Coyle '38 award given to radio station leaders

Madeleine Walsh ’08, WPRB’s former station manager, and Michael van Landingham ’08, the station’s former development director, won the award for their work at the station this past year. Bill Rosenblatt ’83, the president of WPRB’s board of trustees, said that Walsh and van Landingham were instrumental in expanding and improving WPRB after a rocky period last spring.

According to a letter that came with the award, it is given out when the board determines that students have earned the honor by performing “work at WPRB [that] has gone well above and beyond normal operations and served to create a substantially improved environment for the next generation of students.” Rosenblatt said the award is only given out every four or five years.

Walsh took over as station manager at WPRB last spring after the previous station manager left unexpectedly. Will Sullivan ’09, WPRB’s current station manager, explained that when the previous manager resigned last May, the board of trustees asked Walsh to take charge of the station.

“It was definitely a large amount of responsibility to take on in a short amount of time,” Sullivan said. He added that Walsh cancelled her previous commitments to enable her to return to Princeton over the summer and plan for the upcoming year.

Sebastian Jones ’09, WPRB’s news director, praised Walsh’s open-minded managerial style. Jones credited the news department at WPRB — introduced last fall — to Walsh’s support. “Her leadership and her receptiveness to getting something done put it on the fast track,” he said.

Van Landingham, on the other hand, headed a fundraising project to create a new source of revenue for the radio station. Faced with dwindling advertising revenue, WPRB decided to run its first-ever on-air fund drive in fall 2007.

“I was kind of daunted by the task of raising $25,000 in a week,” van Landingham said. “I didn’t think it was possible.”

After an internship he’d been pursuing for the summer of 2007 fell through, van Landingham took a job with WPRB, where he was put in charge of running the fundraiser. “When we ran the drive, I was there 48 hours a day, if that’s even possible,” van Landingham said. The drive raised $40,000.

Van Landigham’s dedication did not go unnoticed. The WPRB board paid him extra for his overtime hours and discussed recognizing him formally with an award.

“Michael created the whole fund drive from absolute scratch,” Rosenblatt said. “He did the vast bulk of the work.”

Jones said that with the money van Landingham helped raise, WPRB will be able to pursue “a lot of projects that would have been impossible under our normal budget.”

The station has already replaced a lot of faulty broadcasting equipment, Jones said. The news department has also been using some of the extra money to get its operations off the ground.

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Jones explained that WPRB has not had a news department in 15 years and that the station is carefully considering the way it will operate. “Michael’s efforts in no small part have really allowed us to start creating a source for us to go to build the department in a way that is meaningful,” he said.

Walsh and van Landingham will have their names inscribed on a plaque in the WPRB office and were awarded a monetary “sum that would be considered substantial by most undergraduates,” Rosenblatt said. He declined to disclose the exact amount of money.