sometime around the middle of September a switch will be flicked, and the airwaves of Maynard will once again be filled with local music shows, community announcements, high school football games, and church services. This might seem unremarkable. After all, tiny WAVM Radio (91.7 FM) has been broadcasting from Maynard High School since 1974, and its annual powering-up is as much a fall ritual as raking the leaves. This time, though, there will be a celebration.
Bennett Tyler, and Benjamin Kelley
in the WAVM studio.
Last October, WAVM received startling news. In response to the station’s petition to boost its signal power, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced its intention to give the station’s license to Living Proof, a California–based religious broadcaster that was seeking to establish a presence in nearby Lunenburg. But the potential loss of its broadcasting license wasn’t WAVM’s only problem. In January, Joseph Magno, a popular teacher and the station’s longtime adviser, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing several of his former students. (Magno, who maintains his innocence, is awaiting trial.) The end appeared to be at hand.
Yet, somehow, WAVM survived. Parents took turns at the station, working two-hour shifts every two weeks. More important, local officials struck a deal with two of its competitors for the license that, if it receives final approval from the FCC, will not only keep the station on the air, but will provide for a significant boost in signal strength as well.
“I think it was pretty upsetting to everybody,” says Maynard High senior Andrea Tobin, a station volunteer, of last year’s travails. But Maggie Rolla, a former station general manager who graduated this past June, says the town rallied after people realized their local radio station was in trouble. “Once the word spread, it was like wildfire,” Rolla says.
An elaborate frequency-sharing arrangement solved the license issue. Living Proof agreed to pull back its signal in such a way that it won’t interfere with WAVM’s broadcast on the same frequency. And WUMB Radio, a folk-music station based at University of Massachusetts–Boston, which had also bid to supplant WAVM, pledged to broadcast on 91.7 FM only during the hours when WAVM is not on the air. (As a student-run station, WAVM maintains a mostly before-school and after-school schedule, broadcasting from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. Monday through Friday; from 2 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; from 2 to 7 p.m. on Friday; and sporadically during the weekend.) Even better, WAVM will abandon its 10-watt transmitter in favor of the 500-watt transmitter UMass plans to build in Stow, increasing its reach south and west to Route 128.
“A lot of parents work out of town, and they like to listen to their kids on the air,” says Ben Kelley, who, like Rolla, volunteered as a station manager before graduating this year.
So, instead of rancor, there is harmony on 91.7 FM. “They’re just a wonderful group of folks,” says WUMB general manager Patricia Monteith, who morphed from competitor to ally, as she handled many of the technical details in putting together the compromise. “Here are students who for 30 years have been providing a service to the local community. They’ve got programming that reaches the local students. But, more important, it teaches them how to work as a team and how to run a business.”
Still, until the FCC signs off, those involved will be crossing their fingers, if not quite holding their breath. That’s because a fourth competitor for the license— religious broadcaster Calvary Satellite Network (CSN) International, based in Twin Falls, Idaho—has not abandoned its application to transmit out of Lexington.
CSN International official Mike Stocklin told CommonWealth by e-mail that the company’s president, Mike Kestler, would have “no public comment” because the matter is pending. An FCC official who asked not to be identified said that CSN International has not filed an objection, but that the company has the right to do so up until the moment that the FCC rules on the WAVM/WUMB/Living Proof proposal—which, this official added, could take place as soon as this summer.
Unless the FCC unexpectedly rejects the deal, or if CSN International surprises everyone by getting back into the fight, it appears that WAVM has won. It’s a rare victory for local, community-based radio—and one that may say as much about Maynard’s character as a community as it does about the state of broadcasting.
A VANISHING BREED
Late on a rainy Friday morning, Cheryl Brouchard is stuffing fliers into newsletters in the school/community center/ office building next to St. Bridget’s Church, where she’s the parish secretary. Brouchard is a 34-year resident of Maynard, which, she quips, makes her a “newcomer.” St. Bridget’s, a gray-and-white clapboard structure built in 1881, is one of four churches from which WAVM Radio and its affiliated local-access cable TV station broadcast services on Sunday mornings. Once a month, kids from the station haul their equipment up to the choir loft for the 9:30 a.m. Mass.
Mark Minasian now works
out of Maynard High for Comcast.
“I know, for the homebound, it means a lot to them,” says Brouchard. “We have a good-sized elderly population.” She adds that townspeople in Maynard listen to the station not just to hear their kids—although they surely do that—but to keep up on what’s going on in their community.
The staple of WAVM Radio is its student-hosted music shows, ranging from hard rock to Friday-evening polka, liberally interspersed with announcements of community events, support groups, and the like. But the radio and TV stations serve the town in other ways as well. They raise tens of thousands of dollars every year in a weekend-long pitch for Beacon Santa, a charity drive run by the weekly newspaper, the Beacon-Villager. The radio station broadcasts high school football games, and the cable station does the same with high school basketball. A radio crew also broadcasts live from downtown Maynard every October for a local street festival called Maynard Fest.
“It definitely provides a service, in that it’s a media outlet for local activities and organizations to get their messages out,” says Robert Larkin, a past president of the Rotary Club of Maynard, a WAVM sponsor.
“It’s an amazing jewel. It’s just really incredible,” adds Mark Masterson, the superintendent of schools.
Years ago, of course, it was hardly unusual for a small community to have its own radio station. Today it’s almost unheard-of. Why does it work in Maynard?
