Student Expresses Concern about Campus Radio

To the editor:

This is for all of my fellow students and other concerned people in the area. What I want to ask you is do you listen to the radio? If your answer was yes, then my next question is which radio station do you listen to? The response I have gotten from students I have asked is yes but not campus radio, in fact most of them really didn’t even know that there was a campus radio station. This concerns me greatly as a music lover and a student.

When I first arrived at WCU in 1998 you could pick pretty much any hall in any dorm and you could hear at least a couple of people playing campus radio. If you were walking around campus you would hear cars going by and all of them would be playing the same songs. My point is that everybody liked 90.5, but now you rarely hear anybody playing it at all. I am saddened by this fact. The radio used to be a common interest between students and that is an important part of campus life. When at parties you were able to call and request songs and you could be on the radio, it was a good drunken activity there was no danger involved. We need as many things like that as we can get, the less danger at parties the better. I remember being able to call in a request and they could actually play it and it didn’t have to be from the seventies or eighties, now if you call they either don’t have it or they can’t play it because it doesn’t fit that show’s particular format. This sucks! We are spending too much money to go to school here to be short changed in regard to any aspect of campus life.

My next concern is that if the radio station keeps falling down the spiral of mediocrity, what will happen to it? Will the students finally wake up and try to change the soon to be tragedy called power 90.S. that is what I would love to happen. Then again you could also go to the other side and the station could just keep going and not change and to me that is a waste because if there are no listeners then what is the point of having campus radio.

I think that if we are to have campus radio it needs to be the highest quality that it can be. I t represents Western Carolina and right now it is not doing a very good job at that. To continue there needs to be some major changes. DJ’s are the first thing that need to change there used to be some great people on the radio but now the DJ’s are boring and most ofthe time they seem very unprofessional. As students we can change that because we are in control, it is our money. If you want to, you can be on air and I don’t think most people know that. Campus radio is a non-profit organization. It depends on volunteers to keep going. So maybe if more students knew this then we could get some talented people to be on. The second thing that needs to change is the types of music that is played. Right now music on campus radio is of poor quality. When I first came here they played the most current and popular music now it seems that they don’t even have the newest music. It is like we are in a time warp. Whenever I go home to charlotte there are all kinds of new songs on the radio. If I ask a friend if they like a song, that I think is brand new they usually say yes but it has been out for like month. I want to be able to hear new music here at western I don’t like being behind by a couple of months there is just no sense in it.

Well, hopefully this will get people talking a little about making some changes to the radio it needs to be fixed. As students we need to be more concience of our resources here at Western

Sincerely,Josh Griffen