Chuck Woods, a University of Florida journalism graduate and retired faculty member, has written an article appearing in today's Gainesville Sun editorial section. In it, he decries the decision that the School of Journalism made last year to switch UF's powerful 100,000 watt radio station, WRUF-FM, from a rock format to country and western music. The intention was to increase the station's ratings, but as Woods points out, there is more to this than ratings: the community's interests should have been taken into account.
Gainesville is a college town, with a high demand among its population for fine arts programming. Indeed, Woods reports that in Tallahassee and Tampa, the state universities there that own two FM stations (like UF) devote one to Public Radio news/talk and the other to fine arts. But not here in Gainesville!
It's bad enough that I am stuck with a U.S. representative, based in Ocala, who is an arch-conservative and consistently votes against the interests and desires of most of the Gainesville residents who were gerrymandered into his district by a Republican-dominated state legislature a few years ago. Now my local Gainesville radio station has been "gerrymandered" as well to serve a particular cultural demand that is already being met by two powerful Ocala stations.
As a matter of fact, as Chuck Woods reports, the predicted boost in ratings didn't happen, instead going down from #7 to #10 in the area market. So it turns out that NOTHING positive came out of this programming switch.
I agree with the writer that WRUF-FM is in dire need of a format change, and his suggestion that it be to fine arts is something that, if implemented, might well herald my return to listening to broadcast radio on a regular basis.
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