Pulse article on WUTC Station Changes

The man in the McDonald’s “Have You Had Your Break Today?” T-shirt balances a bulging stack of CDs and vinyl records in his arms and knocks noisily on the glass doors of the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga’s Cadek Hall, home to the WUTC FM 88.1 public radio station. He’s never had a key to the building; he just comes to the station for two hours each Saturday night to play his albums. Once someone lets him in, the man walks into the WUTC studio, a small room covered in floor-to-ceiling olive carpeting and garlanded with signed posters from artists who have visited the station. He settles into a black swivel chair, adjusts a pair of headphones onto his ears, and presses a bright orange button on the control panel labeled “ON AIR.” He speaks softly into a dangling microphone:

“This is the American Music Hour. I am, as always, your host, Andrew Heck.”

But this Saturday, five days ago, is far from a standard night at WUTC for Heck. His show – a blend of Americana, bluegrass and rock music – has been dropped by the station after nearly two years on the air; this is his final broadcast. Before he plays his first song, the station’s night manager delivers a message from WUTC management, warning him “not to badmouth the station or go boo-hooing on the air because your show got cancelled.” By 10 p.m., when he spins his last track, Heck will indeed be struggling to hold back tears.

After he cues up a live Bruce Springsteen recording on one of the studio’s three CD players, Heck wanders across the room to shelves of compact discs stretching all the way up to the ceiling. “This is what I’m going to miss, man,” he says. “Walking over to this giant wall of music.”

For the past five years, that wall of music has made WUTC something unique in Chattanooga and, for that matter, much of the country: a station whose three main disc jockeys – Richard Winham, Mary Anne Williams and Joshua Daniels – sit down each week to decide what albums they’ll play, then improvise each day from that playlist with songs that match their moods or listener requests. The result is a public radio station that, along with National Public Radio news programming in the mornings and afternoons, features a range of music – always diverse, sometimes fantastic – that sounds like nothing else on local radio. An hour of locally-selected music can feature anything from the folksy strumming of Gillian Welch to the rhymes of rapper Cee-Lo Green, from an early-1970s James Brown cut to the newest tracks from the Shins and the Magnetic Fields.

At least it will sound that way until Thursday. On June 11, station manager Dr. John McCormack and UTC vice chancellor of development Bob Lyon announced to station employees that, in the words of an internal memo, “WUTC will be making the move away from a music station with some NPR programming to a full NPR station with some music included in its programming.” Starting July 1, the station will replace “Free Lunch,” an hour-long, uninterrupted album played weekdays at noon, with “Day to Day,” a syndicated NPR news magazine. Heck’s “American Music Show” is cancelled, along with “Voices from Home,” another weekend show featuring live performances by local musicians. “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor’s nationally-aired Saturday night variety show, has also been cancelled, due to syndication costs that station officials say have increased drastically since the show moved to the Minnesota Public Radio network. The shelved weekend programs will be replaced by three new NPR shows – “On the Media,” “Living on Earth” and “Jazzset” – and a repeated broadcast of “Car Talk.” Internal memos suggest that more changes are on the way in December – possibly featuring two additional hours of NPR news programming each weekday, decreasing local music programming by a total of three hours each day.

Many on the station’s staff were upset to hear of a shift away from music to syndicated programming, a change made without any feedback from the listeners whose donations help fund the station. “It doesn’t seem the listeners are being kept in the fold at all,” says one station staffer who asked to remain unnamed. But what really angered the staff was McCormack and Lyon’s statement that deejays will no longer be allowed to select their own music. Instead, WUTC program director Mark Colbert will pick the playlists and distribute CDs to the deejays – and he will now have the power to approve or veto any song an on-air personality wants to play. Colbert’s new authority has some at the station convinced that the music aired will quickly become more conservative and homogenous, relying on those oft-parodied staples of public radio programming, acoustic singer-songwriters and smooth jazz. “It’ll be a lot of Seinfeld bass with a saxaphone,” predicts Heck. “ I like good jazz, but this will be modern jazz, slow jazz. It’s like sloe gin. I wouldn’t drink it.”

Already, sources at the station say, McCormack and Colbert have announced that the station will no longer play any songs that mention the name “God” or “Jesus,” in an effort to separate church and state-funded radio. The ban effectively removes most gospel, bluegrass or country music from the programming: “If I couldn’t play Jesus music,” Heck says, “there wouldn’t be much point in doing this.”

