WBGU

I saw in the Blade today that WBGU FM, the FM station on campus, is holding a fundraising drive because their funding was cut...

Even as a person who loves radio, I've never found WBGU all that appealing. I've only really actively tuned into one of their shows, the 2AM techno thing they had a few years ago. Admittedly, more because it was effective at putting me to sleep with the repetative noises and things than any enjoyment I had for the music. Other than that, I've never found anything they do to be too exciting. On occasion I've tuned in to find a show where the music mostly consisted of a guy screaming into a microphone. I've also heard sports coverage so abysmal that it became transcendatly comedic.

Of course, I've got to admit that I have a major bias here because I tend to dislike listening to music on the radio. For some reason, listening to music on the radio is about as exciting to me as watching paint dry. When I think of what radio should be as a medium, I think of most of a good public radio station's weekend schedule, or the BBC World Service, or even the good old days of Art Bell's Coast To Coast show. This is not to say that I like talk radio (99% of which is total sludge), but that between the sludge of political talk and the drudgery of music, there lies a great expanse of awesome radio, and that's what I tend to like.

However, my personal biases aside, I have no doubt that part of WBGU's problem is that their goals all seem to contradict each other. They seem to want to be the "anti-Clear Channel" of pioneering anti-corporate radio, they want to be a sandbox for the dozens of volunteer hosts, they want to be very low budget, and they want to be a decent radio station. The current mishmash of talent, ideas, genres, and hosts seems to miss all of these goals, and it doesn't seem to garner a lot of listeners either. Honestly, outside of the dozens of DJs, who listens to this station?

I think that's a good question. Consider, this is a station that puts out less power than your average dorm microwave (they claim 1000W, but the FCC documents say 450W), so there's not really a huge market to work with here. Perhaps, years ago, there was a need for independent music radio, but today in the post-Shawn Fanning era, I think the audience for that has dwindled. WBGU seems to be driven by the uber-ultra-mega-indie scene (read: stuff no one has ever heard of and never will), and while there will always be a core group for that, it's never going to be too broad.

What I would like to see on WBGU is some creative talk content. As the shoestring budget WNIR in the Akron-Kent area can profess to, talk is cheap. Right now, as far as I know, the only talk content WBGU has is a half hour show hosted by...err...Daniel Boudreau. Regardless of my feelings about the man or his politics, I think that in general , rabidly political talk is not what most people want to hear. The beautiful thing about talk radio, and what most of the talk radio on commerical radio misses, is that talk radio can be about anything. You can talk about local issues (which we seem to have plenty of), you can talk about health, you can talk about music, you can talk about cars, you can talk about sports, you can talk about computers, you can talk about books, you can talk about the stars, you can talk about relationships...

Seriously, you can talk about literally anything. WNIR appeals widely to the Akron area because to the people of Akron, that is their radio. It's about their town. When Clear Channel came in and set up a station specifically to try to put WNIR out of business, it failed because what people already had was radio about themselves, and it doesn't get any better than that. In a nutshell WNIR is to the people of Akron what WBGU wants to be for the students of BGSU. There's a lesson there.