Pledge Time

I listen to a non-commercial radio station (WYCE on FM and internet) most of the time when I'm at home or driving my Geo Metro. And it's the time of year that every listener of public radio (or viewer of public TV) hates. Pledge week.

This is the week in which the uninterrupted bliss of non-commercial broadcasting gets interrupted over and over by earnest pleas for donations. They point out how much you probably spend on coffee over the course of a year, or the cost of newspaper subscriptions or cable TV. They talk about how important you, the listener, are to them. And they repeat that damn phone number so many times you're afraid you'll accidentally dial it instead of 911 in an emergency.

But you know what? I don't mind it.

I'm not saying this as some kind of lecture about how the benefits of non-commercial radio are worth this kind of hell. I'm saying it because I really don't mind listening to them during pledge week.

In addition to WYCE, I also listen to the local repeater station for WUOM, the NPR/PRI station operated by the University of Michigan. Their pledge week drives me crazy. WYCE's doesn't.

I think the main reason is that WYCE's pledge breaks don't jar away from the regular format of the station so badly as others' do. WYCE is a nearly-all volunteer station, with a small army of volunteer programmers who come in each week to play music, chat with the listeners, and above all, have fun. And when pledge week comes along, they just keep at it.

Yeah, they do stop the music more often, and talk more, repeating the damn phone number over and over. But the programmers are still having fun. The station double-staffs the pledge shifts, bringing in additional volunteers from the community as well as our usual on-air friends, which lets these duos banter back and forth a bit during the breaks, keeping their fun level up, and keeping the listeners' up as well. It's like listening to one of those "morning drive" teams on commercial radio... but with intelligence and post-adolescent maturity.

Of course it also helps that WYCE is the kind of station that listeners quickly come to love. It features an eclectic, ever-changing mix of music that's free of the monotonous over-playing of corporate-selected "hits", and the deliberately irritating attention-demanding ads of commercial radio. I gave WYCE a listen when they started out over 15 years ago, and my dial's been stuck there (except for NPR's news programs) ever since. If they happen to pick a song I don't like, I know the next one will be something completely different, and almost certainly interesting. I grew up listening to Top 40 radio and later graduated to what was then called "college rock". But now I get a tossed salad of jazz, blues, folk, rock, and genres from around the world... making pop and commercial rock seem as bland as unflavored oatmeal.

What I find amazing is that so few communities actually have a station like WYCE. Some of the big cities have jazz stations or world-beat stations or block-programmed ("Tuesday is blues day") stations, but very few have anything that really breaks down the stultifying formatting that is the bane of modern radio. And it's not like Grand Rapids is some kind of cultural hotbed. And yet, every pledge drive rather easily meets its goal (which probably adds to the fun and relaxed nature of them). The only reason I can think of that more communities don't have their own is that - like me, back in the day - they don't realise what they're missing: a radio station so good that even it's pledge drives are enjoyable.

WYCE broadcasts at 88.1FM in the Grand Rapids MI area, and on the internet from wyce.org.