What To Do About WREK
A few weeks ago a meeting took place between WREK’s General Manager, Georgia Tech’s President (G. Wayne Clough), WREK’s advisor, and others. The basic gist of the meeting was that, while people aren’t unhappy about WREK, some folks think WREK could be doing more for the Tech community. Or rather, more for them.
The Athletic Association, for example, would love it if WREK could broadcast more games, on top of the baseball, volleyball, softball, and after-6pm football games WREK already broadcasts. Oh and, by the way, they suggest converting the license to a commercial one so they can run (and sell) commercials, which seems ridiculous and ignorant on several levels:
- 92.0MHz and below are reserved for non-commercial — WREK is at 91.1
- As far as I know you can’t just convert a license and change its position on the dial
- Finally, the Atlanta radio spectrum is pretty much full — where were you thinking you were going to get a new frequency, and at 100,000 watts?
Then our friends at Georgia Public Broadcasting, who are — poor things — without a station in Atlanta (WABE 90.1FM is run by Public Broadcasting Atlanta (PBA), who also broadcasts NPR content). They’d like a slice, too, thankyouverymuch. GPB approached WREK about doing this in the past, and we said no thanks. They were attempting to lure us with internships, which might have been appealing if Tech weren’t an engineering school. (Unlike WRAS, very few people work at WREK imagining a future in DJing/radio production.)
Read more in The Technique:
October 6th, 2006 at 10:35 am
What the hell — leave 91.1 alone — it was originally intended for the students and should remain as such.
The idea of carrying NPR content confounds since Atlanta already has two stations carry some (not all) NPR programming. 90.1 has elected to throw the switch off the feed around 9am each day and blast out classical music. So, let me guess, 91.1 could become the THIRD station in town to carry Talk of The Nation? You know, just in case you can’t find the other stations on the band within the +/- 1MHz spread? Brilliant.
Instead of even making the suggestion for WREK to carry NPR or dump FM for HD (for all two or three people with HD receivers out there), the better solution is this: WABE should dump the music playlist and join the PeachState Network while WREK continues to spin music like “20 Minutes of Droning Airplane Prop Engine” all hours of the day and night. If people demand commerical programming and really want to hear play-by-play analysis of women’s shuffle board, then they need to crack a deal with Budwiser and stuff it on an AM station where it belongs. Otherwise, WREK is going to become exactly what USF’s student station is today after lightning took out their transmitter: a bleak, basement existance where a DJ pushes scratchy audio through the campus cable TV network to a single listener: a rotten, cardboard-cone speaker in the mildewy billards room next door.