Question: If radio is losing younger listeners, by the droves, to high-tech music players and other time suckers like video games and social networking sites, where does that leave college radio, whose audience is primarily young music lovers?

To find out, I called on a San Francisco woman who, at 41, is long gone from the college grind but who is establishing herself as the authority about the wild, wacky and slightly worried world of college radio.

Jennifer Waits writes an entertaining blog, Spinning Indie, that promises "musings about college radio and independent music," but actually ranges from articles on college and indie radio and music to insightful reports on "field trips" to campus stations, near and far.

Latest entertainment videos

Now Playing:
  • Now Playing
    Rihanna Rips Snapchat Over Ad Joking About Domestic Violence Wibbitz
  • Game of Thrones Actor Warns ‘Brilliant’ Finale Won’t Please All Entertainment Weekly
  • Junko Cheng Appeared in Taylor Swift’s ‘Delicate’— and Now She’s an Internet Sensation Entertainment Weekly
  • The original queen of comedy: Moms Mabley Timeline
  • David Arquette Looks Back At His '90210' Cameo: I Was a Sell-Out! Entertainment Weekly
  • Matt Damon Reportedly Moving His Family to Australia Because of Trump Veuer
  • Rihanna Slams Snapchat for Controversial Chris Brown Ad- ‘Shame on You’ Entertainment Weekly
  • Boyega appreciates Elba's support on 'Pacific Rim Uprising' Associated Press
  • A 'Narcos' Video Game is Coming to PC and Consoles Wibbitz
  • Why David Arquette Was Mad at Luke Perry When They Filmed 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Entertainment Weekly

Here's part of her report on a visit to KSCU, at Santa Clara University:

"Located in the basement of the dormitory Swig Hall, thus the slogan, 'The Underground Sound,' KSCU would be impossible to find on campus if you didn't already know that it was there.

"According to E.O., a staff member for 26 years (he does a dance/electronic/dark wave show), KSCU started in the mid-1970s. ... When he came to KSCU, it only had two rooms and was located in a janitorial closet. Around 1985 the station expanded into a larger space in the basement.

"E.O. had some great tales to tell about KSCU, including floods, power outages, a scandal involving the stolen KSCU van (Rad! This is the first college station that I've heard of that had a van), and an incident in which a cockroach landed on a spinning record, causing it to skip."

That's college radio in a nutshell: funky, underfinanced and staffed by loyal volunteers who play mostly music you won't find on commercial radio.

Sounds like fun, but, in today's economic environment, can it last? A recent New York Times article on the subject was headlined, "College Radio Maintains Its Mojo." But the story could be interpreted in two ways, said Waits, over coffee at the Mission Beach Cafe. "It's saying either that college radio is thriving, or it's no longer relevant."

Her vote? "I think it's thriving." True, she said, "there's a lot of alarming stuff; schools are shutting down stations, and it's harder to raise money. It's time for people to support the arts, and independent culture, if they can. There's a lot of gloom and doom, but the artists seem optimistic. You have to remember to go back to why we're all into music in the first place. There's something incredible about the art of music."

But college radio is known to be particular about the music it plays. By and large, the music is independent, alternative rock. Many stations won't touch a song once it's become what they consider "commercial." Some staffs even ban music from other than indie labels. Those policies would seem to limit audiences to the most musically adventurous - many of whom have already moved on to online radio and music sites.

College radio, Waits said, isn't that narrowly programmed. "It is so diverse. Some do play commercial music; some focus on one genre. Stations like KFJC (Foothill College), KALX (UC Berkeley), KUSF (University of San Francisco), KSFS (S.F. State) and KSCU are focused on playing music that's not played on commercial radio, and it's not just rock. There's jazz, reggae, blues, country, electronic, noise, modern classical. And Stanford's station, KZSU (90.1 FM), has the oldest hip-hop show; Kevvy Kev has been there 25 years. So it's a pretty broad range." There are even, she added, "stations where you are learning how to do commercial radio, like KOHL (at Ohlone College in Fremont)."

Waits, a Bay Area native, has a show of her own, "Too Cool for School," Tuesday from 7 to 10 p.m. on KFJC (89.7 FM and kfjc.org) in Los Altos Hills, where the Foothill College station has been on the air for 50 years. Using the air name "Cynthia Lombard," she's been there 10 years, and has a straightforward announcing style. It's the music that's out there. On one recent show, she didn't play a single mainstream artist. Instead, they were bands like Death Sentence: Panda!, which Waits described as "spazzy rock with a punk edge"; the Magic Carpathians ("experimental psych from Poland"), and Man's Last Great Invention with an ambient-drone-experimental track called "." That's college radio, period.

Dating back to her college years in the mid-'80s, Waits has also DJd on stations at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Bowling Green State U. in Ohio, and Pomona College in Claremont (Los Angeles County).

In all her years on the air, she has earned not one buck. In fact, as with many people who work on college radio, she pays a tuition fee, as KFJC staffers are required to be registered students, to take a radio class and to put in a minimum of eight hours of work a week for the station. "It's a labor of love," said Waits, and a way for her to stay in touch with new music.

After reading academic articles about indie music and radio, and finding little about college radio, she researched and wrote a piece of her own. Her article was published in "The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media."

Afterward, Waits decided she had more to say. Thus, her blog (at SpinningIndie.com). Besides reports on various radio and music conferences and her field trips, she's embarked on a "virtual 50-state tour" of stations, by way of online interviews. Spinning Indie is (surprise!) a nonprofit venture for Waits, who is a freelance writer (her husband works in public relations) and has a 3-year-old daughter.

"It's a compulsion, really," she said (not about her kid, but about Spinning Indie). "I became obsessed and have really enjoyed diving into the project. There's a real sense of community and camaraderie at college radio stations, and something about the hard work there touched a nerve and made me so proud of being part of that scene. "I'd like to be a champion," she concluded, "and be a reminder for people who're disappointed with commercial radio, to give college radio another listen."

Oldies alert: KYA, once the Top 40 "Boss of the Bay," is long gone from the radio dial, but a rocking recreation of it is online, thanks to Gary Mora, who worked on KYA through the '80s, with Gene Nelson, Russ Syracuse, Chris Edwards and others. He later ran a mobile DJ company, "The KYA Oldies Road Show." Now Mora has partnered with David Jackson, of the online Bay Area Radio Museum, to produce "Classic 1260 KYA," a channel of mostly '60s music, studded with KYA jingles, vintage commercials (including "Top of the Hill, Daly City"), spotlights on DJs like Tony Bigg, Tommy Saunders, Tom Campbell and Johnny Holiday, and DJ patter from Mora, engineer "Super Harlow" and others. Mora said he's doing online radio "because of my love for 1260 KYA. Like many Bay Area residents, I grew up listening to my favorite DJs playing those 'Golden Gate Greats.' " To hear KYA again, go to www.kyaradio.com.

Tighten those belts: At KBAY, the soft-rocker in S'Jose, Steve Fox, music director/afternoon drive DJ, was let go, along with engineer John Higdon, the weekend staff (including Trish Bell, Lisa James and Mike Moore), the public affairs director and the receptionist. Program Director Dana Jang now oversees the music and voice-tracks a show from 4 to 7 p.m. Morning co-host Sam Van Zandt expands an hour, to 10 a.m., and covers public affairs duties (his partner, Lissa Kreisler, signs off at 9); Jona Denz-Hamilton adds an hour to her show, now going from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the DJs also cut voice tracks for weekends. As for that reception desk: Sales staffers are taking two-hour shifts accepting deliveries and answering the phones. Hello?
https://www.sfgate.com/default/article/College-radio-doesn-t-do-it-by-the-book-3166479.php
www.sfgate.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-13
291445
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RCJB4JQYTYFAOIQGEXRYN7G3KFJMRGHL
<urn:uuid:d09c7170-37dd-43a9-b700-7993e25e9c6a>
2018-03-18T17:51:57Z
192.33.31.67
text/html
sha1:QFQTK36JSOBZKEWZPEKXHDSQZLV5YVXD
<urn:uuid:073503bb-771a-420b-8772-66dd908826ed>
https://www.sfgate.com/default/article/College-radio-doesn-t-do-it-by-the-book-3166479.php
response
<urn:uuid:26f978d7-8848-4577-92d7-ad155faae518>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-233-130-109.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-13
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf