Nashville Cream: How do you see WRVU's future now that it is no longer an FM station?
Mark Wollaeger: The future of WRVU is of course yet to be written. Largely it is up to the WRVU staff and DJs, who will have VSC?s financial and moral support in making the transition into a streaming and HD future. Other college internet stations exist ? for instance, SCAD (http://www.scadradio.org/)? and we hope that the WRVU student leadership will want to consult with other stations to get advice. It is the board?s hope that WRVU will continue to remain a valuable training experience for Vanderbilt students ? that, after all, is our explicit legal charge as a nonprofit, to serve the needs of the Vanderbilt community ? and also a community asset. Certainly the deal will enhance the educational benefits for Vanderbilt students: the broadcasting training remains, and now they have opportunities to intern at WPLN.
NC: Are there advantages you see to the HD format that will provide new opportunities for WRVU's programming?
MW: We insisted on the HD channel as part of the deal not in connection with programming but in order to make it possible for people to continue to receive the signal over the air in addition to on the internet. We are well aware that few people currently own HD radios. But given the dedication of WRVU listeners, it is our hope and expectation that people will be willing to buy one in order to receive the signal over the air, if that?s how they prefer to receive it. Converters are also available for most car radios. I recommend that people check out www.hdradio.com to learn more about HD. Even apart from the HD, of course, one can buy a $15 connector that allows the streaming of WRVU?s signal through a smart phone over a car radio. The VSC board has no intention of changing the programming.
NC: Will there be any other changes to WRVU's format now that it will no longer be on 91.1 FM?
MW: Programming was never an element of this deal. The programming of WRVU is the responsibility of the student staff.
NC: You've stated that WPLN HD3's coverage area is larger (in square mileage) than 91.1 FM's. Do you know the actual audience size for HD radio within that area?
MW: I do not know how much bigger the actual audience size is, just the square miles. 91.1 FM covers 2700 sq mi, while 90.3 HD will cover 4,400 sq mi by the time WRVU starts broadcasting on HD in September ? WPLN just installed their new transmitter, but has yet to officially boost their HD power. That should happen this summer.
NC: Do you own an HD radio yourself?
MW: Yes, I have a Boston Radio HD Receptor. I was an early adopter the last time I had to buy a clock radio, which was about four years ago. To date, I?ve used it only for hearing shows on NPR that I missed on their usual time. But I?ve never been under the illusion that many people currently own one. It is incumbent on VSC and WRVU together to promote their use in the future.
NC: How many HD radios will VSC be giving out?
MW: I don?t know. The board wants the WRVU staff to take the lead on planning the new system and the promotions, and we will work with them to come up with a mutually agreeable plan.
NC: In your email to WRVU staff yesterday, you said, "Student and faculty board members who served on the board during this most recent academic year approved the sale of the license to Nashville Public Radio." When was the decision made to sell the license?
MW: The full board met face to face on Wednesday, April 27, at 5 pm, and voted to accept the terms of NPR?s letter of intent, which we had been negotiating for several weeks.
NC: At a meeting with staff in September 2010, you said that VSC's handling of WRVU was better than "doing the Rice thing where you just sell the damn station. Do it over the summer and hope people don't get angry." In a later email to [then-station manager] Victor Clarke, you said that "insofar as students make up the majority of the board, and insofar as we always want full participation from the board, it would not even make sense for us to take any collective action any time except during the regular school year."
With the announcement of the sale coming while school is out for the summer, how do you respond to people who say you've gone back on your word?
MW: We realize that this in particular has generated a lot of anger and a sense of betrayal, and I understand it. But I did not go back on my word. The quotations above are accurate: we were concerned that the full board have a chance to continue the deliberations and negotiations right up to the end, and as you know, five of the eight board members are students; for that reason I also assured the current station manager, Robert Ackley, that we would not conduct an email vote over the summer. When negotiations with NPR took longer than we expected, we were unable to reach a final decision in our last scheduled board meeting on April 20. We therefore scheduled an additional board meeting in order to vote on the basic terms of NPR?s letter of intent. That meeting took place on Wednesday, April 27, and the vote was 7 in favor, 0 opposed, and one abstention. Little did we know, however, that negotiating the full deal, with all the details worked out, would take a great deal of additional time. It took, in fact, from April 27 until the evening of June 6.
NC: WPLN president Rob Gordon told me they signed a letter of intent in March. On April 21, you told me, "No final decision regarding the possible sale of WRVU's broadcast license was made at yesterday's meeting."
Why didn't you say that VSC was in talks to sell the license?
