The slow death of college radio

[Ace Purple]

This has not been a good year for college radio -- various broadcasting companies, mostly religious in nature, have been making a run at existing stations. A few years back, my alma mater (Evansville) nearly sold WUEV until an alumni uproar managed to squelch that attempt. Luckily, the administrator who short-sightedly wanted to unload WUEV is no longer there.

Earlier this year it was Rice selling KTRU, and now it's Vanderbilt selling its radio license for a cool $3.35 million. Today at 3 p.m. CT, 91.1 FM WFCL (which was broadcasting the college radio WRVU format, which had just changed calls on 6/1/11) went from a song ("Waiting For The Siren's Call" by New Order) to silence to dead air. The station had been a part of Vandy for decades; now it goes online only for the summer and will reportedly return to the airwaves on 90.3 WPLN-HD3. I happened to record the end by chance while fishing for a WFCL legal ID for TopHour.com, but I suppose I won't land one said by a Vandy student/staffer. Not that they were always great about doing legal IDs, anyway.

My suspicion had been that WFCL would be bought by Moody to simulcast WFCM, which covers only the bottom half of the Nashville market (if that), but it was Nashville Public Radio that made the purchase and the call letter similarity to the Moody station was apparently a matter of chance.