The students want the slot for 
themselves...usually because they're slightly arrogant (most radio folks 
have hefty egos, you know :-) and because they lack perspective.   The 
community folks often have put up with a lot of flak and have built an 
audience so they don't want to leave the slot.  The school starts wondering 
why all these non-paying people get to use "their" station and kick 'em out 
and then wonder why there's no listeners all of a sudden...

...sigh...

It often is a real "us vs. them" mentality at a station with students and 
community members and without strong but fair management at the top you run 
into real problems sooner or later.  Both WBRS and WMFO have had serious 
meltdowns from this problem in the past 10 years and both have become 
crappy little stations (sorry Tony, but you know I was there and I know 
what I'm talking about) with no money, broken equipment, mostly lousy 
programming (usually there's a handful of good shows in an ocean of crap) 
and no interest except from people who are looking out only for themselves 
(both students and community members).   Usually most of the good people 
leave the station, leaving the handful of good folks to hang their heads 
against the wall on a regular basis...and often the school admin ends up 
being very alienated in the process dooming the station in the long-term.

WZBC has been floating at the edge of this for a while now...and I'm 
busting my butt to make sure it doesn't happen.   I'll bet WMBR has similar 
problems; they have a moratorium on new non-student staff members trying to 
generate more student involvement.



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Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA