A
PRX experiment on campus-community radio
By host/producer Justin Grotelueschen
[ download this story as a .DOC ]
Since May 2003 I've been a community member at WZBC, a college/community station at Boston College in Newton MA, producing shows featuring independent rock, experimental music, and my own original productions. In the summer of 2004, following an idea I loosely conceived for my masters' thesis to deliver Public Radio Exchange content to radio stations outside the public radio system, I started producing a weekly PRX show on ZBC. By the time I wrapped up the series in August 2006, Magnetic Tape had expanded to include other free Web-available audio, classic radio theatre, WZBC-friendly (i.e. non-commercial) music, and podcasts.
My initial concept back in early 2003 was to use PRX content to supplement a show featuring my own work and that of a few local producers. The producers ended up not having the time to contribute and, knowing I had to put a show together by myself, I opted initially to focus my weekly efforts on gathering content solely from the PRX. Being on a college/community station and not even knowing of a public radio station producing a PRX-only show at the time, I didn't think I had a model to build from. I did know I had the flexibility with the program hour and with the freedom afforded by community radio to create the kind of loose, quirky show I wanted to create.
When thinking about the particular theme for the show, I looked at the programming schedule at ZBC to see what areas were strong and what were lacking, and compared that to what I could find on the PRX. ZBC is a bastion for lefty news and commentary, with the news team producing six hours of this ilk each week, and Ben Walker was producing Your Radio Nightlight and eventually the Theory of Everything to keep the neurotic, paranoid, and conspiracy theorists happy (kudos to radio experimentation). That pushed my show to peruse the gap between those programming styles, to occasionally dabble in each, to explore the sound art and field recording world I had been immersed in during the prior year, and eventually to incorporate new (to me, and in podcasts, new to the world) programming and ZBC music.
THE
PROCESS
Magnetic Tape first aired on the afternoon of Sunday, July 10, 2004,
from 4 to 6 pm. During the first month or so of production I would begin
conceptualizing an episode on the Tuesday or Wednesday before the Sunday
it was to air, but that process didn’t last long. Soon I didn't
start pre-production of MT until the Saturday prior, downloading the
pieces that day and updating my Web site and producing a liner on Sunday
morning. But I found I was wasting too much time just to ramp up to
where I left off the afternoon before, so I settled on devoting most
all of my Sundays to putting the show together, airing it, and then
going home and reviewing the PRX pieces I played through the PRX site.
I produced MT that way for the two years to follow.
My typical Sunday: I prepare for and put a 2-hour show together by, 1), previewing work on the PRX, depending on how much PRX work I wanted to play that day, 2), downloading between one and one and a half hours of programming, 3), updating the playlist on the Magnetic Tape site, 4), producing an intro using clips of what I was airing, 5), airing the show, and 6), reviewing the pieces I aired on the PRX site. I’d start at 11am or noon finding the content for the show in the form of Mp3s, Mp2s, and .WAVs. I started off producing intros of my voice only so that I wouldn't forget to announce anything important related to the pieces I was to air; I’d record my voice at home and play the .WAV file on the air with some music from the CD deck behind it. But it made more sense after a few weeks to include some of the actual audio I was going to play, so I used snippets from whatever I was airing to produce a 1 to 3 minute (nice to have the flexibility to make it as long as I wanted) intro in .WAV format at my home mini-studio. I loaded that file and whatever I was going to play onto a 512MB USB drive on my keychain and off I went to the station.
THE TECH
WZBC has a ‘Net-connected computer hooked up to the board to play Democracy Now, liners, and some music, and I broadcast through that computer almost exclusively in order to not have to burn CDs or use the CD decks at the station. Occasionally, if I was brave in trusting the ‘Net connection at the station, I would stream my entire show from the Web, which I did occasionally through files hosted on Archive.org and UbuWeb. Otherwise I loaded my intro and the contents I had on the drive onto the board’s computer and set up a playlist in Winamp. Every once in a while I did pot down the computer to play CDs of the band I featured, if I didn’t have their tracks on MP3 and preloaded on my USB drive.
To put my show together, I used Cool Edit Pro 2.1 on a PC (1.3 GB AMD Duron, 512 MB RAM) with Windows XP. I sometimes used Audacity instead of Cool Edit to record my narration, mainly because it loads and saves .WAV files quickly. For hardware, I first used the Edirol UA-5 USB Audio interface with a cheap unidirectional mic; after a few months I upgraded to the Edirol UA-700 for its expanded mic modeling capabilities (and I sometimes laid down my own music for the intros using the guitar modelers) along with a Shure 58 Beta. Both Edirol USB interfaces are now discontinued, but you can probably find them on Ebay (I fully recommend the Roland's Composite Object Sound Modeling (COSM) mic- and amp-modelers if you record music at home – quite versatile).
