Musikdämmerung
Speculation and conjecture has been the pastime at work lately. As soon as a committee was formed to review possible changes to the station, everyone on the second floor knew it was bad news.
WUFT-FM is a great public radio station. It is an NPR affiliate, and, of course, the NPR programs we air–Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and so on–are fine programs that we all enjoy. But, when WUFT was founded over twenty-five years ago, classical music also figured prominently in the mission of the station. And that mission has been successful for all these years because the public has been very supportive.
Obviously, public radio support is measured in pledge dollars, and, from a cost/benefit perspective, classical music is probably the best format. While nationally-syndicated news and public affairs programming is very expensive (over $1,000 per broadcast hour), classical music is a relative bargain. The cost-effectiveness of classical music is such that, at WUFT, the pledges for classical make up for the deficits the more expensive news programs generate. That is not a bad thing, though. Rather, it is a mutually beneficial way to bring variety to the listening audience.
The first sign of trouble appeared during the membership campaign last April. A letter appeared in the Gainesville Sun–an unsolicited letter not tied to any previous article or op-ed–that complained about the classical music. It was a letter which ought to have elicited nothing but laughs and derision, since it complained that our format was devoted to “dead, white, slave-traders”. I don’t know a single classical music composer that ever owned a slave, much less traded slaves. A letter from a crackpot doesn’t have much power to change anything. But on its heels appeared an op-ed by a somewhat well-known local photographer, which posited that our format was stale and that Gainesville listeners were missing out on a host of other NPR programs. This op-ed initially had an effect that was the opposite of what may have been intended. The day after its publication, WUFT had a great pledge day for classical music, and the Sun eventually published a series of letters in support of classical music.
Then, after the seas calmed, word came that a committee was considering possible changes to WUFT’s format. A proposal to expand local news coverage and increase student involvement seemed perfectly sensible. And, perhaps that would be the extent of the change. But the minutes of the committee’s meetings suggested that bigger changes were on the table. On the second floor, it was clear that this wouldn’t end well. No one on the staff involved in music programming, including the station manager, was appointed to the committee. This led some to believe that a decision had already been made, and that the committee was merely window dressing. The rumors reached the public, and more letters appeared in the Gainesville Sun, including a scathing op-ed by UF music professor Raymond Chobaz, which alluded to UF president Bernie Machen’s involvement in the elimination of classical music programming from the radio station at his previous employer, the University of Utah.
This afternoon the official word came out: WUFT will go all-talk. No more classical music after August 3, 2009. Supposedly, the second HD stream will be devoted to classical music full-time. But it is unclear whether it will be locally programmed or come from a generic national satellite source. It is also unclear what jobs will be eliminated. And what will become of the other arts institutions in North Central Florida, which have enjoyed a warm relationship with WUFT, is also unclear.
I don’t speak for my coworkers, and I don’t speak for WUFT. But, as you all know, I certainly speak for my self. And for me, this is heartbreaking.
Oh no. We talked about this a while back, and I feared this is what was going to happen. How many times have I said, a hard rain’s gonna fall. One more slouch closer to Gomorrah. I’m really sorry, first for you, then for us all.
Yes, this has been a huge drag. We still don’t know how this is going to work, since those who decided haven’t told us if we can have locally-programmed classical music–in which case my job will be the same–or if we’ll use some network service, in which case I can imagine them forcing us to sell off the whole record library.
The public, by and large, still doesn’t know. They waited until right before a long holiday weekend to announce this, and, in many cases, people are out of town for much of the summer anyway. Plus, while the Gainesville newspaper had a story, I don’t know that the Ocala paper, or the papers in all the other places our listeners live, published anything. Everyone may just wake up on the morning of August 3 and find the station completely changed.
