Hofstra's WRHU hosting marathon broadcast of student radio stations

Hofstra University’s WRHU/88.7 FM campus radio station will host a marathon broadcast Wednesday that organizers said would be the first of its kind: disc jockeys from other colleges and Long Island high schools patching in from their own studios or broadcasting from Hofstra’s.

Six college radio stations in New York and New Jersey — including Long Island University’s WCWP — will join students from Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School’s WPOB and Syosset High School’s WKWZ. Each will do programming for an hour on broadcasts heard simultaneously on all of the stations.

The result, said Andrew Gladding, WRHU’s chief audio engineer and the event’s organizer, will be — if only for a day — “the largest radio station in the tristate area.”

For those who love the college radio medium, and the students learning how to produce it — close to 300 volunteer at Hofstra’s station alone, Gladding said, one of the biggest college radio staffs in the country — the day will be a celebration.

“There’s a human being picking out songs they want to play, using their ears and brains and creativity to build a playlist, and it’s one of the last places listeners can go to get human-selected music,” Gladding said. “An 18-year-old comes to Hofstra, they’ll have a favorite playlist from high school, but by the time they graduate, their college experience will have changed the music they listen to. The audience gets to experience that by listening to the station.”

Weekly terrestrial radio listenership has slumped slightly in recent years, the Pew Research Center said this summer, citing Nielsen Media Research data. But the medium still reaches 82% of people nationwide. In a 2022 Pew survey, nearly half of adults surveyed said they got their news from the radio at least sometimes. Pew did not say whether the survey included satellite radio.

Hofstra’s signal carries into New York City, Westchester and Suffolk County, Gladding said. Some of its programming is aimed squarely at Long Islanders, like coverage of Islanders away hockey games and shows that focus on traditional and contemporary Irish and Italian music.

WRHU’s program director of music, Jake Epstein, 20, a junior from Amagansett who hosts weekly shows on the station and will participate in the Wednesday program, said the recent boom in podcasting had created a “ripple effect” in interest and appreciation for audio production.

College radio still has an important role to play as a pop music proving ground, he said.

“I get emailed and called by music production companies and record labels” seeking airtime, he said, “everything from a local artist trying to get a song on the radio for the first time” to emissaries of Taylor Swift who wanted to roll out her latest album.

In a typical week, Epstein said, the industry types send him about 80 emails with music for electronic download. Some still use a bygone format: “I still get sent about five to 10 CDs” each week, he said.