Radio Free Yale

On Wednesday night, "Love Talk" premiered on WYBC 94.3 FM. Hosted by a pair of charmingly dry-humored seniors who drolly dish out everything from hook-up tips to sociological perspectives on XandO, "Love Talk" wraps up in an agreeable nutshell everything that college radio is supposed to be about: undergrads kicking back and goofing off on-air, as intent on amusing themselves as they are their (presumably small) audience. The easygoing badinage of "Love Talk," however, belies the often trying day-to-day realities of its host signal, WYBC, where student leaders are striving to define the station's purpose and personality and to dig the company out from under a mountainous debt that has swelled over the years of a tumultuous history.

The premise of the Yale Broadcasting Company, both at its inception in 1941 and today, "was first to be a training ground for people interested in radio, and second as a common link between Yale University and the New Haven community," Wayne Schmidt, WYBC director of operations, said. WYBC's staff includes paid "community members" who work in conjunction with student volunteers.

WYBC is rare among college radio outlets in its classification as a commercial, non-profit station--a status that obligates it to generate revenue by selling on-air advertisements. "There are only five other college stations in the country with our same categorization," Schmidt explained. "The upswing is that students can learn the real business of radio instead of what you have at university-supported stations, which don't reflect the industry as a whole."

In WYBC's past, the real business of radio has been a sordid trade. Lax management and shrinking sales during the mid-'70s sowed the seeds of a small but growing debt to the University. Lassitude mutated into larceny in the early '80s, when two student members allegedly embezzled funds. "Though they were quickly replaced, sales had dwindled to nil and it wasn't clear whether students or community members ran the station," WYBC alumnus and Board of Directors member Glenn Gutmacher, DC '87, said.

"The numbers of community members increased and increased. They were intimidating the students away," Board of Governors Chairman Carleton Loucks, SY '54, recalled. According to Gutmacher, the University shut the station down in the summer of 1985, following complaints from fellow Hendrie Hall residents that homeless people were sleeping in the WYBC offices. The station restarted the following autumn, but debt began accumulating again after Assistant Sales Manager Gutmacher departed in '87, and more charges of embezzlement surfaced. By 1988 WYBC owed over $56,000 to the University.

"There are so many dramatic sound bites from that era," General Manager John McGann, CC '98, said. "Probably half the heroin in New Haven was coming through a ring run out of the record library. One guy who worked there almost got killed--a guy took a kryptonite bike lock and tried to beat him with it."

"A large portion of our current debt is due to bad management from the late '80s to the early '90s," Station Manager Kevin Rothman, PC '97, affirmed. "Credit cards were being used for just terrible things. People were ordering limos to go to concerts, buying champagne and going out to dinner, and billing it all to the station. There was so much stolen equipment. We lost a $7,000 mixer--someone just walked out with it."

The long haul back from what Loucks called "the depths of despair" began in 1992, after WYBC's debt to Yale had surpassed six figures and following years of negligible ratings. WYBC adopted a "core format," consisting of a satellite feed of a R&B program from Houston called "The Touch," from 2 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Two years later, WYBC entered into a six-year joint selling agreement with the General Broadcasting Company, owner of local classic-rock bastion WPLR. The agreement established that WPLR would purchase and sell all of WYBC's available advertising time, in return for a fixed monthly payment to WYBC of $10,000 plus a small percentage of net profits.

"The agreement is very lucrative for WPLR and not that good for us, and it was arranged that way because WPLR was taking a big risk by taking on a bankrupt station and paying us money for six years," McGann said. "So of course we're going to get little percentage of their profit [from advertising revenue]."

