Looks like Detroit Public Television will be getting into the radio business. It’s completing work on a deal with the cash-strapped Detroit Public Schools to take over management of WRCJ.
The move will solidify connections between Detroit PTV and the city’s arts scene. Both TV and radio stations will use studios in the glittering $125 million Detroit School of Arts, a state-of-the-art performing and communications arts high school near the city’s major downtown arts institutions. The FM station, formerly WDTR, will have a dual music format, as hinted in its new call letters — the last three letters of WRCJ stand for radio, classical and jazz.
In April Detroit PTV beat out Ann Arbor-based Michigan Radio and four other bidders, including two religious broadcasters, for control of WRCJ, ending years of speculation about the fate of the state’s oldest educational radio station.
The takeover is expected to start July 1, but both sides are still hammering out specifics of the five-year operating agreement, said Robert Scott, v.p. for programming and education for Detroit PTV. By ending its subsidy of the station, the school board will save nearly $1 million annually, said its executive director for community communications, Kenneth Coleman.
Until last July WRCJ aired an eclectic mix of R&B, hip-hop and adult contemporary music and community talk shows. Its listenership barely registered in Arbitron surveys. Then the school system dropped most of its local talk shows, cut back programming hours and issued a request for proposals for an organization to run the station. Applicants had to accept many stipulations, including a mixed classical and jazz music format for WRCJ, and develop a five-year business plan that would address how the station might eventually generate revenue in the long run that could be shared by the two parties.
Detroit PTV was selected over other suitors in part because it and the school board have collaborated in the past, said Coleman. “Detroit Public Television had a strong leadership team and a board that looks like Detroit and one that has Detroit’s best interest at heart. Michigan Radio had a very strong proposal, but Detroit Public Television offered a little bit more.... We had worked with them in the past with TV broadcasts and town hall meetings and have had longstanding relationships,” he said.
Another bonus is that the two will be neighbors in the snazzy new high school, which just opened its doors in March. Among other features, it contains two theaters, a recital hall, dance studios and media labs. The performances spaces are all hard-wired to in-house radio and TV studios. WRCJ is about six months away from relocating to the arts school, and plans for the station to be a training facility for students are still part of the deal, said Coleman.
Detroit PTV has a 10-year operating agreement to manage the school’s TV production facilities, said Scott. “The studios are built. The lighting grids are up. We’re in the process of outfitting the technology in the studios and edit suites and expect them to be installed in six to seven months,” he said.
Transitioning to the ’burbs
Ironically, the high school digs will soon be Detroit PTV’s only outpost in the city itself. Although at one time station execs contemplated relocating adjacent to the arts center, they decided last fall to move to Wixom, 30 miles northwest, to occupy the former home of Clover Technologies. The telecom company's space was already heavily wired and available at a price that let the station prune $6 million from the $28 million goal for its capital campaign launched in October. Staff will start moving out to the ’burbs as early as midsummer, although the full transition is expected to take more than a year, Scott said.
Although some radio programmers say dual-format stations can’t fully satisfy either of their audiences, consultant Bruce Theriault said he helped Detroit Public Schools conduct a study 18 months ago that found the cohabitation of classical and jazz a good fit for the city.
“They were looking for a public radio format that did not try to duplicate what existed in the market,” said Theriault, a pubcasting consultant based in Colorado. “They wanted something that would fit with their broad definition of the arts being done at the arts high school. . . . Also, it had to be something that would create an audience sufficient to generate revenue.... It wasn’t ‘what can you do?’; it was ‘what can you do within these parameters?’ That [dual classical/jazz format] came back as a really strong option. WRTI in Philadelphia does well with that. ... They are very similar markets.”
Detroit already has one NPR station — Wayne State University’s WDET, which plays a mix of “cool music” in the words of Detroit Free Press radio reporter John Smyntek — along with the morning and evening NPR newsmagazines. WDET was just named “best radio station” by Detroit Hour magazine for its eclectic jazz-, blues- and folk-inflected contemporary sound.
WDET did not submit a bid for WRCJ, said its former g.m., Caryn Mathes, who recently took over the top slot at WAMU in Washington, D.C. “I found the RFP to be confused and I thought it odd — looking for an outside expert partner to manage it, yet they’d already changed the call sign, already decided the format, and set some things in stone that were a real impediment to that station succeeding. I consulted with our general counsel and he advised us not to get involved as well,” she said.
By “impediments” she listed as an example that the RFP stated that some school board employees involved with the station had to be kept on, but it didn’t state in what capacity or who would pay for them. Mathes attended a bidders’ conference in which school officials announced they wouldn’t be answering any questions; they would respond to written questions later.
Mathes also said she was surprised that the school system chose a bidder to run WRCJ that lacked radio experience. WDET had approached school officials a couple of years previously with a proposed local management agreement that had a revenue-sharing component, but “we could never make a go of it,” she said.
Michigan Radio, which reaches into some parts of Detroit from its home in Ann Arbor, did submit a bid.
Donovan Reynolds, g.m. of Michigan Radio, would say only: “I am delighted that the Detroit Public Schools made the decision to preserve that frequency for public service broadcasting. They had offers from commercial and religious broadcasters for that frequency and they turned them down. That’s a victory and that’s fabulous.”
Filling a classical void
The nation’s 10th-largest market hasn’t had a classical station since a commercial one switched to rock in 1997, although devotees can pick up a CBC classical channel from Windsor, Ontario, and the market also lost its leading jazz station in the ’90s.
Detroit PTV’s Scott said his station’s proposal developed a program schedule that would play classical music from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, with jazz at night. Weekends would be a mix of community affairs and inspirational/gospel programming.
Scott, who will likely wear the hat of WRCJ station manager and who worked in radio early in his career, is unfazed bythe dual format, saying it reflected his own listening tastes—he is a classically trained musician who plays jazz—and that it fills a void in the local market. The station will use satellite music feeds at first for most of its schedule but run one live shift in morning drive time, said Scott. It will gradually add live hosts as the station gets on its feet.
Though public broadcasters may be pleased the system didn’t lose a powerful FM signal to a commercial or religious outlet (there are already a half-dozen of the latter in Detroit), some community activists are still upset that the station is changing hands at all.
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, an independent news service based in Detroit, had a weekly call-in show, Open Forum, on WRCJ that was one of many shows that fell under the axe last summer.
“The history of PBS in this area has been one in which they don’t program to the people in the city of Detroit. They see it to be a suburban audience. It appears they want to take the station and extend their ideas around it,” he told Current of the Detroit PTV takeover of WRCJ.
Azikiwe is spokesman for the Committee to Save Educational Radio, which was created when the station announced it was seeking bids for WRCJ’s operation. Azikiwe said the group will try to make the handover a campaign issue as school board officials seek election in the August primary and November election for the first time in six years. In 1999, the state took over control of the school district and appointed school board members. Azikiwe and other activists think all contracts signed by the so-called reform board should be reviewed by elected officers.
Relieving itself of WRCJ’s nearly $1 million in operating costs will do little to solve the Detroit school system’s financial woes. A November audit of the schools reported a $200 million deficit. Smyntek of the Free Press said that handing over the keys to the radio station has not generated a lot of controversy locally simply because the issue seems so small compared to school closings, layoffs and other urgent cutbacks by the school board.
Web page posted April 18, 2006
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