In an age of long commutes and loose community ties, Maynard is something of a throwback. With about 10,000 residents jammed into just 5.24 square miles, Maynard has the look and feel of a small, rooted city rather than a commuter suburb. The downtown is dominated by Clock Tower Place, an old mill complex by the Assabet River that was once home to Digital Equipment Corp. and now serves as office space for smaller businesses. Median household income in Maynard—$60,812, according to 1999 US Census Bureau figures—also differentiates Maynard from its more affluent neighbors, which include Sudbury ($118,579), Concord ($95,897), Stow ($96,290), and Acton ($91,624).
“I think our town is very unique,” says Anita Hill, co-chair of the Friends of WAVM, whose younger son hosts a weekly music show. “It’s a very intimate town. People take care of each other’s kids. It’s a very tight community, it really is. You see the same faces over and over again.”
Radio analyst Scott Fybush, who writes the online NorthEast Radio Watch, says the kind of place that can support community radio “is incredibly rare in this day and age,” and that accounts for the dwindling number of local stations. “What it comes down to, in a lot of cases, is that these communities themselves might not have the same commonality of interests that they did when [their radio stations] were successful,” says Fybush, who got his start at WCAP Radio (AM 980) in Lowell. “There’s only so much that you can talk about the school-lunch menu or the lost-dog report until people say, ‘That’s nice, let’s see what Opie and Anthony are talking about this morning,’” he adds, referring to a pair of notorious nationally syndicated radio hosts. Then, too, Fybush observes, in the age of the Web, no one has to hang on to the local radio broadcast to find out whether school has been canceled.
Also, there are the economics of radio, which are not kind to small, community-oriented stations. Earlier this year Jay Asher, whose family had long owned WESX (AM 1230) in Salem and WJDA (AM 1300) in Quincy, reached an agreement to sell both stations for about $4.5 million to Principle Broadcasting Network, a Connecticut company, which has transformed them into foreign-language religious stations. Asher says that, given the debt Principle took on to buy the stations, it was inevitable that the company would embrace a low-cost, high-profit format.
“In a perfect world, I would have had a successor that would have bought the stations and continued them in the same vein,” Asher says. “Do I wish that were true? Yeah. But that’s not really practical from a buyer’s standpoint.” He adds that with fewer locally owned banks, retail outlets, and auto dealerships, there are also fewer sources of advertising to keep community radio going.
That wasn’t an issue at WAVM, which is a noncommercial, publicly owned radio station. What was at issue was the station’s Class D license from the FCC, which left it unprotected from encroachment by other broadcasters. In order to upgrade the license and preserve its franchise, school officials also had to boost the station’s power. As it turned out, simply filing for an increase to 250 watts inadvertently opened up WAVM’s license to challenge. The tentative decision last October to give the license to Living Proof, according to radio analyst Fybush, jibed with FCC guidelines that call for public stations to be awarded to the petitioner that would reach the highest number of listeners. Living Proof won on the basis of a complicated formula that takes into account such things as the reach and location of its proposed transmitter.
That a Christian station would make a bid for the license ought to have been no surprise. In recent years religious broadcasters have earned a reputation for aggressively pursuing every radio license that becomes available. “Poor little community radio stations, high school radio stations, are right in the crosshairs of these Christian broadcasters,” says Chuck Sherwood, a Boston–area activist with the Alliance for Community Media.
Which raises a question: Why did Living Proof back off? According to Harry Martin, an Arlington, Va.–based lawyer who represents Living Proof, his client decided to compromise and pull back its proposed signal from Maynard so that he wouldn’t get bogged down in a protracted appeals process. “It was worth it for us to tweak our signal a little bit to accommodate them,” Martin says. “This works very well for everybody.”
‘A TOUGH PLACE TO LEAVE’
Although more than 160 students as young as fifth- and sixth-graders spend time at WAVM, the station is, like most organizations, run by a handful of people—perhaps 20 to 25 students, some of whom are there every day from 2 p.m. until sign-off, doing their homework at the station and even having their parents drop off their supper.
One of those students is Bennett Tyler, a senior and general manager of TV8, the local-access cable channel. “The kids really for the most part run everything,” Tyler says. “I was trained by older students, and now I’m teaching younger students.”
Which is how it’s been for more than a generation. Take Mark Minasian, the local-access supervisor for Comcast, who works out of Maynard High School. He was involved in the station as a student in the 1970s, graduated from Mount Wachusett Community College, and continues to be involved in keeping the radio and TV operations on track. “I didn’t mind leaving Maynard High School and moving on, but this was a very tough place to leave,” Minasian says. “In fact, I’ve never left.”
Radio is the simplest of electronic media, something you can listen to in your car, at work, or while doing chores at home. Not everyone has cable, but everyone has radio. But with stations being gobbled up by corporate conglomerates, and with local programming giving way to nationally syndicated shows, community resources such as WAVM Radio are simply disappearing, with potentially dire consequences.
“I think you lose the basis of what democracy is about,” says Carol Pierson, president and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, in Oakland, Calif. “As economics start driving the media instead of public service, then I think we’re in trouble as a democracy that is supposed to be making decisions based on having knowledge of what’s going on locally.”
To be sure, the students at WAVM aren’t exactly speaking truth to power. They’re playing the music that they like, getting their friends to call in, telling jokes, raising money for poor kids, broadcasting high school sporting events and church services, and letting people know about the next ham-and-bean supper. But that, too, is the lifeblood of democracy.
It’s something that used to happen at tiny radio studios in hundreds of little towns across the country. And in Maynard, Mass., it’s still happening.
Dan Kennedy is a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. His weblog, Media Nation, is online at medianation.blogspot.com.
Tell him about innovative ways by which media are connecting with their communities by writing to him at da.kennedy@neu.edu.