It’s
another day and another college radio station is on the ropes.
WKKL
FM 90.7, licensed to Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable,
Massachusetts is not on the air.
They stopped transmitting in late December because of equipment
failure.
Now the Community College is considering ways to relinquish the station’s
FCC broadcast license. Bruce
Riley, interim Dean of Arts, Humanities and Adult Education at the college
summed it up this way in the Cape Cod Times [link]:
“It’s about budget priorities.
It’s a fairly pricey fix. It’s kind of a strategic decision. We have to figure
out whether it’s cost-effective.”
The
cost of repairing the equipment is estimated at $10,000.
WKKL
is known as The Cape’s Alternative. It has hosted generations of student DJs
and happy listeners.
Now, the student staff hopes that Community College will choose
to keep WKKL going. It is the latest in a recent string of college stations signing off:
•
Late last fall, Denison University in Granville, Ohio, sold WDUB (The Doobie) to WOSU in Columbus for the
unbelievably low price of $5,000 cash and $47,040 in underwriting spots.
Read
our coverage here.
•
The College of Wooster in Ohio sold the license for WCWF 90.9 FM (Woo 91) to the Educational Media Foundation
(EMF) for $170,000.
•
The University of Minnesota Duluth is currently completing the sale of KUMD to
the local PBS TV station for $170,000. See our coverage here.
•
In late December 2019, the University of the South, located in Sewanee,
Tennessee, mailed the license for WUTS back to the FCC while students were gone
on Christmas break. Our report here.
An anonymous
Spark News reader pushed back on our reporting:
"On the other hand, we
forget that most universities are facing some serious economic trouble. Class
sizes are about to shrink dramatically due to a coming demographic crunch and
belts must be tightened."
Of
course this is true. A common theme in all of these situations is that the people in charge of the stations don't believe that the "campus station" doesn't bring
anything of tangible value to the university. It is a feel-good.
Unfortunately, good vibes are not enough to make it sustainable. This is a time of budget shortfalls and an emphasis on ROI --
the “return on investment.”
Who
is to blame? Most often it is the university itself. Very few have made their
stations part of the overall strategic plans.
LESSONS FROM THE MOST
SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE STATION IN THE NATION: WSUM, MADISON
It
is time to look at college stations that bring excellent ROI to their
universities. At
WSUM and though out the University of Wisconsin, their success of their success is based on a
clear mission:
WSUM is the University of
Wisconsin Madison Student -run community radio station. Our Mission is:
• To act in a service and
outreach capacity for the students of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
people of Madison and surrounding communities.
• To provide an
educational environment and valuable hands-on experiences as a teaching and
learning tool for students
• To provide an
alternative source of information and entertainment to the campus and community.
In a future report we will take a closer look at how make mission pare of WSUM's success.
This isn't to say that WSUM nor Wisconsin Public Radio haven't done great work at integrating themselves into their communities nor their parent colleges. But their success is simply not replicable anywhere else by dint of the simple fact that they're in Wisconsin. Education in Wisconsin - and more precisely the progressive idea of education - is held in a different, higher, regard than pretty much anywhere else in the United States. It even has its own name: The Wisconsin Idea. This has led to enourmously more financial support for all sorts of things associated with the public colleges in that state, including the radio stations. While the concept is under heavy and constant attack by the same forces that put Scott Walker in the governorship for so long, there is nevertheless far more public support for money for their public colleges than there is in Massachusetts.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's before you get into the harsh reality that Cape Cod is an incredible unequal region of the station when it comes to socioeconomics. You have a very small part of the population that's filthy rich and a huge part that's very poor. And the size of the group inbetween is getting smaller every year, and they're mostly going into the latter group.
Now toss in the idea that Cape Cod is, arguably, the most over-radioed chunk of land in the entire United States...with roughly 222,000 year-round residents being served by roughly 50 different radio stations. It's EXTREMELY difficult for any one radio station to be economically viable on the Cape, and it's hard to make an argument that the cost associated with an FCC-licensed radio outlet is contributing all that much to the educational value of Cape Cod Community College; especially when one considers the greater focus on education towards employment that community colleges (in Massachusetts at least) tend to have, and how there's a lot more job opportunity in podcasting (which doesn't require an FCC licensed radio station to teach) than there is an AM/FM radio broadcasting.
I think it would indeed be unfortunate if WKKL just gave up and handed in their license. But I would consider it perfectly understandable if they did so.
P.S. It's not terribly relevant today, but WKKL was largely a repeater for WBUR from 1992 to 1999. That ended in part because WBUR acquired the old WBUR(AM) (now WBAS) and moreso when WBUR acquired what is WBUA and WBUH today.
The link to the Cape Cod Times story is broken, it should be:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20200227/cape-college-weighs-cost-of-bringing-radio-station-back