MW: In regards to our exchange on April 21, no final decision was made ? until six days after you asked me that question. I assume that Rob Gordon told you only over the last few days that they signed a letter of intent; we did not agree to the letter of intent, which went through many revisions, until April 27: The letter of intent established the broad outlines: the money, the HD, and the internships. But there?s a lot more, it turns out, that has to be decided, and once lawyers start doing their thing, the process drags out as new issues come up and have to be negotiated. As Rob will confirm, negotiations like these are not conducted in public; we in fact had two other offers on the table at the same time; and all negotiations include a confidentiality clause that forbids public discussion. Robert Ackley asked on April 20 if we had any offers, and I told him that we had multiple offers but that I could not discuss them. He then asked me if VSC currently was negotiating with any potential buyers, and I told him that if VSC were engaged in negotiations, I would not be able to tell him that on legal grounds. If you had asked me those questions, I would have answered them for you. And if you or anyone had asked me whether there was a chance that VSC would schedule another meeting before the end of the semester, I would have answered that question as well.
NC: And how does the fact that you did not disclose the pending sale to WRVU staff square with your statement (again, in the email to Clarke) that "the board remains committed to open discussion and transparency"?
MW: My answer above speaks in part to this: There are legal limits on how much one can share when engaged in negotiations. More to the point, the board has in fact run an open process. In addition to soliciting feedback over the web, we met with the eStaff and were willing to meet with them as many times as they liked; we met with representatives from the alumni; we were open to talk any students who wanted to talk with us f2f; and we met with a coalition of people from the Blair School of Music and the community, represented by Cindy Stein.
As for disclosing the sale in advance: Although clearly we in some ways botched the transition in ways I will explain below, the change-over of necessity was always going to be abrupt, once the sale went through. (Again, I?ve explained why the negotiations themselves could not be openly discussed.) The final signatures were not appended to the agreement until the morning of Tuesday, June 7. The plan was to meet first with Robert Ackley, at 2:30, which I did, and also to send out advance notice to the eStaff at 2:45; that message unfortunately would not go through the listserv owing to the fact that I tried to send it from an email address that the system didn?t recognize, so many eStaff heard about the deal first online, from, I believe, the Scene, Jim Ridley somehow having gotten his hands on a copy of the press release around 2 pm. We did not want information to leak in that way. The bigger mistake, though, was our thinking that the deal was done a week earlier and could be announced on June 1. In fact, lawyers raised new issues, and we had some more work to do over the following week to finalize the deal. In the meantime, we were unable to stop the FCC from moving ahead with the call letter change, which had already been scheduled for June 1. When that change became broadly available on Monday, June 6, we pressed harder to finalize the deal. Again, we didn?t want people to find out secondhand. Obviously, the bigger issue was that people did not want this deal to go down, but I regret that the way the details leaked out in advance caused unnecessary extra strain and anxiety for people. It also made them feel disrespected, which I also regret.
Finally, there?s a reason radio stations nearly always change formats abruptly, when they do change: Open mikes and angry people are a volatile mix, particularly when the FCC stands ready to pounce on code violations. (Granted, we ended up violating FCC regulations with respect to the call letters, but that was simply an error ? we lost control of the situation there ? and not something likely to generate big problems in the forms of fines, etc.) And let?s face it, there was going to be a lot of anger regardless of how this was announced. Letting DJs do ?final shows? is a very appealing idea, and I?m sure most DJs would have handled it professionally; but it would only take a few bad decisions for that situation to go bad. And while few people want to hear this now, VSC doesn?t believe that there have to be any ?final? shows: WRVU programming will continue, accessible in new ways, and all DJs will be able to apply as always for fall shows.
We realize that many people now feel that something dear to them has unfairly been taken away, and it is natural to feel angry. But there are other ways to see this, even if the folks on Nashville Cream don?t want to hear it right now. I?ll give a few examples:
First, you might look at the following blog: http://joshspilker.tumblr.com/post/6320441835/wrvu
Second, on Nashville Cream, there was a post by by rexhammock on June 7, 2011 at 8:40 PM: his view is obviously very close to VSC?s, but rather than take what he?s saying on board and arguing with it, posters responded with vitriol and obscenity. Take a look for yourself at the first response to him. But what about his point: ?WRVU is the programming and the people ? not the pipes that deliver it to you.? Rex (whom I don?t know) is a respected media analyst and is in the business of media (see his http://www.rexblog.com/): maybe he?s wrong and VSC is wrong, but our position is not an unreasonable one.
Note: In a follow-up email, Wollaeger suggested Yale's WYBC would be a better example of an online college radio station: "The SCAD remains relevant, but Vanderbilt is more like Yale than it is like SCAD."
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