[grc] Canadian version of the Healthy Stations Project

[Frieda Werden]

This paper won an award from the regulator.  It begins:

Another One Bites the Dust? The Transition from CHRY 105.5FM to VIBE105

Download this paper in PDF
<http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/acrtc/prx/2016/mastrocola2016.pdf>

   - By Daniela Mastrocola, PhD Student
   - York University & Ryerson University | ‘Communication & Culture’

On April 30, 2015, senior management at CHRY Community Radio Inc., the
campus/community radio station housed by York University, announced the end
of CHRY 105.5FM’s 28 year broadcast. Volunteer contributors – some of whom
had been programmers since the station’s inception – were told that none of
their programming contracts would be renewed as of the start of the new
fiscal year. On May 1, 2015 a new programming cycle began under the banner
of “VIBE105” (VIBE, henceforth), the new broadcast division of CHRY
Community Radio Inc.

Management informed staff about the impending change during a closed staff
meeting one month earlier, insisting that a drastic change was necessary in
order to secure the station’s long-term financial sustainability in a
changing media climate. They identified five interrelated objectives that,
they argued, could only be achieved under a new station identification
(ID): (a) an increase in the expectations held of broadcasters to improve
the overall quality of delivery, in order to (b) combat the perceived
inferiority of an ‘amateur’ campus/community (c/c) radio station (along
with suspending the use of the “c/c” title in external communications,
which was already underway). They hoped this would (c) increase advertising
revenues and financial sponsorships, in part to (d) stop depending so
greatly on the York University student levy and diminishing fundraising
revenue and (e) thereby financially sustain a station that had been
operating on an unsustainable budget for years. They insisted that the
long-held commitment to providing non-mainstream content as well as
free-of-charge media literacy and radio production training to the
community-at-large would not change, despite the new “urban alternative”
format.

This paper situates the closure of CHRY and its reopening as VIBE within
the broader political-economic context of broadcast regulation in Canada in
order to understand (a) why this drastic change was deemed necessary on the
part of those who undertook it and (b) what this change means for the
future of this campus/community radio station. It asks four interrelated
questions. What challenges did CHRY navigate on a daily basis in order to
sustain its existence in an increasingly competitive local (Toronto) and
unsupportive regulatory (national, CRTC) environment? How did these
challenges evolve alongside the development of the CRTC’s regulation of
both private (commercial) and community broadcasting, as well as the
emergence of online media? What are the demonstrated and foreseeable
consequences of restructuring CHRY in the form of VIBE, in terms of the
community service values that were core to the former’s functioning?
Finally, what steps might have been taken – or may be taken elsewhere in
the future – to preserve this community service sector of Canadian
broadcasting?

[continue reading at link]

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/acrtc/prx/2016/mastrocola2016.htm

-- 
Frieda Werden, Series Producer
WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service www.wings.org
<http://www.wings.org>
https://www.facebook.com/wingsradio