mtvU’s College Radio “Woodie” Award Voting Has Begun
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.
