An added FM channel comes to Tampa Bay area, too
It’s a classical music station! No, it’s a news station! Stop! You’re both right!
Like the hard-to-forget old Certs Mint ad, public radio’s expansion announcements now typically have good news for both audiences.
Unlike an earlier wave of stations that ousted music for news/talk, Tampa’s WUSF and Columbus’s WOSU have joined a public radio parade that offer two formats on separate stations and in a single press release.
Instead of surrendering to the ratings power of news/talk, classical music’s average quarter-hour share of the public radio audience is actually expanding among stations with all-classical as well as dual news/classical formats, according to Arbitron’s recent annual review of pubradio audiences. Between fall 2005 and fall 2009, the combined AQH share of both formats grew from 33.7 percent to 36.6 percent of pubradio listening.
WUSF’s announcement last week came just a month after the news from Columbus.
Starting in mid-September, classical music will have its own sister station, WSMR-FM, down the Gulf Coast in Sarasota. WUSF-FM in Tampa will go news/information in the daytime and stay jazz at night.
WUSF is buying the noncommercial channel for $1.275 million on a 10-year loan from the University of South Florida Foundation, an affiliate of its licensee.
JoAnn Urofsky, g.m. of WUSF-FM/TV, says she didn’t have to argue strenuously to make the deal. Judy Genshaft, president of the 47,000-student University of South Florida System, was co-host of The Best of Our Knowledge, produced at WAMC when she was provost of SUNY Albany in the 1990s.
The seller of the new station was Northwestern College, a Christian institution in St. Paul, Minn., that was once headed by the Rev. Billy Graham. The college still operates a chain of Christian stations in the Midwest and made the sale because, as one of its executives said, the Florida station is “outside our ownership palette,” Urofsky recalls.
No available station could match WUSF’s audience area in every direction, Urofsky said. Where the new signal falls short, her engineering team may put a translator station on a leased tower to bring the classical service to listeners east and north of Tampa. In the meantime, the classical service will be carried as an HD Radio multicast service on WUSF.
On the south end of WUSF’s reach, the new Sarasota channel, at 89.1 MHz, will add 500,000 potential listeners to its reach, according to Public Radio Capital, which handled the sale and financing.
The news/talk schedule for WUSF is already offered on one of its HD Radio multicast channels, Urofsky says. Now it will be available to many more listeners.
Both music and news announcers will have additional work — pre-recording voice tracks, including station breaks, for two separate schedules, she says. WUSF will assign announcers for live hosting during Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Marketplace, she says. The music station will originate from studios being renovated on the campus of USF-Sarasota-Manatee.
Many classical music fans will prefer the new station, not only for its added hours of music but also because it can be “more adventurous” in its musical selections than the norm on the present mixed-format station, which was “designed to hold together an audience” between the big NPR newsmagazines, Urofsky says.
Map adapted by Current from WUSF's coverage map.
Web page posted Aug. 10, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC
