From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: College Radio Stations' Web Sites (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 12:46:43 -0600
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
College Radio Stations' Web Sites Serve Both Students and Listeners
By KELLY McCOLLUM
College radio stations' Web sites, besides being useful for promotion and
for communicating with listeners, are also broadening the stations' reach
and giving students the chance to learn more than just the basics of
broadcasting, according to an assistant professor at Georgia Southern
University.
"Colleges and universities have to understand that it's not just college
radio anymore," says the professor, Steven McClung, who teaches
broadcasting. He says college stations, like their commercial counterparts,
are beginning to see the Web as a crucial component of broadcast operations.
Mr. McClung analyzes the audiences of college-radio Web sites in an article
in the fall issue of Feedback, a journal published by the Broadcast
Education Association (http://www.beaweb.org/).
Mr. McClung looked at the Web sites of college radio stations and surveyed
about 600 users of 26 of them. Most interesting, says Mr. McClung was the
demographic information he collected about the sites' users. In many
respects users who click in to college-radio Web sites tend to resemble the
listeners who tune in to the stations -- typically white males. But the
survey found that Web-site users tend to be older and more educated and to
have higher incomes than expected, says Mr. McClung. "It wasn't just poor
college students -- there were some pretty high numbers in terms of income."
For college radio stations, says Mr. McClung, a wider on-line listener base
could mean more lucrative advertising revenue and more respect for the
medium. He says it shows that "it's not just being used by kids -- college
radio gets knocked a lot for being a sandbox, a place where kids play."
Mr. McClung found that most of the Web sites are providing some form of
content through the Web. For some, it's recorded clips of on-air news
stories, while others offer live audio feeds of their broadcast signals.
Many of the listeners, he says, may be out-of-town alumni or parents of
students. "People will tune in to hear their kids, to check out what's going
on in the community."
WMBR at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology maintains a list of
college radio stations
(http://wmbr.mit.edu/cgi-bin/finder?format=col&page=found), offers links to
their Web sites, and notes which ones provide live audio on line.
The sites also give stations new ways to market themselves, says Mr.
McClung. Some stations use their sites to promote events and sell
merchandise, like T-shirts and CD's. According to Mr. McClung, government
regulations limit ways in which radio stations can make money over the air,
but Web sites offer more freedom. "On a college-radio-station Web site, you
can do anything you want," he says, "and that really opens up the door for
revenue."
And the Web offers new teaching opportunities, says Mr. McClung. "I think
it's a marvelous tool," he says. The sites can be used to teach students
about promotion and advertising sales, which commercial radio stations are
now doing on line.
Providing news and information on the Web also broadens the scope of on-line
journalism programs. "Educators have the opportunity to not just produce
news reporters, but to create content providers -- people who can send a
story over the air and put the story on the World-Wide Web."
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education