Wow, did I ever blow it with my post “Whose Community? Whose Radio?” I took a news item about the announcement of changes at WLUW and I did a lousy job of stringing together thoughts I have about radio and community, most of which were only loosely related to the station itself. The cherry on top was a lame rhetorical “who cares” at the end.

One answer to that question is “I do,” despite the assumptions made by some of the commenters. I started DJing at WNUR in 1990 and, although I stopped for a couple years after I left the university, I have been back on the air in a 5 am time slot for the last three years. During my first stint at WNUR, I was at times the Jazz Producer, the co-founder, producer, and music director for Continental Drift, an editor of the defunct 60-Cycle Hum, the first station webmaster, and part of the team who first put WNUR’s signal on the internet. In addition to being passionate about radio, I’m passionate about community–about the amazing multiplying effect of people’s energy when we get together and let it bounce off of each other, amplifying into “a power stronger than itself” (if I can lift a slogan from the AACM.) I care deeply about radio and community, and I spent all Sunday morning trying to articulate years of experience, energy, and thought on the subject. Especially considering how raw the feelings of many WLUW enthusiasts must be at the moment, I was particularly careless to not distance my bigger picture thoughts from a few relatively off-the-cuff reactions to the news and a brief sampling of programming.

That said, I will stop short of falling on my sword. The fact is, radio is changing along with every other medium of communication in our society. For anyone else who would answer “I care,” it won’t do to simply ignore that fact. Michael Ardaiolo took my comments about the infrequency of programs like Open Books as a slam:

Finding disinterest in a show that is only aired once every two or three weeks is just laziness.

I’m not sure where he inferred disinterest. It’s a simple fact that people are decreasingly willing or able to schedule their lives around broadcast schedules. (Fortunately, the internet enables time-shifting so that content like Open Books can be useful beyond its ephemeral original airing. I quite enjoyed the archived interview with Joe Meno.)

Some of the posters incorrectly concluded that I am trying to champion the internet as the triumphant victor over radio. Actually, I’m interested in considering what there may be about radio which can’t be achieved by the internet. In pursuing that question, those of us who care so strongly about these things may come to ever more clarity about what it is that really drives us. I will reiterate that the medium is not the message. Let’s figure out what the message is, and push it down every medium we can get our grubby hands upon.

Hopefully some of the folks who found their way to the previous post will also find their way to this one, and will realize that we’re all on the same side. As much as I’m a fan of the internet, it can be hard to jump in to meaningful conversations online. I find it’s usually better to start them over a meal or a beer or a coffee. If people want to get together and spout off about what it is that gets us so fired up, I’ll buy the first round. Seriously.

Loyola University recently announced that it was “taking back” its radio station, WLUW. (About five years ago, Loyola reached an agreement with Chicago Public Radio to manage the station.) WLUW’s Music Director, Michael Ardaiolo, provides a more human accounting than press releases on his blog Audiversity.

Coincidentally, writer and DJ Dan Morgridge had prepared a feature about WLUW for Gapers Block: Transmission. His piece was adapted to take the announcement into account and published on Thursday. Morgridge’s updated piece reflects the fears of many passionate radio fans that this resource and this community about which they feel so strongly will disappear or change beyond recognition.

As a long-time volunteer at WNUR and an enthusiast for music that doesn’t get played much on radio, this certainly caught my attention, although I must admit that I don’t listen to WLUW very much. Honestly, I don’t listen to much radio at all. I am rarely in the physical presence of a real radio, and I haven’t yet developed the habit of tuning in widely available internet streams of various radio sources. I’ve been working on it somewhat since I got a Squeezebox for Christmas; in addition to its ability to stream my own music, it makes it pretty easy to tune in internet radio streams.

When I tuned in to WLUW on Friday, I caught the tail end of Democracy Now! My initial reaction was to question whether WLUW is furthering its “community” mission when that program is widely syndicated and freely available on-demand on the internet. (Furthermore, the program is broadcast on WZRD in Chicago twice in the two hours preceding the WLUW time slot!) In the internet age, does it make sense for a scarce resource such as broadcast spectrum to be used to propagate content which is otherwise available?

WLUW’s “community” is not limited to listeners to Democracy Now. In fact, if one looks over the schedule, it seems unlikely that one can define a single WLUW community. Furthermore, several of their programs only air once or twice a month. While I love the quaint vision of people gathering around their radios to listen to “Open Books” on the second and fourth Sunday evenings of the month, I’ll bet not many people schedule that.

Enthusiasts like myself prize the curatorial spirit of radio stations because they provide an opportunity for serendipitous discovery of new treasures. But the internet is better at that as well. My mention of “Open Books” won’t disappear into the either after its allotted hour is up, and if you come across it, you don’t have to remember to catch the next broadcast. You can go straight to their archive of selected author interviews and see what is interesting, and you can check out their blog and subscribe to the feed, and keep up with what new comes up as it is released.

It looks like at least half of WLUW’s programming is music oriented, which raises an entirely different framework of issues. I won’t try to recount all those issues in this post, but it is well known that music programming faces massive challenges both on broadcast radio and in its internet analogs. (I do have to give credit to a WLUW DJ for reminding me on Friday that I was interested in hearing more music by Artanker Convoy. But it was a reminder and not a discovery because I had already found their label page a few weeks ago.)

So, while I won’t celebrate if WLUW’s programming model changes, I ask “so what?” Not in the impertinent “who gives a crap” sense, but in the “why have I spent several hours trying to articulate my thoughts?” sense. At the end of the day, the medium really isn’t the message, so if community is important to us, we need to understand what that really means and figure out how the message will survive as media are changing faster than ever.

To read:

• Rad10.com | Why do people listen to the radio?
• Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2006: Radio
• The Long Tail: FAQ: Does the rise of the LT = the fall of mass culture?
• Communities Dominate Brands: Book
• Communities Dominate Brands: Blog
• Fortune Magazine: There is such a thing as too much choice – Jul. 12, 2006
• Programming philosophies and the rationalization of music radio — Ahlkvist 23 (3): 339 — Media, Culture & Society
• World Music Central: Gatekeepers and Corporate Control of Radio