One source within WUTC says that McCormack is “basically going to censor the station. Most of us take pride in our music programs, and being limited that severely, we’re not even doing the same job anymore. We’re not creating anything. So basically, here come the resignations.”
The first is already in: on June 17, the day programming changes were announced to the public, morning deejay Mary Anne Williams said that she would depart the station July 1. Some WUTC staff members say they expect Richard Winham and Joshua Daniels to follow her lead before the fall pledge drive begins.

Station officials and some staff members say that these are overreactions to moderate changes, and that the new NPR programming will bring more underwriting dollars from local businesses. “How is changing one hour of music and moving a few programs around a sweeping change?” WUTC development assistant LaWaunda January recently wrote on a UTC message board. “Richard Winham is off on vacation, Mary Anne has tendered her resignation and Joshua Daniels has decided to take two weeks of vacation time on his own volition. How is this a sweeping change?”

Mark Colbert didn’t return a phone call, and John McCormack declined to comment, referring questions to UTC vice chancellor of university relations Chuck Cantrell. “Our changing is to build on our strengths,” Cantrell says. “By adding in this noontime break [“Day to Day”], this is a step to bring more underwriters and listeners to the music. During the week, we’re talking about one hour. We think people will like this program.”

Cantrell doesn’t want to talk about Colbert’s new control of music playlists. “We’re making an effort to structure the programming. Let’s just leave it at that,” he says with a laugh. “When you go to every employment situation, there are some decisions that are popular and some that are unpopular. You can’t please everyone all of the time.”

WUTC management officials say that changes are necessary to reduce spending – “A Prairie Home Companion” now costs $18,798 a year to air – and increase underwriting, the short advertisements from local businesses that air during music and NPR shows. Internal memos say that “every effort has been made to review all empirical information, including years of Arbitron data, underwriting sales figures, as well as a study of the past six membership drives to determine the time frames in which membership pledges actually have been made.” Cantrell argues that most underwriting and listener support pledges come during NPR news programs, and that the station is simply increasing the most financially profitable programs.

But staffers at the station, who declined to go on the record since they draw paychecks from the station, are quick to reply that those programs air during the hours when people are driving to and from work and are most likely to be listening. One staff member draws a chart of a sheet of paper, showing the hours that the station is on the air, then draws a line showing two peaks, like the humps on a camel. These peaks are the hours with the most underwriting, the staffer says: 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. The staffer then writes down the names of two syndicated shows that air outside of “drive time” – the last hour of “All Things Considered” and “Fresh Air,” which run from 6 to 8 p.m. – and scribbles beneath them, “not much underwriting.”

What bothers some staff more, though, is the assertion that the station should base its programming on underwriting dollars, not listener support. “Underwriting is essentially advertising,” a station employee says. “If underwriting is dictating our programming, there’s basically no difference between commercial and non-commercial radio… What we’ve tried to create with the programming is a sense of community. If [locally-produced music] is lost, there is no local community – it essentially becomes corporate radio.”

These staff members say that shifting to NPR-based programming and removing deejay control over music are decisions that won’t save the station much money. One says that when the costs of adding new NPR news programs are subtracted from the money saved by dropping “A Prairie Home Companion,” the net savings are just over $3,000, “an hour or two of on-air fundraising.” And they argue that the changes fly in the face of WUTC’s never-stronger popularity. “The station is more successful than it’s even been before, both income-wise and ratings-wise,” says a station source.

That certainly seems to be the case: the station’s spring pledge drive, in which listeners are asked to donate money to support programming, raised $120,000 nearly four days ahead of schedule, the most successful pledge drive the station has ever seen. And an independent study by The Pulse of Arbitron ratings, polls which are radio’s rough equivalent of television’s Nielsen ratings, show WUTC’s market share steadily increasing in the last two years. Arbitron’s winter 2004 ratings show 88.1 holding a 3.7 market share – a number that surpasses the 3.3 share reported for WDOD FM 96.5, “The Mountain,” a commercial rock station with a 10,000 watt broadcasting tower. For a public radio station to outpoll a commercial one “is just unheard of,” says a WUTC staffer.

Sources inside the station say that McCormack and Lyon are ignoring the wide popularity of music shows. “The successes of the station have been excused,” says one staff member. “[Management] said that the pledge drive was due to a general upswing in charitable donations due to a growing economy.” Another staffer says that McCormack “thinks anyone can do the job [of programming music]. He thinks that you go into a room and push some buttons. He doesn’t think that there’s any art to it: as long as you’ve got a signal on the air, people will listen and give money.”

More than one station employee is willing to declare, off the record, that the changes at WUTC are not business decisions, but the result of a long, ugly feud between deejays and management that has dragged on since the station first switched to an eclectic musical format six years ago. “There were two sides,” says a station staff member. “One side was programming the music; the other side didn’t like the programming, or the people doing it. That second side won the battle. The battle is over.”

The fight began in 1998, when WUTC was a jazz station and, according to one employee, held only about a 1.0 Arbitron market share. (The Pulse was not able to confirm Arbitron ratings stretching back that far.) When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, under pressure from Washington to decrease public radio funding, announced that it would start funding stations based on their level of listener support, “they realized that they weren’t going to make the money they needed unless they changed the format,” says a staff member. “They were in a pickle.” So the station switched to a Triple-A (“adult album alternative”) format, and gave Richard Winham the responsibility for developing and managing music programs, a responsibility techinally held by Mark Colbert. “The station,” says the staffer, “just took off. You can see the results.”

Not everyone was happy with the new format, though. “You can imagine the bitterness,” says another staff member, “seeing the people who took your jobs flourish. There’s bound to be bitterness; it just took a couple of years to fester real good.”

Last September, station sources say, Winham petitioned McCormack for the title of music director, a role still officially held by Colbert. Sources say the school tentatively agreed to put Winham’s title on paper, “but the day before Christmas break,” a staffer says, “John McCormack tried to take Mary Ann off the air and strip Richard Winham of the title he’d just given him.”

University chancellor Dr. Bill Stacy put a halt to that move, though, and the station was placed under the control of Cantrell and UTC director of human resources Don Webb. A series of meetings was held – “they would bring us in one by one,” says an employee – and sources say Cantrell and Webb promised to do market research to determine public opinion of the station’s direction.

But in April, Bob Lyon was named the school’s vice chancellor of development, a hiring that placed him in charge of WUTC. Staffers say Lyon held two group meetings with the staff before announcing station changes with McCormack on June 11. “There was no market research, there was no community advisory board,” says a staff member. “That’s when the resignations started coming in. That’s when everybody started to jump ship.”

Heck says that, with grudges brewing between deejays and management, a change was bound to happen. “There was a lot of tension in here. The university had to rule in some way. I could feel the tension.” That strain has now been replaced by bewildered anger in some employees. “This isn’t a business decision,” says one staffer. It’s ridiculous to think that this station is run like a business. It’s not about money. If they wanted to tighten their belts, they could… [The managers are] not bad people. They just don’t get along [with the deejays]. It’s kind of been sick to watch. You’ve got a good thing going here, why don’t you just sit back and enjoy it, see the money come in, instead of letting your egos get in the way? But that’s not human nature.”

Station officials, meanwhile, maintain that the changes are mild, made for sound business reasons, and that the public didn’t need to be formally consulted. “We get feedback every day,” says Cantrell. “If people like or dislike the new programs, they’ll let us know.”

As rumors of the changes at WUTC fly across town, some listeners are already busy letting the station know their feelings. Bobby Stone, a co-owner of local video production company Atomic Films, has posted an online petition to “Save WUTC 88.1” at www.petitiononline.com/881wutc/petition.html. “As loyal WUTC listeners and supporters,” it reads, “we are serious about protecting the quality of this station and are prepared to withhold our financial support during the next fund drive and in Underwriting [sic] in protest if our requests aren't met.” He created the petition Friday morning; by 3 p.m. it had received 100 signiatures. Early Monday, more than 500 people had signed, including several underwriters.
“I have listened to a lot of radio stations – public radio in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Athens – and somehow, we have the best public radio station in America,” Stone says. “I don’t know why they’re trying to change something that’s not broken. Hopefully, they’ll see loud and clear that people are willing to vote with their pledge dollars to keep things the way they are.”

One of the first people to sign the petition was George Parker, who runs the Pete Parker Foundation, a group that purchases large blocks of airtime on WUTC to advertise concerts that benefit local charities and feature musicians like John Hiatt and Nanci Griffith. “What they have done with that station to date is great, it’s incredible,” he says. “And that’s all thanks to the disc jockeys. For management to tinker with that now, I think it’s a huge mistake… They just raised more money than ever before, and they raised it faster than ever before. What else do you need to know to validate what you’re doing?”

