The NVU-Lyndon community received an email from Dean of Students and Executive Director Jonathan Davis on Friday announcing the sale of WWLR’s FCC license. Vermont Public will take over the radio waves within the next few months while the club looks to move to online streaming. “The decision to sell is the result of more advanced learning technologies in the classroom, waning student participation, and ongoing costs associated with dated station infrastructure and FCC compliance,” Davis wrote in his email.
The conversation about how to move forward with WWLR’s license came to the public light in December 2021. At the time, the Vermont State Colleges’ Board of Trustees oversaw three FCC licenses: two at Northern Vermont University’s campuses and one at Vermont Technical College. The board’s “outside council” noted that NVU’s student-run stations were struggling to meet FCC regulations, which could mean additional fees or declining the stations’ FCC renewal applications, which were due on December 1. “As a result of that discussion, NVU undertook a study to decide whether this was, indeed, an area where they wanted to continue the licenses. Although they have passionate student managers and advisors, they do have waning student participation and aging equipment that supports these radio stations,” general counsel Patty Turley announced at the December 6 Education, Personnel, and Student Life Committee meeting.
In 1977, WWLR had upwards of 40 students working to broadcast seven days a week, 6:00 am to 1:00 am. Former general manager Curtis Bates says the club had 10 members on campus during the 2020-2021 academic year. By the end of the Spring 2022 semester, five members remained. Current general manager Colin Gallagher says the main goal since taking over this fall has been to increase the club’s membership. He says there are now seven active club members, four to five of whom have shows broadcasting over the air. Outside of those few students, the station has been running automation of classic rock songs on loop. With so few club members to help, Gallagher says it has been difficult to add songs into automation. The call letters that still sound at the top of the hour were recorded by former students around three to four years ago.
WWLR’s faculty advisor Meaghan Meachem says she had a conversation with Davis when the license was up for renewal to discuss how to move forward. She acknowledged there was a period of time where WWLR was dormant, and there were some major gaps in the FCC file that would be looked at during the renewal process. “The question had become: do we roll the dice and renew, or do we walk away?” she said. “It wasn’t an easy decision.”
Meachem and Davis concluded that the best move forward, to avoid any potential fines, would be to not renew the station’s license. That decision was then presented to the VSCS board and associated committees. However, NVU did pledge to pursue streaming opportunities for students in the absence of FM radio signals.
This is a move Castleton University also made a few years ago, and something Lyndon students have been asking for, in part. Pete Cormier was the general manager of WWLR from the end of 2018 until he graduated as part of the Class of 2020. He confirmed that students in the club wanted to add streaming to the station in addition to the FM frequency, though “the higher ups wanted to switch it all to streaming.” Alek Wolfe, a current student at NVU-Lyndon that has been part of WWLR since the Fall of 2020, said there has always been a push for streaming. Other members noted that within the past few years, some students even left the club because it was not streaming online.
The EPSL committee approved the non-renewal of NVU’s FCC licenses on December 6, and the entire Board of Trustees approved the vote later that afternoon. Both votes were unanimous.
Lyndon State College first applied for a frequency and construction permit for WWLR in March 1975. According to the FCC, the station’s license was first granted on May 12, 1977, but WWLR started broadcasting on 91.5 FM as early as February 1977 according to The Critic’s archives. The original plan, however, was to move to FM broadcast much sooner.
As the station moved to the first floor of Vail and got its ducks in a row, a student climbed the transmitter tower in November 1976 to hang a flag. Student general manager Joe Benning, wrote a letter to The Critic expressing that this action had damaged the transmitter, which needed to be sent in for repairs. “What you didn’t think about was the fact that each step you took destroyed a little bit more of the precious ohms that we needed to go on the air. The tower now must be sent back to the company to be fixed and the students, who are paying for it, must wait even longer,” Benning wrote. The cost of those repairs came from the student body’s activities fees.
Senior Vice President of Technology at Vermont Public, Joe Tymecki, heard that NVU was not planning to renew its licenses, and after confirming on the FCC website, reached out to the university to inquire. The media giant had been looking for a way to expand its Vermont Public Classical network in the St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville area. Vermont Public’s Director of Marketing and Audience Engagement Michelle Owens said, “Improving coverage of this network in the Northeast Kingdom has been our goal since we first launched the service in 2004.”
But, without a license, NVU had nothing to sell. NVU Interim President John Mills “rolled the dice,” Meachem said, and renewed WWLR’s license this spring. This was approved by the FCC on March 21 for a term expiring on April 1, 2030. Sylvia Plumb, Assistant Vice President of Vermont State University’s Marketing and Communications team, said the renewal and associated fees cost under $5,000 total. “We got very lucky they did not overly scrutinize the holes that were in our file. I think it helped that we were a college station, not a commercial station,” Meachem said.
