WPRB students oppose plan to sell

Despite more than a decade of financial struggles, WPRB, the 67-year-old student-run radio station, will not be shutting down.

On Saturday, WPRB's alumni board of trustees presented the student officers with possible plans for change, including selling the station's broadcasting license and then either donating the profits to the University or converting the broadcast format to webcasts. It also proposed maintaining the broadcast signal while restructuring the organization with professional management.

At the meeting, students who work at WPRB voiced their opposition to selling the station. Rumors of the trustees' intent to sell circulated among staff and other students before Saturday's meeting, inspiring a passionate response from students that included the creation of a "SAVE WPRB" group on facebook.com.

The trustees said the WPRB business staff was unable to sustain the station's finances. "We keep asking students to do things and things keep not getting done," board president William Rosenblatt '83 told the undergraduates at the meeting.

WPRB has been in a "downward slide" for the last 15 years, Rosenblatt said. "We're now at what I call a permanent downward cycle."

Treasurer Sean Murphy '94 said, "Revenue has been going downhill, even though students have ... [kept] expenses down."

Rosenblatt explained that poor student management and a changing advertising market were to blame. "The Princeton area used to have lots of mom-and-pop stores," Rosenblatt said, "[but] now there are mostly national chain stores, and it's a lot harder to get them to advertise. This has a big effect on our ability to sell advertising."

"This is not just about making more money. This is about revitalizing the station," Murphy said. "If the station is no longer able to make money, it's no longer a fun place. Our number one job is to make sure the station is around for a number of years."

"The trustees were putting some really radical options [on the table]," outgoing WPRB business manager Luke Goodwin '08 said in an interview. "I think that was partly just to let us know how seriously they wanted us to take [the financial situation]. I don't think they necessarily wanted to take a measure that was that drastic."

After six hours of deliberation, the staff and trustees agreed to keep the station alive.

Details of the station's plans are yet to be determined. "We're all pretty happy with the model that we've agreed to look at," Rosenblatt said. "We expect that when we have the next trustee meeting three weeks from now, we'll have a plan to look at, and we'll decide 'go or no go.' " He added that a committee was formed to further assess the situation.

The plan for the station's future is "sort of vague," WPRB music director Kelsey Johnson '08 said. She added that the options currently being considered include new fundraising methods, such as holding membership drives usually employed by public radio stations or hiring a nonprofit planner to pursue revenue sources.

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WPRB is also debating whether to offer some services to the University, Johnson added.

"[We're] not actually selling ourselves to [the University]," she said. The station is considering "maybe broadcasting lectures and offering them something that would give us some sort of security at the University, but not ruin what WPRB is about."

Johnson, who created the Facebook group and has been vocal in expressing her desire to keep the station going, said the "trustees feel that since radio is dying, now is a good time to get out of radio."

She added, "It was the first time we had to explain why [WPRB] is important to us, but I think it scared them because we showed them why you can't just treat it as a business. None of the options are thrilling because we don't want to admit that we're in a state of emergency, but our trustees think we're in an emergency."

After the meeting, Rosenblatt said the discussion was "a step in a process that has been going on for several years," as the station has shouldered an increasingly large financial burden. "It seemed abrupt to some undergraduates [since they] just changed positions in February. Part of the purpose of the meeting was to bring them up to speed."

Rosenblatt said that he appreciates the station's role as a venue for artistic expression by students. "The musical aesthetic of WPRB is really the heart and soul of the station," he said. "And to cut that out would be to kill the station, so that's the last thing that we'd like to do."