Technically, the contract allows WPLR no control over the content of WYBC broadcasts apart from periods earmarked as core programming, which targets a largely African-American, "urban-contemporary" audience. But WPLR's purse-string power still casts a long shadow over WYBC's autonomy. "If WYBC decided to alter the core programming enough to affect a stated percentage of airtime, then PLR could decide that their revenue base and ability to sell ads was affected too, and they would have the right to renegotiate the contract or cancel it outright," Loucks explained. Or, as Schmidt put it, "If [WYBC] wanted to play Led Zeppelin 14 hours a day, they would have the right to do it. It would be the end of the company, but they could do it."

Not addressed in any contractual language was the state of affairs between student and community members. "Basically, students used to get pushed around by community members. That is rapidly becoming a thing of the past," McGann said. Loucks added, "There's always a little stress between the two. The community members are there 52 weeks a year, and they fill in when students are on break. Then the students come back and there's always a little discussion about who `owns' what time slots."

Tensions have ebbed partly because of the slow dissolution of boundaries between community and student formatting. "Spectrum," an urban-contemporary show, was once solely staffed by community members, while today, 30 percent of its ranks are students. The historically student-dominated "Nü Rock" format has gained more community membership too; renamed "Frequency" last month, non-undergrads make up 15 percent of its staff.

If WYBC has become a more pleasant place to work in recent years, it is still not exemplary of town-gown relations. "Spectrum deejays never interact with Frequency deejays, but it's not necessarily a bad thing," Frequency music director Jason Koo, TD '98, said. "Everyone just likes to do their own thing." Frequency Format head Jorge De La Rosa, BR '96, concurred: "There's no rift, but [interaction between students and community members] doesn't really come about. The community members view radio as a career. The students just do it for fun. They just want to get the music out there. That's where the difference is."

It was De La Rosa's idea to change Nü Rock's name to Frequency, and the switch is more than semantic. Whereas Nü Rock targeted a definite but tiny niche of indie-rock fans, Frequency takes a freer form, consisting largely of specialty shows geared toward myriad audiences. These include "Beat Farm," which spotlights techno and industrial music; a new, as-yet-unnamed ska show; and "Sound Museum," which picks up where Nü Rock left off.

"We're trying to come up with a more viable mix," de la Rosa said. "WPLR is interested in [our commercial standing] because they're on the money end of things. We want to attract listeners, but at the same time get new music out there, and we have an understanding [with WPLR] about that. That's why we're on from nine to two, because it gives us the leverage to play what we want, but not during prime-time hours."

Getting hold of those prime-time hours is a tantalizing prospect, however, which has sparked the concept for WYBC-2, an idea first proposed by Rothman two years ago as a means of providing more deejay slots and expanding the student audience. This offshoot station could operate on a small tributary of WYBC-1's operating costs, and feature ad-free student programming 24 hours a day. The only hitch is that of finances: getting a second station off the ground would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. "I am not expecting the station to go deeper into debt to start WYBC-2," McGann stated. "It's almost entirely dependent on our ability to raise funds from alumni."

Indeed, the spectre of dollars and cents looms large over WYBC's daily affairs, and members differ on the severity of the circumstances. Loucks' veteran's-eye view is that "the station is in very good shape. It's nothing like the day-to-day panic of several years ago...WYBC is solvent." While Loucks predicts that WYBC will be debt-free within two years, McGann's most optimistic prediction is the year 2000, "and that's only if we focus entirely on paying off the debt and sales stay where they are or rise a little bit. It would require that we do nothing else with our money," he said.

Economic anxieties aren't foremost in the minds of rank-and-file WYBC members, however. WYBC's contract with WPLR expires in 2000, and at that time the station could decide to start its own advertising sales force and return to a completely in-house programming format, winning back prime-time hours now monopolized by satellite feeds. But the prospect isn't quite as crucial to student deejays as one might expect. "The more chances people have [to get radio experience], the better," Koo said. "But most people never listen to the radio here anyway. It's just there for the deejays to have fun. I know for me, when I'm deejaying, it's not because I think people are listening. It's because I get to play music for two hours." The spirit of college radio, hybridized and battle-scarred as it is at WYBC, endures.