At ZBC, I used the studio PC, a newer Dell with Windows XP, along with Winamp through the board. If I was streaming audio I would use Realplayer. I only had a problem with this setup when my computer would freeze, which happened a few times. One Sunday during the first few months of the show, the screen saver came up while I was in the middle of a 40-something minute piece; I tapped on the mouse and it shut off Winamp (Jake happened to hear that while tuning in in his car – naturally, the luck). The only other issue I had was during my last show when I loaded every intro I produced through the lifetime of my show (cumulatively just over two hours of audio) and pressed shuffle; the computer froze about 45 minutes through and when I restarted it and reshuffled, it played many of the same intros again. Things happen.
Also, most DJs at ZBC use a custom Web service called Spinitron (Spinitron.com) and update their playlists live online, song-by-song, but since I played a lot of exclusive content I didn’t use that -- I didn’t want clog our playlists with entries no other DJ would play because those entries go into a database meant for bands/albums/songs.
THE CONTENT
I used several avenues to find content through the PRX: on the site I browsed the home page, I searched the newly licensed and new pieces, I searched by tone (dark, edgy, and quirky were my faves), and length depending on what else I had planned, and I read the e-mail newsletter. After a short time I was getting personal recommendations from producers, coming from producers whose work I had aired and other producers recommending their work to me based on what I said I liked / didn’t like in my reviews.
About six months in I ran into a couple snags. One, I was using a LOT of points to fill a show, and two, I was spending points on pieces I wasn’t all that interested in playing, just for the sake of filling my show with PRX work. I had alleviated the points issue by featuring a band every show for about a quarter of the show, and by airing the “free” productions (and urging those producers to keep providing free content), but that well dried up fairly quickly, again because of me wanting my show to fit a particular aesthetic that I felt was underserved at our station.
Another difficulty was marketing. I wasn’t exactly sure how to position my show or where to go to tell people to hear it, other than via the producers I talked to on the PRX and DJs at our station. Essentially it came down to me telling random people about it and hoping they’d tell others, and trust that the ZBC listening community would latch on and spread the word. I didn’t even have an email list, but there was a reason for that, and that was …
THE AUDIENCE
I did have a particular audience, the regulars who would contact me, other than the random passersby on the FM dial and on the Web stream. I’d get phone calls in the studio from the same people, and through those communications I’d do random polling to see how I could get the word out about my show. I couldn’t believe how many people listened to my show who didn’t really use the computer. And these were people of all ages. I never figured out how that added up. But that didn’t matter much to me either because that wasn’t …
THE GOAL OF THE SHOW
I really wanted to see if I could get other DJs at the station interested in what the PRX had to offer: getting DJs to sign up with the PRX as producers as listeners, and to join me in the station’s account in downloading and airing pieces. I began with subtle pushes over the ZBC list serve to the group and to individuals, along with hallway conversations, bugging people who I thought would be interested after station meetings, leaving PRX pieces on the computer and reminding DJs they could play them, anything.
I don’t want to discourage anyone else from trying this at his or her own college/community station, because I think now more than ever, with the podcasting craze, the time is right to get more diverse programming on the airwaves, to spice things up. The downfall of my show had more to do with the timing of my burnout than in the excitement around new programming.
THE ENDING
I produced the show until it wasn’t fun to produce anymore, mainly because I wanted my Sundays back. But something about what I was doing made me keep doing it; maybe it’s that warm fuzzy feeling of expanding the reach of big and small producers who frequent “public” radio, the mouthpiece of the educated and proper, vs. the sloppy yet endlessly exciting “community” or “college” radio waves. In the end, I tried to trash the buzzwords. I mean, a radio listener is a radio listener, right? I think the PRX is proof that a lot of different producers, listeners, and content can co-exist happily.
Here’s what I sent to Jake over email, post-mortem:
“Overall MT seemed a worthwhile experiment to see if PRX content would fly on college radio. I had a difficult time getting anyone else to jump on board the station account -- a few DJs expressed interest but wouldn't jump on despite my repeated communications. I did get some DJs to become members of PRX and got some listeners to check out the site. I got a good response from a somewhat new audience (not quite news, not quite music, not quite NCP), a good response from fellow ZBC DJs, esp. the community members. And it seemed I was helpful in getting the juices flowing within the PRX system by my ~50 reviews in 2004 and incessant licensing of pieces. So even though it doesn't look like a scaleable model to present to other stations, I think the radio show was worth my time.”
So for my last show I gathered all the show intros I had produced over the past 2+ years (adding up to 2 hours and 10 minutes, just longer than one full MT show), shuffled them and aired them randomly. And that was that.
If you are interested in any particulars or just want to say hello, buzz me through my PRX profile. Go PRX.
Godspeed,
Justin