If you read this blog regularly, chances are you owe a debt to college radio. Before the internet, college radio was the only place that you could actually hear the bands being talked about in underground zines and British music mags. College radio also gave several of us a chance to get behind the mic and introduce others to the music that rocked our worlds. Some say that radio is a dead medium and anything worth doing happens on the internet these days. That, of course, is a pile of horseshit. College radio, if nothing else, is the wonderful weirdness discovered on the left side of the dial. It is a community unto itself that is by definition local, run by engaged and hardworking kids, and awesome.
Rice University has decided that they want to sell their radio station KTRU, the transmission tower, and their FCC license to the University of Houston. $8.5M. Not a bad chunk of change. The problems are several. The University of Houston plans to reprogram the station in the classical/NPR format. It seems there’s plenty of that to go around. The bigger problem is that the station was built by students, at no cost to the university. Students went and found someone willing to donate a transmitter and built the station from the ground up. Clearly, it is an insult to these folks for the university to cash in on their hard work. Naturally the agreement was reached in closed-door meetings and announced during the summer when student s were out. The whole thing stinks.
You can help. Sign the petition. Join the facebook group. Take a stand for college radio.