If such listener protests prove ineffective, the future of the station seems as delicate as the Emmylou Harris songs the deejays often play. Richard Winham is traveling in India and won’t return until July. Mary Anne Williams, still under contract at WUTC, declined to comment, except to say she’s sorry to part ways with the station. Joshua Daniels, happened upon while eating lunch downtown, only issued a careful comment: “I’ve enjoyed contributing to this community through my service at WUTC and hope I will be able to make more positive contributions to the community in the future, through WUTC or otherwise.”

Moments after Daniels finishes his statement, a Pickle Barrel waitress walks up to him. “Aren’t you Joshua Daniels?” she asks him. “You have a great radio show.”
He smiles back at her. “I used to.”

Isn't it possible that the two statements are consistent, though admittedly misleading? Notice that, in the chattanoogan.com article, Lyons is reported as saying there will be no changes in music FORMAT. Perhaps there are no FORMAT changes in the works. None have been officially announced. The internal memo speaks of decreases in the number of HOURS that music will be played, but no reference to format. Speculation about changing over to smooth jazz seems, at least right now, only (Heck's?) speculation. I don't like the decrease of music on the station or the loss of DJ autonomy any better than you. But it seems possible that the options you give about Mr. Lyon's comments are not exhaustive. There might just be a lot less music, but with the same general format.

His name is actually spelled "Lyon" -- and that has nothing to do with programming. Just thought I'd point that out...

ugh. I vaguely remember the "jazz 88" days. yuck. the death knell of this station will be the first kenny g song they play.

good piece, mesh.

Dr. Green,

It is possible that the statements are consistent, albeit that hinges upon the definitions of "programming" and "format" that Mr. Lyon is using and our, the listening public, assumptions of what "programming" and "format" means.

Which is why I purposely included option #2, that Mr. Lyon was playing "fast n' loose" with his language (being aware of the hub-bub and obvious concerns over programming and format) and that John Wilson needed to do some better reporting by checking other sources instead of reporting Bob Lyon's quote as a defacto rejection of any format or programming changes.

Now, I suppose there is a fourth option, that Mr. Lyon is a simpleton and therefore utterly unaware of possible station changes and that there would be a diverse and divergent set of views on what "programing and format changes" might detail. I don't think that's what occured either, because Bob Lyon is obviously a very intelligent man, which might mean that he was just playing stupid, which is even scarier and insulting to the WUTC listening audience.

But in conclusion, the publicized changes by all means entail a change in station programming (i.e. reduction in certain music, addition of NPR music, cancelling of certain programs and the firing of DJ's). Do the entail a change in broader "format"? I think so, and I reference, again, the memo by John McCormack & Bob Lyon:

"WUTC will be making the move away from a music station with some NPR programming to a full NPR station with some music included in its programming."

That right there is a discussion of station format, not JUST of programming.

One little correction - WDOD FM has a 100,000 watt signal, not 10,000. That makes the fact that WUTC had a higher audience share even more amazing.

As for the changes, what the jocks at WUTC are going through now is what us commercial deejays went through ten years ago when big business was allowed to buy huge numbers of radio stations. It's been a long time since any of us where allowed to play what we wanted to play - we all have consultants and playlists and so forth and have had such for a long time.

I can even understand some programs being changed due to financial decisions - Minnesota Public Radio has been raising the prices on all of their programming to levels stations like WUTC cannot afford. And WUTC is not the only one out there that's been forced into dropping some of MPR's programs.

I think the real sticky point is the elimination of locally-produced and locally-hosted programs in favor of syndicated NPR shows. I don't tune in to WUTC to hear NPR (I personally don't like their news coverage); I tune in to WUCT to hear shows like "Celtic Harvest" and "The American Music Hour". Losing any of those shows is like losing a friend.

It will be real interesting to see how this story plays out. WGOW even picked Bobby Stone's online petition as their "Website du Jour" for Tuesday, which shows that even commercial radio types are concerned about what happens to WUTC.

And I agree, Aaron did an excellent job writing this piece.

If the upper management of WUTC was given jurisdiction and authority to act as they saw fit, and let's assume it was done with good intentions (resigning that business decisions can be good) rather than political, then they will be judged on both their actions by their constituency and results of those actions by their superiors at UTC.

