So I want to take a moment to step on my soapbox. Not for a bad reason or anything, but just looking for a little help from the community I can reach.
The radio station I volunteer with, WJCU, is holding their annual Radiothon. Basically it's the time of year where we reach out to our listeners to ask for tax-deductible donations to keep our station running, and to improve the quality of our non-commercial, 24/7/365 operation product.
As I said, we're a commercial-free station, run by students, and with a wide variety of programming. Anything from "The Heights", our Triple-A weekday offering, to "Metal On Metal" featuring legendary on-air voice Bill Peters, to "NEO Rocks", a grab bag of local talent that really highlights the power of what college radio truly is. This is on top of our community-led programming, plus our extensive lineup of ethnic and diversity programming, plus the fact that our studio is used for classes at John Carroll to help the future broadcasters learn their trade in a state-of-the-art facility
Here's a little on what Radiothon's brought about in the last several years:
In the summer of 2006, WJCU finally succeeded in rehabilitating our ramshackle FM transmission facility. The project also allowed us to increase our signal power to 2500 Watts, and cost approximately $106,000. While we were able to finish the project, we used up our entire cash reserve saved over four years from previous Radiothons. The entire project was paid for by listener donations, and would have been impossible without them.
In 2007, almost all of the $32,000 dollars we raised went into improving our digital infrastructure. This involved creating a dedicated fiber-optic link across campus to the university’s IT facility, and installing a new server, 5 new PC’s, as well as new network switches and routers that have allowed us to upgrade our webstream, and launch a special events streaming channel.
Much of the $37,000 we raised in 2008 was held in reserve for a badly needed studio renovation, but due to additional budget cuts by the university, and uncertainty about further cuts, we postponed that major project and instead focused on a number of other projects:
-Adding an AAC stream for our webcasts so that our online listeners, including those with iPhones, can hear WJCU with audio quality that’s even better than our broadcast signal.
- Equipping both JCU’s Klein TV studio and Marinello little theatre to allow live public performances of local artists (NEO Rocks) with live studio audiences.
-Begin digitizing our 27,000 + CD music library and adding digital playback systems. This has been an expensive and time consuming undertaking that is only now nearing completion.
-Construction of a 3rd “mini-studio” to accommodate overflow production traffic and provide a backup to our production studio.
-Improving station safety and security with a card-key access system.
In 2010, as promised, the proceeds from WJCU’s best-ever Radiothon were used to completely renovate our main on air studio. The result has been a better sounding work environment that is much friendlier to both show hosts (who work for free), and guest artists. This project cost in excess of $65,000.
In July of 2012 we completed a complete renovation of our main production studio, which made it far more flexible and suitable for uses such as talk show style interviews and high quality sound recording. This project cost in excess of $45,000
Last year, we completed several major projects, including:
- Completion of our renovated Studio C, and repurposing the former studio space as a tech center, including a new music library server system.
-Creating and making available a free WJCU App for Android (now available) and Apple (release pending) mobile platforms. Along with this was a complete replacement and upgrade of our streaming infrastructure, which now provides some of the highest quality streaming on the web.
So you can understand why I'm passionate about WJCU in general and Radiothon in specific.
Now I'm not asking anyone to go into things blindly. Head over to our website and listen to some of the programming before Radiothon is over this weekend. If you're Cleveland local, tune into 88.7FM while you're driving or working. Try out our Android app.
If you like what you hear, consider giving a tax-deductible donation to help college radio thrive and survive. You can donate from our website, but to get the most "thank you" out of your donations, call the studio at 216-397-4438. We have premiums through the call-in lines that aren't available to the website donations, plus we can give you a live voice to talk to, a real 'thank you', and quite possibly a shout-out on the air.
If you want to do a little interaction with yours truly, you might just be able to catch me on Fridays from 11am-12:30pm.
Thanks for humoring me on my campaign to keep the airwaves awesome. I'll be back to sports later.
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