Marty Ronish A quick note, and Happy Monday! WLIU on Long Island is up for sale or is available for some sort of creative partnership, according to Tom Taylor of Radio-Info. WLIU’s owner, Long Island University is going to stop supporting the NPR-affiliate in October for financial reasons. The station is mostly news and jazz, though it does play some classical, and one of the announcers is Bonnie Grice, who is well known to those of us in the classical world. We’ll keep you posted.
A lot of us in the media have been casting about for the best way to support and promote the artists who create the classical music that we live and breathe. Their place in newspapers is shrinking, shrinking. In some communities the symbiotic relationship between the classical radio station and local musicians is strong and vibrant. In others not so much.
San Francisco has one great answer for our common dilemma, and it just turned 10 years old. It’s the website San Francisco Classical Voice.
Ordinarily, I’m super careful to attribute my sources, but I failed to write this one down when I saved the link. I think I got it from ArtsJournal.com. I also haven’t independently checked the facts and figures in this article. Now, after all those disclaimers, here’s a quote from the article that knocked my socks off:
Happy Monday, everybody. There’s a very nice blog post about WQXR’s switch from commercial to public radio here. Doc Searls lists five reasons public radio is better than commercial for classical music, but my favorite is the last one: Direct Listener Involvement. Commercial radio has had a huge disadvantage for the duration: its customers and its consumers are different populations. As businesses, commercial radio stations are primarily accountable to advertisers, not to listeners. Public radio is directly accountable to its listeners, because those are also its customers. As public stations make greater … Continue Reading