Another public radio station has announced it’s dropping classical music in favor of news — a common enough occurrence that maybe I should just write a boilerplate post about the phenomenon and change the links, cities and call letters where appropriate.
This time it’s WUFT in Gainesville, Fla., which makes the switch Aug. 3. Like WGCU in Fort Myers, Fla., which dumped classical last year, WUFT will move the music to a 24/7 stream available to listeners with digital radios.
Chloe Veltman is a blogger on ArtsJournal.com and at VoiceBox – The Radio Show, but she’s also a new classical radio announcer on KALW in San Francisco. She agreed to be a guinea pig on this blog and reveal her innermost fears and joys at this new experience.
We say we’re a blog about “classical music in broadcasting,” but I sometimes like to stretch that mission statement to include other musical genres. Some passions and challenges transcend genre and encompass all music broadcasters who aim to serve the public interest, not just sell ads.
So here’s welcome news of a coup for fans of music and noncommercial radio who live in Dallas, Texas. At a time when few stations have the budgets to expand, KERA, that city’s primary public broadcaster, has struck a deal to buy an FM frequency that it will program with the Triple A format. Triple A, or Adult Album Alternative, assumes various guises at individual stations depending on the programmers in charge. But generally the format showcases rock, folk, alternative, country and other genres — the music’s roots as well as its contemporaries.
One of our own, General Manager Jeff Skibbe from KXMS in southern Missouri has written this guest post on programming. Mille grazie, Jeff!
“Qube Connections” by Jeff Skibbe
I have always been a fan of British TV’s James Burke, the science historian whose episodes of the series “Connections” famously began with a thread of an idea upon which Burke would weave a rich tapestry of cause and effect in the worlds of science and technology. If you haven’t seen the 1978 original or any of its sequels, you should investigate getting a subscription to Netflix soon.