Whoa… Lets see, How much federal money does WUFT get? A radio station at one of the largest public universities (read government schools) in the country? Now,I’m no fan of this administration, and being a dead, white, former slave trader (whose job has been eliminated because of federal legislation), Let me give you my take. This administration doesn’t care about the arts. The death of Mike Jackson and the subsequent shout out to the family from the White House shows that. How many legit classical musicians families have been so consoled? Your radio stations decision to go all- talk (read government propaganda) shows me this administration will stop at nothing to get their socialist agenda across. That is to say, use YOUR tax dollars to further THEIR means. No radio station in the private sector with alternative political view enjoys that advantage. Your station just got a bail out. And now, the Presidential piper is going to call the tune. But the announcement coming the day before a long holiday weekend…that’s page one in the playbook. Pay very close attention to which heads roll in the aftermath. That will tell you how this happened, If I’m wrong.
Actually, Bernie Machen, appointed by Jeb Bust, is a conservative, and supported John McCain. And there hasn’t been an openly pro-classical music administration since Carter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I02B8JMnbJI
To tell you the truth, I don’t think that politics played a big part of this. I think it had more to do with the personal preferences of the people who made the decision. People who don’t like classical music–and that is their prerogative–don’t appreciate that other people do like it.
Moreover, they look at numbers on a page, which might show a 70% decline in audience when the classical music begins at nine o’clock in the morning, and conclude that classical is radio poison. They don’t consider that that is the hour when everyone gets out of their cars to go to work. They think that they’ll be able to sell way more underwriting with talk than they could with classical. They will discover they are all wrong.
In any case, this decision might have been made at high levels within the UF administration, but it certainly doesn’t go any higher than that. Contrary to popular belief, “Public Radio” receives a statistically insignificant sum of money from tax dollars. In a year, less than one of your tax dollars pays for public broadcasting. And for that, I think people get a whole lot.
Sorry to learn of this situation – although I’ve never listened to your Classical Music programming, I’m confident that this “decision” will be a loss for many current local CM lovers, but more importantly, for those who now may never get the opportunity to become one.
Growing up in the Philadelphia area, we had a terrific full-time commercial Classical FM station (WFLN) that simulcast on the AM band during daylight hours.
As a teenager, my Corvair’s crappy radio was AM-only, but one of its 5 pushbuttons was always set to ‘FLN – initially, much to the surprise of my rock-loving contemporaries, but then bemusement would frequently set in, courtesy of Vivaldi, or Mozart, and “you LIKE this stuff?”, would turn to “what IS this stuff?”.
More than one of my friends came to CM because of WFLN, and the tacit “cred” that it received because they knew through my example that one could enjoy both the Yardbirds *and* Beethoven.
Anyway, WFLN has been extinct for well over a decade, with its library and programming going to Temple University’s station (WRTI), which ineptly splits the day between Classical and Jazz, with many, many, many interruptions for self-promotion. I know of no one who truly likes this station, and it’s a sin that they can’t get their act together.
At the bottom of the dial is Penn’s station, WXPN, which used to feature oddball programming (including Classical), with an amusingly amateurish student touch, but is now much more tightly run and glossy, with the exception of the long-standing electronic music program “Stars’ End”, and a fine Saturday night Blues show. God help them both, because they’re waaaay outside the norm.
And then we have the local behemoth, WHYY, home of Terry Gross, a spiffy headquarters with its multi-million dollar “Technology Center”, and the world’s highest-paid public radio/TV chief executive (you can look it up).
WHYY was heavy-duty into Classical music up into the ’90s, and for all the right reasons. But at some point, they decided that Information had become their mandate, and proceeded down the trail that so many Public Radio stations have since followed, leaving Art behind, and betraying all of those who had supported the station for so many years. WHYY is the current paradigm for a Big-Time NPR station, and undoubtedly what your employers have in mind for your local outlet.
Politics aside, I no longer listen to Public Radio, and its self-congratulatory, echo-chamber news programming, or half-assed celebrity interview shows. And the relegation of this important music to marginalized HD sub-channels or the like, is disingenuous, at best, but mostly just insulting – it’s driven me to XM radio and the Pandora I-phone application…these and Princeton’s WPRB, which unabashedly plays everything from rockabilly to ragas, and doesn’t give a *crap* whether you’re ready for it, or not….now *that’s* programming!
Thank you for that post.