Radio Survivor

2009 CMJ College Radio Awards

Even though I complain a lot about bogus radio station accolades, it’s still nice to see awesome stations getting recognition from their peers and the powers that be.

For the past few years college radio trade publication CMJ has been hosting a College Day during its annual CMJ Music Marathon in late October. As part of the festivities, college radio DJs and stations are feted with an awards ceremony honoring their efforts.

If you or your station reports playlists and charts to CMJ then you have an opportunity to suggest nominees for the awards. Now until September 27th you can nominate your choices for Station of the Year, Music Director of the Year, Most Adventurous Radio Station, etc.

You can see some of the individuals and stations who were nominated and won last year here. As always, I think it would be great to see nominees who haven’t made these lists before, so I encourage anyone involved with college radio to nominate and vote.

Princeton Review just released its annual latest college guide, The Best 373 Colleges, 2011 Edition, and in it, as always is a listing of colleges with popular radio stations. As I mentioned when I wrote about last year’s survey, I take issue with the methodology of these rankings and with the way that they have been described by Princeton Review and by radio stations. This listing of radio stations is headlined “Best College Radio Station” in the guide, even though students answering the surveys were simply asked “How popular is the radio station?” (which is the sub-headline).

Because of this, the survey really only gets at the fact that students seem to be aware of a radio station on campus. Survey takers aren’t asked the names of campus stations or if they are listeners. In fact, several of the schools on the list have multiple radio stations, so it’s impossible for one station to lay claim over the title of “most popular radio station” with certainty.

For example, in the latest survey Sacred Heart University is cited as having the 18th most popular radio station. Since Sacred Heart owns both an Internet-only student station (recently cited as one of the most popular campus clubs) and a public FM radio station, it’s not clear which station students were referring to when they said that their radio station was “popular.”

Additionally, this list is based on surveys of students at only 373 colleges, so it does not include the entire universe of college radio stations.

On Spinning Indie I have a complete list of this year’s “winning” radio stations in addition to the listings from the 2010, 2009 and 2008 editions of Princeton Review.

mtvU Woodie Awards

I was starting to feel like such a buzz kill today as I wrote yet another post complaining about the voting process for mtvU’s College Radio Woodie Award.

As I mentioned in my piece for Radio Survivor, this contest has had a number of rounds; so it’s been easy for me to scrutinize various issues along the way.

There were nominees who showed up in the Top 25 after being absent from previous rounds, station call signs attached to the wrong college, and then today I noticed that the voting rules were recently changed, reducing the number of rounds of voting.

(A station testimonial on the Woodies Contest Page)

Here is why 90.5 WASU is the best college radio station:

1) The perfect music for college!
2) Always giving away great stuff like movie tickets, concert tickets, and anything else us poor college kids want.
3) Hilarious commercials that are created by the students.
4) Great radio voices that are always on air. LIVE!
5) They do so much and their studio is like a closet. A new one is being built right now but they are the best station I have ever heard any they have done so much with little resources. That is passion!
6) The station manager is Jon Wood. Obviously WASU is destined to win the woody award!

I’ve also poked holes in the annual Princeton Review list of “Best College Radio Stations,” and was tickled this year when I noticed that they accidentally left the #3 station (it turned out to be WSOU) off of their online list of the top 20 stations in their 2010 rankings.

(Another Comment on Woodie Awards page:)

WRCT Pittsburgh. Not on this, but amazing nonetheless. Freeform as ****. http://www.wrct.org

Basically I get irritated when stations proclaim things like “We’re the Best College Radio Station in the Country!” based off of these lists. Am I bitter? Perhaps. My own station was not nominated for either of these awards; and it’s not alone.

(Another Comment on Woodie Award Page…in a nod to Kanye West at the MTV Awards:)

Other stations nominated, I’m real happy for you and Imma let you finish….
BUT KSCR TRULY IS THE BEST COLLEGE RADIO STATION OF ALL TIME OF ALL TIME

So, although I’m really glad that college radio is being recognized; I hope people realize that there are excellent stations beyond those who win these contests.

(Another comment from the Woodies award page:)

appalachian state only have cows and hill billies listening to their station. And none even know how to operate a radio. In other words, they probably are listening to another station instead of listening to your hick music station.

Perhaps the main benefit of these awards is that they get people talking. If your favorite station is nominated, then you may feel pride and may work to help get them an award. And, if your station was left off the list, then you may get angry and start working to promote the heck out of your station so that more people know about it.

(Another comment from Woodie Contest Page:)

WRVU Nashville is a truly great radio station, but the truth is that the non-student run radio shows are what make it a unique station. Most of the college students just play lame trendy hipster crap.

As long as we’re talking and debating about radio; then at least it means that we still care and that it has a future.

mtvU Woodie Awards

Whenever a list is produced of the BEST of anything there will be nay-sayers; whether the list comes from “experts” or is the result of popular vote. For that reason, I’m suspicious of every list that I’ve seen of the most popular/best college radio stations. Now with the latest contest underway, mtvU’s (MTV’s college-oriented network) award for best college radio station in their annual Woodie Awards, I have even more reason to cast a critical eye.

Currently one can vote from among the “top” 100 college radio stations in the U.S. on the mtvU Woodies page on RateMyProfessors.com. This is the second round of voting, as those 100 stations were chosen from a list of 300+ stations that was posted a few weeks ago. On September 15th, based on votes, the list will get whittled down to 50 stations. After that, votes will determine the top 25. Finally, there will be another 4 rounds to determine four regional winners (Northeast, West, South and Midwest). From those regional winners an overall winner will be chosen by popular vote.

I have several problems with mtvU’s specific process:

1) Timing of Nominations over Summer Break a Bad Idea

Voting for the top 100 stations was from August 18th to September 8th (the day after Labor Day). Although one could nominate stations not already on the list, chances are high that many college radio stations were on summer break when the voting process started and missed the opportunity to nominate or vote.

2) Factual Errors in Nominee List Casts Doubt on Results

During the nomination round I saw a ridiculously high number of factual errors on the list of nominated stations. When taking a look at the California stations alone, many of the listings had an incorrect school name attached to a radio station’s frequency and call letters. This makes me very dubious about a lot of things. The lack of attention to detail casts doubt on the entire voting process for me. It also means that we can’t know for sure if people were voting for the station that they meant to vote for if the call letters and school name were incorrectly matched.

(more…)

It’s time for my annual rant about the Princeton Review college survey! Every year they survey college students from all over the land (at 371 colleges this time around) in order to learn more about campus life for their “Best Colleges” guide that they market to high school students. 300ish students on average are surveyed per school and they are asked a range of questions about academics, food, the social scene, etc.

What irks me is that they hype some of their lists as one thing, when they are really another.

Although they ask college students, “How popular is the college radio station?” the top 20 list (you have to register on the Princeton Review site to see it) is headlined “Best College Radio Station” (with “How popular is the radio station?” on the second line).

Because of this, college radio stations get to proclaim that they were named “Best College Radio Station” by Princeton Review. Kind of deceptive….when it’s actually just a popularity contest AND when the survey doesn’t even specify the names of the radio stations (some campuses have more than one—so it gets left to them to fight over who gets bragging rights over the survey results).

Additionally, there are many college radio stations that will never appear in the rankings since students at their schools have not been surveyed. This includes my own station, KFJC at Foothill College.

According to the brand new 2010 survey, Ithaca College has the most popular radio station (although they have two: WICB and VIC Radio). You can see the complete list on Spinning Indie, along with results from 2009 and 2008.

Oh, and did I mention that the online listing only has 19 stations, as they inexplicably left off poor #3. Any guesses on who it could be?