WLIU is indeed a local station for the Hamptons, but repeaters for Connecticut-based stations also bring in national shows and feature strong music and news-talk formats. Current’s map above, based on FCC maps, shows the 60 dBu contours of stations.
Time keeps running out for local FM at Long Island’s end
The day when Hurricane Earl was barreling up the East Coast toward Long Island was to be the final deadline for General Manager Wally Smith and supporters of WLIU to complete the purchase of the station that, for two decades, had been sheltered from rough seas by licensee Long Island University.
As of that day, Sept. 3, the nonprofit Peconic Public Broadcasting had been operating the eastern Long Island station for nearly a year with the goal of buying its independence from the university. But Peconic failed for a second time within the week to raise the required $637,000 payment.
Late that evening Peconic got another reprieve and a new deadline: Sept. 28.
“Even if they make this payment, it’s going to be a struggle,” said pubradio fundraising consultant John Sutton, pointing to the station’s limited broadcast range — overlapped as it is by Connecticut pubcasters — and its long reliance on LIU and patronage of wealthy Hamptonites.
If Peconic fails, “there are other public broadcasters interested in the license,” says Erik Langner, acquisitions director at Public Radio Capital, the Colorado-based consultancy specializing in signal expansion, which was both advising Peconic and working to line up other pubradio bids should PPB’s falter.
With its main transmitter in Southampton on the thinly populated east end of Long Island, 95 miles from Manhattan, another pubradio buyer won’t duplicate the traditional model of a local staff dedicated to serving that summer community, no matter how rich some part-time residents of the Hamptons are — especially when bigger stations are beaming public radio’s strongest formats into its area.
Under the contract negotiated with the university last October, Peconic — organized by Smith and four lay trustees — was to pay $2.4 million to buy the 25,000-watt station at 88.3 MHz. Most of the cost, more than $1.5 million, would be paid in-kind through services provided, and the remaining $850,000 would be cash.
For weeks, WLIU has warned listeners and website visitors that the “voice of 88.3 FM would be silenced” if it couldn’t raise enough money by August’s end.
There had been many missed deadlines already.
Peconic was given extensions to move out of its studio building on the campus of Stonybrook University. The relocation was one of the in-kind costs spelled out in the sales contract signed last fall, according to Long Island University Chief Financial Officer Robert Altholz, but it was delayed at least twice. The long search for a new home finally ended in late March, when WLIU moved into a storefront property in Southampton Village, according to local news accounts.
The closing date on the purchase was to be June 30, but Long Island University postponed it to Aug. 31 so that WLIU could make fundraising appeals to vacationers and seasonal residents of the island’s east end, Altholz told Current.
On Sept. 1, WLIU didn’t have the $637,000 payment but it did have encouraging news: The George Soros Open Society Foundations had put up a $50,000 challenge grant, which would match other donations up to that amount. Peconic also said that an unspecified area bank had agreed to lend it cash for its final payment, if certain unspecified conditions were met. The university gave it a 72-hour extension until the close of business Sept. 3.
Peconic had made enough fundraising progress, particularly toward securing a bank loan, to receive the Sept. 3 extension, Altholz said in an interview last week. He said he’s given Peconic every chance to fulfill the sales contract because its bid for WLIU was the highest submitted last year.
“From our point of view, as much as we love the station, we have a fiduciary responsibility to generate the highest proceeds to the university,” he said. “We want to give them a reasonable opportunity to complete the sale.”
The 72-hour reprieve last week meant that Bonnie Grice, the WLIU personality most widely recognized as “the voice of 88.3” greeted listeners to her morning music program Eclectic Café: “It is the first day of September and we are here with our regular programming. We remain optimistic and are alive and well at this point.”
Both Grice and Smith, her longtime collaborator and former husband, declined Current’s requests for interviews. “We are at a very delicate and private state of negotiation during the past few weeks and are not at liberty to share any information about those conversations with the press,” Smith wrote in an e-mail. “I am also totally engaged in the process of managing this acquisition at this moment and will have quite a story to tell you when we have successfully completed this process.”
Local news stories of Peconic’s ongoing struggles — including the extended search for a new studio site — and increasingly dire warnings about the station’s need for public support may have wearied some Hamptonites, at least according to the local press.
In a Sept. 1 editorial, The Independent, a Hamptons newsweekly that accused Smith of lavish spending and mismanagement, posited that WLIU supporters “who made good faith donations were probably played for suckers.”
"Even if the station came up with the money it needed to survive . . . it is doubtful it will continue running much NPR programming after this year — the station will not be able to afford it," the paper editorialized. "With signals of multiple if distant NPR stations within range of the Hamptons’ listeners, “the whole effort to ‘Save NPR’ was a cynical con game."
Worries about the station’s viability extended well beyond Long Island, as Public Radio Capital’s activities indicate.
As the Sept. 3 deadline approached, Altholz said he planned to expedite a new round of bids from public radio outlets who competed to buy it last year, as well as new interested parties.
WSHU in Fairfield, Conn., which operates a transmitter and four translators broadcasting NPR News and classical music on Long Island, may decide to step in, according to General Manager George Lombardi. He opted to sit out of the sale until now out of deference to the community’s aspirations to own and operate WLIU as a local station.
WNYC in New York and Connecticut Public Broadcasting’s WNPR are among the regional pubcasting outlets that could see the Long Island frequency as a valuable extension of their signals, according to pubradio observers, but publicists for both stations were either unable to confirm their interest or did not respond by deadline.
The little Long Island station couldn’t compete with other regional outlets in broadcasting public radio’s most successful formats, so it opted for a hybrid approach, programming mostly jazz and eclectic music mixes and some news. Its schedule features genre-bending music playlists and public radio news mainstays such as NPR’s Morning Edition and the BBC World Service.
Stations serving such small communities can’t go all-news or all-music, according to Sutton, the fundraising consultant. To build a big enough audience base, they have to appeal to both news and music listeners. The community’s affluence doesn’t guarantee WLIU’s success because the wealthiest residents of the Hamptons don’t live there year-round, he said.
WLIU’s service area extends from the eastern tip of the Hamptons as far west as Smithtown and Brentwood, according to a coverage map on NPR.org, with a population dwarfed by potential audiences reached by its public radio neighbors. Although different ratings methodologies used by Arbitron for Long Island and Connecticut make direct ratings comparisons between the stations problematic, weekly cumes from 2009 reveal that the Connecticut stations across narrow Long Island Sound have roughly10 times as many listeners.
In December 2009, WLIU’s weekly cume was 20,600 listeners while transmitters of WSHU had 257,300 in its weekly cume, and Hartford-based Connecticut Public Broadcasting’s WNPR had 212,800, according to Radio Research Consortium. In these figures, WLIU may have gotten a lift from the people meters used on Long Island but not in Connecticut, because when Artbitron switches from diaries to people meters ratings, stations generally score higher cumes.
WLIU’s ratings were derived from Arbitron people meters for persons ages six and older, Monday to Sunday, 6 a.m. to midnight. The Connecticut stations were measured by Arbitron diaries and counted listeners aged 12 and older. RRC’s Carl Nelson, manager of client services, pulled the Connecticut cumes from Arbitron’s national and regional database that counts listeners for each of the pubcasters’ outlets and eliminates duplication among them.
If Peconic ultimately fails to complete the purchase, it has the option to continue operating WLIU for an additional 30 days, Altholz said, adding, “They may choose not to do that.”
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Web page posted Sept. 9, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC