September 7, 2006

WYSO General Manager Paul Maassen demonstrates the newly installed digital audio processor at the radio studio. The station is working to add a digital transmitter at the antenna site in Clifton, which will allow for mutliple channel audio streaming.

By Virgil Hervey

Shortly after he was hired as the new general manager of WYSO Public Radio last summer, Paul Maassen said that his first priority was community building. A little more than a year later, a visit to the station shows that he has taken meaningful steps toward mending a rift between WYSO and the community and that he has also ushered in significant upgrades in technology and station capacity.

Before Maassen began, the station was still feeling the rift sparked by former general manager Steve Spencer’s decision, in winter 2002, to significantly cut the station’s volunteer-hosted programming and replace it with nationally syndicated programming. That move prompted a regional effort, Keep WYSO Local, that aimed to restore the volunteer-hosted programs and also to reinstate several popular WYSO staff members, including former Music Director Vick Mickunas and News Director Aileen LeBlanc, who left the station following difficulties working with Spencer.

In a recent interview after his first year on the job, Maassen said that since he began at WYSO, he has been talking to everybody he can find. He has been impressed by the way people in Yellow Springs feel connected to the station, he said. One of his goals as GM was to figure out how to use that sense of connection to benefit the station and the community. He decided the best way to begin was to talk and get feedback.

“To me, making contact is the natural thing to do,” he said,

The station hosted its first listener community meeting last September, and the second took place in Dayton on Aug. 23. He hopes to hold more community meetings on a quarterly schedule, Maassen said, and to move them around the broadcast region to make them accessible to all of WYSO’s listeners.

In addition to the community meetings, Maassen recently started a series of “Ask the GM on Air” broadcasts, during which listeners may call in and ask anything they want. The first program was encouraging, he said, with quite a few callers participating. Again, more of these opportunities for community input are in the works.

Another community-building effort has been WYSO’s “Summer Roots” concerts. Originally conceived by the WYSO staff, the plan was to hold just one concert on the Antioch College campus this summer as a trial balloon. But the original May concert was such a success, not only from an attendance perspective but in bringing together many different elements from the community and the region, that the staff at WYSO promptly put together a second one in August, according to Maassen, who said he hopes the summer concerts start a tradition.

During Maassen’s short tenure, there have been a number of programming changes. The “Evening Excursions” program has been extended from two to three hours, from 8 to 11 p.m., and villager Cindy Funk now hosts a Celtic music program on Saturday afternoons. WYSO is also offering more local news, something that Maassen hopes to expand upon in the future, he said.

While not enough air time may be the same problem that plagued WYSO in the past, resulting in the cutting of local programming in order to be more appealing to the larger listening region, the solution may be just around the corner.

As well as programming changes, Maassen has initiated physical changes at WYSO. Everywhere one looks around the station’s facilities, there are signs of equipment upgrades. According to Maassen, new computers will assist in the production of expanded local news coverage. They are out of the boxes and stacked on the floor.

New emergency generators will enable the station to stay on the air during power failures to broadcast emergency preparedness information at times when it is most crucial. Channels have already been opened with the police chief and the Village for the rapid flow of information to the station, according to Maassen, who believes that public radio should serve the public interest.

Most significant of all may be the installation of digital radio transmission equipment, Maassen said. Shortly after the first of the year, the station will have the capability to stream up to three channels of audio, WYSO 1, 2, and 3. Listeners, however, will need digital receivers to take advantage of this program expansion. But as many commercial stations have already started broadcasting in digital, the radios are already on the market and becoming less expensive all the time, he said. The station will continue to broadcast at 91.3 on the FM band as well.

“We will have a lot more shelf space to put on programming,” he said.

The limiting factor regarding enhanced programming is the lack of production facilities, Maasen said. To take advantage of the new technology, he said, the station will need more space, more studios, and more people. He said that he sees digital radio as a catalyst for all this.

“The locals are passionate and get behind things,” Maassen said.

But it’s still unclear if increased capacity will result in more public access to local programming opportunities, according to Maassen. When asked about the possibility of WYSO rehiring former Music Director Vick Mickunas and former News Director Aileen LeBlanc, he said that he has talked to Mickunas, but he declined to be specific about the nature of their conversations. LeBlanc has produced several news stories for WYSO during the past year, he said.

Other concerns at the time of Maassen’s takeover were the station’s dwindling number of volunteers and a growing budget deficit. Maassen said the volunteer situation has improved to where they have a “pretty full staff.”

As for the budget deficit, while membership money has been “just okay,” according to Maassen, WYSO had a good year with underwriting, and grant funding was exceptional. Although he is still waiting for the final figures, he described his first year as a good one, where the deficit was reduced and the station started moving in the right direction financially.

Plans for the future include more of an Internet presence with podcasts, digital streaming, and on-demand radio, he said. He pointed out that villager Bill Felker’s show is currently available as a podcast from the WYSO Web site, www.wyso.org. He is looking forward to a stronger relationship with Antioch College and recognizes the need to provide more opportunities for students to be involved with the radio station, Maasen said.

Maassen has a vision of a local benefactor stepping forward to subsidize the purchase of digital radio receivers for all in the village, making this a “digital Yellow Springs,” he said.

“This is an exciting time to be in the business,” he said. “It’s coming together a piece at a time.”