According to Meachem, April was when conversations with Vermont Public started to get serious. The Board of Trustees finalized a resolution detailing the parameters of the sale on October 31 for “no less than $80,000” in a “Lease with the Purchaser for the use of the existing facility for a period not to exceed three years.” The sale was finalized earlier this month, some Vermont Public staff being notified as early as December 8. “The sale of the license was $80,000, which won’t be received until the FCC approves it,” says Plumb. The FCC could take anywhere from 30 to 90 days to acknowledge the sale. When this happens, Owens says there will be dead air for one to two weeks while Vermont Public takes over.
Until then, WWLR will still be broadcasting out of the Vail building by university students. However, if the FCC recognizes the sale at the 30-day mark, the station will stop broadcasting before students return to campus for the spring semester. Gallagher hopes the process takes longer so club members have the chance to go on air one last time, especially considering the hiatus they will have to take when the transition to streaming starts. “I think it would be nice to do a sendoff. It’d be nice to say good-bye to some of the listeners, because some of the listeners probably aren’t going to switch over to streaming.”
“NVU intends to use the proceeds of the sale (sale price minus fees) to make the switch to streaming radio,” Plumb said. Meachem estimates this could cost anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 on equipment alone. “It’s wicked outdated equipment. I think the newest piece of equipment in that studio is the emergency alert machine,” she said.
Meachem reached out to Michael Talbot, Castleton’s station faculty advisor, for guidance. Castleton had budgeted around $40,000 for their transition, but only spent around $25,000. But “there are a few things that don’t apply to Castleton that will apply to us,” Meachem advised, such as a new audio board. “The audio board down in WWLR is not compatible [with streaming].” In addition to equipment, she hopes the physical space WWLR operates out of can get some time and money put into it.
“This is not a small investment,” Meachem said. Had the university continued under the FCC license, upgrades were still desperately needed to bring WWLR into the 21st century. “Let’s be real, we all know the transmitter is not in its best shape. I know to get just the transmitter back to where it needs to be, you’re looking at $15,000 to $18,000. So, money spent to transition to streaming is money that’s much better spent right now.”
Feelings about this move have been mixed across the board. Many alumni of the institution have taken to social media in disappointment, describing the sale as “sad” and “another awful, knee jerk decision.” Lyndon’s Rugby Club advisor Flip Buttling commented in a public Facebook group that, “this is just another short sighted decision.” Cormier told The Critic even he thinks it was the wrong choice. “WWLR has been an FM noncommercial radio station for a very long time, with so many members over the years who put in their personal time to make it amazing, from members raising money to make the signal strong, to going out in the community and connecting with Lyndon. It just feels like the college gave up.” Benning, WWLR’s first general manager, told the Caledonian Record the sale was “very disturbing” to him.
But recent alumni and current students are looking at the bright side. Bates told The Critic that “going to streaming is a nice idea, especially considering that alumni like myself will be able to listen to WWLR from anywhere in the country.” Wolfe added, “it also allows more participation when it comes to people making requests.”
Still, others find themselves torn. 2022 graduate and former news/weather director of WWLR Vanessa Symonick said she had always approved adding streaming to the station when she was at Lyndon so “family members and friends from out of state would be able to listen to their friend or loved one on air,” but she would have preferred “having both options to tune in so you can appeal to both your audiences.” Gallagher also has mixed feelings, worried that the station may have more competition with music streaming platforms like Spotify. “[But,] I think there’s a lot of potential.”
Once the transition to streaming starts, Meachem says there will be a period of time when there are no shows coming from the Lyndon campus. “Between ordering equipment and actually getting things functional,” she estimates the process to be done towards the end of the spring semester or even into the summer.
There is also a question of branding. While the “WWLR” call letters will move to Vermont Public’s ownership with the license, the Lyndon club could decide to keep the identity of “The Impulse” or choose to make a new name for themselves. Meachem says she is leaving the decision completely up to the students.
Gallagher told The Critic that the previous executive board started the conversation in the spring, but had no ideas and did not move forward with anything. Now, the plan is to ask current club members if they want to change the name. If they say yes, Gallagher says “I might try to ask the [whole] student body what they want the name to be.”
“We have to remember that [this] generation doesn’t listen to traditional radio the way students back in the 70s listened to traditional radio,” Meachem said. Edison Research vice president Megan Lazovick confirmed Meachem’s suspicions in an Inside Radio article. While Gen Z are not necessarily listening to radio, they have nothing against it. “They think it’s cool… [but] it would be better if they actually listened to it more than they do.”
“This is not the end of radio on Lyndon’s campus. This is a new era of radio on Lyndon’s campus,” Meachem said.
Feature Photo by Alexandra Huff || Former WWLR member Jacob Lunnie (left) and former sports director Colton Lafayette (right) set up for the NVU-Lyndon 2019 Involvement Fair.