Top Menu

college radio station KSPC Fall 2015 Zine. Photo: J. Waits

College Radio Watch: Join us as a Patron by Aug 1, Tours and More News

At Radio Survivor, we’re in the midst of a Patreon campaign, with a goal of having at least 100 monthly donors to Radio Survivor by August 1st. If you chip in at least $5/month, we’ll send you our inaugural ‘zine. You may not realize that Radio Survivor is a lean, volunteer effort and our work on the website and podcast is on borrowed time between all of our other paying gigs and obligations. With more contributions, however, we will be able to do some more in-depth projects, including documenting the history of LPFM and the indymedia movement. As of this writing, we need another 59 donors, so now’s a great time to join up to support our work covering college radio, community media, and audio culture. Here’s a link to donate on our Patreon page. Thanks!

Are all “College Radio” Station Sales Part of a Broader Trend

I’m a stickler for definitions and tend to think about college radio as a specific category of radio station that includes substantial student involvement. For that reason, I’m careful to distinguish between college-based stations and college radio stations. Unfortunately stations at colleges often get lumped into the same category, which can create confusion when talking about broader trends in the industry, including radio station license sales.

Although I’ve written and spoken about various college radio station license sales over the past decade or so, I’m cautious to not report on these stories as part of a major trend or decline in college radio. As part of that effort, when there is news of a station sale, I work hard to not feed into a common industry refrain that “yet another” college is selling its license. Whereas other types of radio station licenses may get sold and bought with regularity, news reports rarely state that “yet another station is being sold.” In part, I want to encourage folks to look beyond the headlines.

Let’s interrogate the circumstances of these sales, particularly when the “college” stations in question aren’t always student operations. I worry that stories about college’s selling radio licenses are interpreted on the surface as student-oriented “college radio station” sales, leading the general public to also think that college radio is dwindling. It’s much more complicated than that, since there are many types of radio stations on campuses (public radio, religious radio, student-run stations, lab-oriented training stations and more) and not all of them even broadcast over FM or AM.

A few recent college-owned license sales are for stations largely airing syndicated national programming from a religious or public radio broadcaster. That’s the case with the latest instance at Corban University in Oregon.

All Access reports “CORBAN UNIVERSITY is the latest college to bail on FM radio, selling Contemporary Christian KWBX/SALEM, OR to EDUCATIONAL MEDIA FOUNDATION for $90,000. KWBX is already an affiliate of EMF’s AIR1 network.”

Digging further, it turns out that from the very beginning KWBX has been an AIR1 affiliate, playing Christian music and programming. In an interesting twist, however, the station briefly aired Corban University sports as part of its initial agreement with Air1. Back in 2011, a Hillop News profile of the station recounted its nearly 8-year-run at that point:

One of the purposes of having a radio station was to train students to broadcast Christian programming, but with students off campus for four months of the year during the summer, an essentially student-run radio station just wasn’t possible. With no infrastructure, the endeavor might have stopped there. But [Mike] Allegre was determined to see it through. He had heard that Air 1 was looking for a place to establish a station in Salem, so he decided to pursue that path.

San Diego College Radio Tours on the Podcast

On this week’s podcast, I share a travel report from my journey to San Diego for the National Federation of Community Broadcasters conference. I reveal highlights from my presentation on the “Past, Present and Future of Community Radio” panel and also give a preview of my soon-to-be published San Diego college radio station tours.

More College Radio News

Infrastructure

Station Sales, Sale Attempts

Events

History/Anniversaries

Awards and Accolades

Alumni

Support from readers like you make content like this possible. Please take a moment to support Radio Survivor on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!
Share

, , ,

Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes