Waning Support for College Radio Sets Off a Debate

[Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/busine..., December 5, 2010]

Like many college radio stations across the country, Rice University’s KTRU and Vanderbilt University’s WRVU play a broad swath of music — from undiscovered indie bands and obscure blues acts to ’60s garage rock and ’80s postpunk. It’s a mix largely absent from commercial broadcasts, and students active in radio say their stations add distinct voices to their cities’ broadcast landscape.

But as colleges across the country look for ways to tighten budgets amid recession-induced shortfalls, some administrators — most recently in the South — have focused on college radio, leading even well-endowed universities to sell off their FM stations. That trend was felt this summer at Rice and Vanderbilt, among the most prominent of Southern universities, stirring debate about the viability of broadcast radio, the reach of online broadcasting and the value of student broadcast programming.

“We play music that you won’t find on any other Houston radio station” said Joey Yang, a junior at Rice and station manager for KTRU. “KTRU’s mission is to broadcast exactly what you can’t find elsewhere on the dial.”

Scott Cardone, a sophomore disk jockey at WRVU with a two-hour electric blues show, pointed to the potential void in Nashville if Vanderbilt’s FM signal were to be sold. “The community will lose what probably is the last radio station playing anything other than country, Christian or Top 40 in the whole city,” he said. “You can’t hear the music that we play anywhere else.”

At the center of public discussion are “student habits” — or whether students are actually tuning in to the universities’ FM signals.

In September, Vanderbilt Student Communications, the corporate body that oversees Vanderbilt University media, released a statement announcing it would explore the migration of its student-run radio station to exclusively online programming. The exploration, which was voted on by a board of five at-large students and three faculty members, was a response to “changing student habits and evolving economic challenges,” according to a statement by the group.

In August, Rice announced the decision to sell student-founded station KTRU — its 50,000-watt FM frequency, broadcast tower and F.C.C. license — to the University of Houston, for $9.5 million. In a statement, David W. Leebron, the president of Rice, called the station a “vastly underutilized resource.”

The announcements at Rice and Vanderbilt highlight a stream of college radio station closings in recent years, including KTXT at Texas Tech University in 2008 and Augustana College’s KAUR in South Dakota in 2009.

While officials at both Rice and Vanderbilt emphasize that the stations will continue to broadcast online, Mr. Yang believes the loss of a terrestrial signal will effectively delegitimize KTRU.
“As a 50,000-watt station that can be heard all across Houston, there’s a sense of responsibility to the community,” he said. “When you lose a terrestrial footprint in Houston — anyone can put out a signal that’s on the Internet — it takes away the legitimacy of what we’re trying to do.”

Despite obvious parallels between KTRU and WRVU, Chris Carroll, director of student media at Vanderbilt Student Communications, draws a stark contrast between the situations at the two universities. At Vanderbilt, he said, “what’s happening, really, is a big public discussion about is this a good idea or not, and there’s no conclusion to that yet.” Rice, he said, made the decision to sell KTRU behind closed doors — without student input.

Mr. Carroll, who does not vote on the organization’s board, contends that students just don’t listen to terrestrial radio anymore.

“We will pull a random sample of Vanderbilt undergrads — of 500 or so at a time. And what we’ve found is that these students aren’t listening to radio at all. It’s not just WRVU,” he said. Instead, students are listening on mobile devices like smartphones and laptops, both of which are more readily serviced by the Internet, he said.

Mr. Cardone acknowledges that WRVU’s audience may be thinner on campus than off, but he believes the station justifies its value as one of the only relevant connections between the students and the city. According to Arbitron, a media and marketing research firm that measures local radio audiences, the station reaches just over 30,000 people each week in greater Nashville.

After a tumultuous summer, groups focused on saving the stations have mobilized at both campuses. Both have Web sites — savektru.org and savewrvu.org — and Facebook pages to gather comments and provide updates.

Friends of KTRU, a group opposed to selling the station, retained the Paul Hastings firm to represent it, and on Friday, the group filed a petition to deny with the F.C.C., claiming the sale was not in the public interest.

At Vanderbilt, Mr. Carroll says the WRVU page on vandymedia.org, an umbrella site for the campus student media, has garnered more than 700 comments. He says he will sort them into common themes before the board reviews them early next year.