Pledge income down at WUFT, and a closer look at the KFUO sale

Two updates today on recent station-centric kerfuffles that we’ve been following. The first pertains to WUFT-FM in Gainesville, Fla., which as you might remember decided to drop classical from its primary signal and move all the music to an HD channel.

Well, the station had its first fund drive since the switch, and donations were down — by 37 percent, according to the Gainesville Sun.

Local classical fans had urged their kind not to donate as a form of protest, which might explain some of the decline. But station personnel are looking on the bright side, emphasizing that they got more first-time donations than in the drive a year ago.

The article reports that some local listeners are happy with the change:

Alachua County resident Alison Law said she had last donated about 15 years ago before donating again this year. Law, who is active in local political issues, said she previously turned off the station when it played music during the day but hasn’t listened to any other station since news and talk shows were added at that time.

“There’s more to life than classical music,” she said.

Whatever the reasons are for pledging and not pledging, it’s probably too soon to see one down pledge drive as a final referendum on the format switch. Any station that makes a format change will see some churn in both audience and support, and such things take a while to shake out. We’ll just have to see how the station is faring a year or two from now.

And if you’ve been following the sale of St. Louis’s KFUO-FM, check out this blog post by the Post-Dispatch’s Sarah Bryan Miller — the reporter who’s been covering the sale — in which she dissects an FAQ put forth by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which is selling the station. It gets into the nitty-gritty, but it’s worth seeing how the Synod has been blurring the truth about details of the sale. And it’s unfortunate for the public — which supposedly ought to share common ownership of our airwaves, even those that are commercially licensed — that the sale was negotiated in such secrecy.

About Mike Janssen

Mike Janssen Served as Scanning The Dial's original co-authors from Mar, 2008 to Jan, 2010 and is a freelance writer, editor and media educator based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He has written extensively about radio, mostly for Current, the trade newspaper about public broadcasting, where his articles have appeared since 1999. He has also worked in public radio as a reporter at WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he began his career in journalism and filed pieces for NPR. Mike's work in radio expanded to include outreach and advocacy in 2007, when he worked with the Future of Music Coalition to recruit applicants for noncommercial radio stations. He has since embarked on writing a series of articles about radio hopefuls for FMC's blog.

Mike also writes regularly for Retail Traffic magazine and teaches workshops about writing, podcasting and radio journalism. In his spare time he enjoys vegetarian food, the outdoors, reading, movies and traveling. You can learn more about Mike and find links to more of his writing and reporting at mikejanssen.net.

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