RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

found onty a few other stations which аге interested in the same issues we are . WYSO -FM in Ohio is a college station which tries to program for the urban community in nearby Dayton , In the evening , Medgar Evers students run programming for the Bed-Stuy community on the New York School Board's station , WYNE-FM. Possibly , you have heard community-orienteđ programming оп WKCR-EM, Columbia University's station. None of these stations , incidentally , are as lowpower as ours; it is hard to get information on the five or six hundred 10-watt stations like WHCR , because they are so small, and therefore wrongiy (we feel) considered insignificant. Not much is written about them . And most college radio in this country is programmed for the students on campus, not the community around it. While we have learned some ideas from the college stations , we hope in the f uture to give them iđeas, since we think our unigue concepts might fit with what college radio should try with its nearby neighborhoods . That is part of our prof essional responsibility , we thmk : to spread the word about the possibilities (and problems ) of neighborhood radio . We have mentioned before the tremendous debt we have to Community Rađio stations here and in other countries . The conversations we have had with people who work on those stations , and the chance we've had to listen to their programming, have given us many ideas for WHCR . If you have never listeneđ to WBAI-FM in New York , you might try it out to see what one kind of community radio sounds like . Though what you will hear on that station will not be "professional" in the smooth-tongued sense of commercial stations , we think that community stations like WBAI are good examples - when they are wbrking well - of what professionalism should mean for us . Drawing on these models - Black , college and community rađio , we have put together a programming philosophy which allows us to supplement the other radio programming in New York rather than compete with it. Because we are a neighborhoođ station for Harlem, what we do will add to what community members can find already elsewhere . Part pf that adding will be because we will have programming for our community that no other station will want , since they serve much larger audiences . Part of that addmg is in the way we f ocus on international, national , state anđ city issues so that they make sense to Harlem residents and

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