Currently, a growing vocal constituency has passed judgment and have found them wanting. We will have to wait to see whether this will effect change. I have a cynical feeling it will be more akin to signing a petition to not allow an old building to be torn down after the contractor’s hit it twenty times with a wrecking ball.

If they’re allowed/encouraged/enabled to continue as planned, some time will need to pass to determine if their actions did the financial good that they seemed to intend. But I don’t believe any more time needs to pass to alienate them any further from a vocal and informed listening audience - bringing into doubt the success of the former.

This is all very sad and I hope these people find peace at the end of their fight.

I LAUGH AT YOU ALL!!!!

Let's see if I can get this straight. A bunch of state employed disc jockeys who couldn't get hired by a for-profit radio station to sweep the trash whine and moan because they don't get to do what they want when they want?

That's called the real world, you bunch of over-paid under-worked leeches. Try working a real job, where you are exepcted to do what the boss tells you to do and are happy to have a job. If the boss says, "We can't afford this show" and you don't like it, don't go running to the media like a tattletale in kindergarten. If the boss says "You need to play these songs" shut up and do your damn job.

I swear, I wonder if any of these prize idiots would last a day on an assembly line, a construction site, behind the wheel of a big truck, or any other job that requires hard work and discipline. Sitting in an air-conditioned studio for four hours a day is about the easiest gig one can imagine and yet these pampered public radio "employees" act like they should be bowed down to because they are some sort of icons.

If I were the boss at WUTC, I'd tell Mary-Anne to not let the door hit her on the ass as she leaves. It's about time she stopped sucking off the government teat (WUTC employees are state employees, paid for with our tax money) and tried to find a job out here in the real world like the rest of us.

A great big dose of "get the fuck over it" needs to be sent over to those studios.

Vox Populi

How do you follow THAT one?
With a shower, Comet and Lysol !
Nux Vomica requires his "Black & White", as broadcast by his masters Shemp Hammity and Ol' Pillhead (I wonder if he memorizes Shemp's Butt-Powder and Hair-Growth Pill commercials as well?)
How unususal that this knuckle-dragging poster-boy for Clear Channel would even be aware of WUTC, much less post such a cretinous, vitriolic and totally bogus screed flaming the true and celebrated talent of WUTC in a spectacularly failed attempt to make the administrative wanks and their apocalyptic policy look better than the pitifully clueless benchwarming farm-team losers that they are. The Peter Principle has never been as well (and large) writ, and as clumsily and inappropriately defended.

When I found WUTC I thought it was the greatest radio station I had ever heard. I listened to it every day at work. The music was great and Mary Anne Williams and Richard Winham were very knowledgable. Chattanooga needs this kind of radio station. This station plays a very diverse kind of music that you can not get at any other station. Since WUTC also has one of the most intelligent audiences you should let them decide what they want to listen to each day. I for one will not listen any more to anything you air if the format does not go back to the way it was. It seems like if it is a public station and the public is supporting it by listening and through dollars the public should have been considered in this decision and not one or two people.

I've been listening and the only change in the music that I've noticed is the fact that the regular djs seem non-existant nowadays. Must be nice to be able to get weeks at a time off and have someone sit in for you. Such is not the case in commercial radio.

George Parker said: "They just raised more money than ever before, and they raised it faster than ever before. What else do you need to know to validate what you’re doing?”

Indeed, and this will be the tack I take in my communications with Lyons/McCormack. If this is accurate, then it seems that the management of the station is guilty of doing a poor job.

I'm an internet listener here in Huntsville, Alabama. I'll certainly do what I can to apply pressure to the station management.

We discovered WUTC last summer, and told our friends unreservedly that it was "the best radio station we've ever heard." If the end result of this is a Clear Channel-ish homogenization of the station, how sad that will be.

First, NPR takes Bob Edwards off Morning Edition now WUTC forces Mary Ann Williams out. They've put the choice of music back in the hands of a person whose taste nearly killed WUTC with his elevator jazz. I have to drive to another city to hear Prairie Home Companion?! They call this PUBLIC Radio, right? No one asked a single member of the listening (and financially supporting) audience what WE want to listen to and WHO we want to speak to and for us.

Fire the incompetent managers who made these decisions and give us back our beloved 'on air' personalities and the excellent national programming we pay to hear.

Typical Chattanooga. But there is XM radio!