Radio 101

As I write this, we're under a Tropical Storm Warning here in South Florida, coming just three days into Hurricane Season, and when the warning was issued, Fran and I talked about our hurricane preparations and the likelihood that this storm would hit our area, and she reminded me that, in high school, she was in the Weather Club and did weather reports on the high school radio station, WBGD in Brick, New Jersey.

WBGD was Brick Township High School's own radio station, FCC licensed, student-run, one of many of its kind. And it's gone. The transmitter failed about 15 years ago and that was the end. I don't know if anyone at the school misses it. I don't even know that there's anyone at the school who remembers it.

And then there was WHRC. That was the carrier-current radio station at Haverford College outside Philadelphia, 640 AM, and that was where I did college radio. It was in the basement of the cafeteria building, victim of the occasional flood, heard in the dining rooms upstairs and pretty much nowhere else. It was also supposed to cover our sister school, Bryn Mawr College, but the line between the schools never worked. We covered less territory than a Mr. Microphone. I would have had more listeners had I just yelled out my dorm room window. But it was fun, I learned a lot about how to do radio, and I was reminded how much fun it was when I noticed on a website created for my (redacted) reunion this past weekend that many of my classmates cited the radio station as one of their fondly remembered activities. I was one of the managers of that station and I have to admit that I don't remember most of those students working there, but, whatever, I'll defer to their undoubtedly better memories. Doing radio was popular among the students back then, and although I am one of the very, very few WHRC alumni to actually have a career in the media, it was a prized activity among the student population.

Need I tell you what happened to WHRC? It died. It came back as a streaming station and a collection of podcasts. And it died again, about eight years ago.

Now, you could say that student radio died from lack of interest, and you'd be correct. When technical problems arose, nobody cared enough to invest the money and time needed to fix them. At other schools with student FMs, the administrations weighed student interest and the hassles of maintaining the facility and license with the money they could make selling the licenses to the EMFs of the industry and understandably chose the latter. The demise of old-school student radio might have been inevitable.

Or maybe not. Would things have been different had commercial radio interests invested in college and high school radio as a farm system and R&D lab? We frequently lament the lack of a farm system for radio talent, management, and engineering, but we talk about small markets for that ("it's all voice tracked now!"), and in reality, we needed to start smaller and earlier. Inculcating a love of radio used to happen when we were students, kids, trying to decide what to do with the rest of our lives. Student radio was a major player in "getting 'em young," starting young aspirants on the road to a bright career in communications. And while, yes, students today aren't interested in radio and have podcasts as a no-strings option, they could have found radio as an attractive career path and developed programming that would have appealed to their generations, while having fun along the way, just like we did.

And the industry blew that chance. Nobody was thinking about the future.

Is there still a chance? I don't know, but if there's going to be any future for radio, there has to be an investment in re-establishing something akin to student radio. It doesn't have to involve licenses, either. It could mean donating studios and equipment for schools to launch streaming stations or podcasts. It could mean devoting an HD-2 or HD-3 channel to student-created programming. It could mean having students do shows on the weekend. It could mean making grants to LPFMs in underserved communities with an emphasis on training youth to work in radio. It should include mentorship and meaningful career paths rather than just the usual internships. The radio industry should remember that "outreach" requires actually actively reaching out to the people it wants to attract, and if that's a new generation of talent, it has to start early, like it did when WBGD and WHRC and so many other stations gave us a chance to "do radio."

We had this. We lost it. It may be too late to have it again, but it couldn't hurt to try.

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While I'm riding out the storm, I'm also updating All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page with lots of stuff to talk about that isn't storm-related. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Weather permitting, I'll be making a quick trip to San Antonio to appear at the National Association of State Radio Networks conference on Tuesday, so if you're part of that, see you there. And if you're in South Florida, stay safe.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon