I ♥ College Radio

I was actually a bit surprised that the HTML heart symbol was permitted in the title field there. The iHeartRadio brand launched with the URL iheartmusic.com back in April of 2008. It was sort of a mix of ideas from the start. they were going to stream music to mobile devices and webcast 800 of Clear Channel radio stations online. The comedy here is that Clearchannel is simultaneously moving toward a national programming model where hundreds of these stations will be more-or-less identical.So as tech-savvy as it might seem at first, the content is about as edgy as cheese-whiz.

Last year they debuted the ability to make custom music streams, much like Pandora. Clearly they had figured something out about the content problem. Then I got news yesterday. Clear Channel was soliciting college radio stations to join their platform. This was unexpected.  They put out a press release confirming everything on January 23. You can read it here. Sources report that they are negotiating individual deals with university and radio station representatives, indicating a level of motivation and interest that cannot possibly be generated by a sense of charity.  The first college stations to get involved are below:

• Appalachian State’s WASU – Boone, NC
• Connecticut College’s WCNI – New London, CT
• Dartmouth College's WFRD - Hanover, NH
• Denison University’s WDUB – Granville, OH
• DePaul University’s Radio DePaul – Chicago, IL
• Emerson College’s WERS – Boston, MA
• Flagler College’s WFCF – St. Augustine, FL
• Green River College’s KGRG – Tacoma, WA
• Ithaca College’s WICB – Ithaca, NY
• Rice University’s Rice Radio – Houston, TX
• Seton Hall University’s WSOU – Orange, NJ
• Stanford University’s KZSU- Stanford, CA
• Temple University’s WHIP – Philadelphia, PA
• College of Wooster’s WCWS – Wooster ,OH

You will notice that not all of these are even radio stations in the broadcasting sense. Rice radio is the webcast that the students were left with after KTRU was sold off. WHIP, and Radio DePaul are all also strictly online. The rest are a mixed bag: WSOU is arguably the biggest college radio station in America, WERS is nearly as big.  WICB is a large but rural college station with s strong commercial lean, KGRG, WASU, WCNI and WCWS are all rimshots to major markets lost in the suburbs. WFRD is in the unrated market areas on the Vermont and New Hampshire border. There is no pattern to this list, it screams shotgun approach, and these are just the early signers. There will be more.

What is the purpose?  That's an open question.

KTRU is Dead Long Live KTRU

It appears now that all is lost. It's the second time the University President has tried to sell off KTRU.  This time it seems he has succeeded. The board of regents at the University of Houston has approved the purchase of the station from Rice University leaving essentially no obstacles to the transfer of the license. At this time the final sale price is unknown, but the price could be up to 10 million dollars. U of Houston already operates the Classical outlet KUFH. More here.

.The news was not communicated to the student of Rice University whatsoever. A blog leaked it on the 16th. The sale closed on the 17th. More here. I can't tell you much about who KTRU is handling it.  Student DJs were still on air even early this morning.  The schedule on their website says that overnights are automated but this was certainly a live DJ. He cut on at 1:55 AM and gave a legal ID then at about 2:05 gave a brief news announcement about the take over. Audio Below. I spliced together the two segments editing out the pesky hour of copyrighted music content that lay between. I'm not sure if we'll hear another student voice on 91.7 ever.
My bet is that The University of Houston intends to re-launch it with 24/7 NPR, leaving KUFH as all Classical. The Tumor is that the new calls KUHC have already been requested.  It could have been worse, it could have gone to the Educational Media Foundation.

**********UPDATE**********

I thought about this more and have become yet more opinionated. I now see it more as an administrative failure at Rice. Rice is having money problems. (more here) Regardless of the root cause, be it the economy or mismanagement, or  a raw deal of unknown origin, the party of ultimate responsibility is the Rice administration. Their solution, rather than to make sustainable changes, is to sell an asset: KTRU. But you can only sell KTRU once. They're covering an array of rolling operational losses with a one-time only cash cow. It reads like desperate Harvard MBA flailing. In the mean time a valuable property of Rice University is gone forever.

Rice university president David W. Leebron paid himself $911,741 last year. (More here) This deal sounds all the more criminally self-serving when you realize how cash-hungry this administration is to sustain the opulence of it's executive staff. Clearly Leebron is running the board of trustees like a CEO gone amok, and with no shareholders to rise up, the situation has degenerated beyond hope.