Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection

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Blog Post for Friday 2/25/11 – 33 degrees at 6:07 AM – Raining very hard with Flood Watches in effect – what next?

Radio dreams in pieces.

Cancel my subscription

The return of “Rising at Ten” to the radio has been scrubbed.

Dave McAndrews, who was the program director of WFTE, resigned yesterday. Dave was my only point of contact with WFTE and so that is that.

WFTE is a not for profit (Non-commercial) radio station, one of thousands given licenses by the F.C.C. (Federal Communications Commission) to serve local communities with public service programming not found on the commercial side.

Like most of these operations, at least from my perspective, WFTE is operated on a small budget, staffed by dedicated (unpaid) volunteers and generally run by a committee of some sort. From the WFTE “About” page on the web site:

About WFTE

WFTE is a grassroots coalition building a non-commercial, listener supported, volunteer operated community radio station in the greater Scranton, PA area. Our dedication is to the progressive values of social and economic justice, human rights, multiculturalism, environmentalism and the freedom of expression.

The station (90.3 and 105.7 FM) will be a full power educational/non-profit radio station broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 3,000 watts. WFTE is owned and operated by Community Radio Collective, Inc., (CRC), a Pennsylvania nonprofit formed in February 2008. CRC is managed and governed by its board of directors.

Without being in the mix (and I would not get involved even if forced with torture) I can bet that most of McAndrew’s problems came from this statement:

managed and governed by its board of directors

I ran radio stations for 40 years. A radio station needs strong, decisive leadership. It must be run like a benign dictatorship. I can not imagine running one with any degree of success by a committee no matter how noble the intentions.

As you can see by the statement:

Community Radio Collective, Inc., (CRC), a Pennsylvania nonprofit formed in February 2008

it has been a long term project. The station is still not on the air. They have an antenna and a transmitter site. I saw pictures. What else they have is a mystery, even to McAndrews.

McAndrews told me the hold up now is that the survey work done for the transmitter site did not meet F.C.C. approval. The commission is very picky about such things.

He also told me that he had not been informed or even seen what sort of technical arrangements had been made to put the programs on the air.

Pretty tough to steer the boat when you don’t know where or even what the wheel looks like.

WFTE is certainly poorer for losing McAndrews. He is an experienced, seasoned radio guy and would have contributed immensely to the operation. Finding guys like that who will work hard, for free, is not going to be easy. It’s hard enough in the commercial side to find qualified people who will work for money. Towards the last days in my radio career I defined a good Disc Jockey as one who showed up.

A great one showed up on time.

And a superstar showed on time, sober.

I am of mixed emotions about my budding radio resurrection being 86’d. I have shit-all else to do, what with school, (both attending classes and teaching) writing, the occasional studio project and the full-time business of keeping the SPEED.com and TruckSeries.com websites full of content.

But I had put together a half dozen programs and I had a lot of fun doing them. McAndrews and I are the only humans who heard them and we both liked them.

I investigated briefly the possibility of putting them on-line in pod-cast form. From what I can see the regulations and red-tape you have to go through are onerous enough that I have no interest in dealing with them. Plus, and this is the real deal-breaker, it looks the like the bare minimum licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI not to even mention the Harry Fox Agency would be about $1,000 yearly.

Nope. Not gonna happen unless Jimmy wins the lottery.