Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture and WCRX-FM Faculty Advisor Matt Cunningham discusses the radio station’s history and the studio’s upcoming move within the 33 E. Ida B. Wells building.
Transcript:
0:08: Welcome back to the Chronicle Chronversations.
0:10: I’m your host, Aaron Guzman.
0:12: This week, I am joined by WCRX-FM’s faculty advisor, Matt Cunningham, to talk about WCRX’s studio move.
0:19: How are you doing today, Matt?
0:20: I’m great.
0:21: This is a bit surreal being on the other side of the microphone with you.
0:25: I was actually waiting for the day that this would happen.
0:27: I know. It’s only been here a couple of years that you’ve been in and out of the station.
0:31: Oh, yeah. Definitely.
0:33: So, it’s an honor to be interviewed.
0:34: How long have you been here at WCRX?
0:35: Well, I don’t know if that’s simple.
0:39: It’s complicated.
0:40: No, I, I first arrived here in 2010 as the radio station supervisor.
0:47: Under, the station manager, Cheryl Morton-Langston.
0:52: I left briefly and started a production company and did that for a few years.
0:56: And then, Cheryl retired in June of 2017, and they asked me to come in for the year as a guest lecturer and to oversee the station.
1:07: And then I applied for the full-time faculty position and got it.
1:11: So I’ve been here running the station since June 2017.
1:15: When I first got here, in 2010, WCRX was a part of the radio department.
1:19: And so only people who were getting a degree in radio and who wanted to work professionally in the medium of radio could work at the station.
1:27: When I came back in 2017, we had begun to merge with the communication department.
1:33: And so radio was still a degree you could receive, but the new chair wanted to find avenues for students that were curious about it, but didn’t want to take all the classes.
1:46: So, right away, we came up with opportunities for students from around campus, as well as faculty and staff to do various things.
1:53: So one of them is, we have Make Radio.
1:55: So everyone has a playlist on Spotify or YouTube or Apple Music, and the quirkier it is, the better.
2:02: We ask you to send them in and my music director will review them and then if, you know, it’s a radio-friendly songs and so on, we will ask you to come in and you produce an hour show with your playlist.
2:14: So we’ve had some for Thanksgiving last year, I think it was, someone did one on best family bands.
2:20: We had some for, you know, strong women for Valentine’s Day.
2:24: So we always have fun things.
2:26: So any student, faculty, staff can propose that and do one, and they’re guided.
2:31: We also invited and started with the Museum of Contemporary Photography here on campus, and they started doing a podcast.
2:39: You know, it’s funny, photography museum, very visually focused, does a podcast, an audio podcast, and they’re talking with photographers about, about their work, about some of the work in the collection of the museum, and then our students will edit and produce it.
2:56: It’s now what I say is any student that wants to create something that we can air on the station can use the facilities.
3:04: More into the move of the WCRX studio.
3:07: To your knowledge, is there going to be any new amenities added, any new features, any updates that you guys will be making to the studio as it moves over to the other side of the building?
3:16: Well, we’re taking a lot of our equipment over.
3:18: The boards and the monitors and all that are gonna remain the same.
3:22: They’re industry standard.
3:24: Everything that we have here is stuff that is used in the major market that we’re living in.
3:29: So we have our automation system is something that’s used with iHeart, but we’re also using this as an opportunity to try to reframe our studios to meet the needs of what’s going on now because these studios were built probably, I’m guessing 20-25 years ago in this space.
3:47: So, you know, we’re reconfiguring a bit so that we can also make it accessible to the college at large.
3:55: So we have our on-air studio space will, that will still be our on-air studio space.
3:59: It’ll be moved over to the northwest corner of the building overlooking the sidewalk and Ida B. Wells.
4:06: People will be able to see it as they’re driving by or walking by. We’ll have speakers that at times hopefully will be on that people can actually hear what’s being played on the air and people having conversations.
4:17: So that’s very exciting that we’re gonna have that and they’re trying to find ways to put on the windows or put on the walls so that people driving by can look and go, “Oh, that’s a, a college radio station. I’ll tune in while I’m stuck in traffic.”
4:29: So we’re excited about that.
4:30: What is the most memorable event or broadcast that you’ve experienced here at your time in WCRX?
4:37: We used to do a live 8-hour food drive.
4:39: Now it’s a prepackaged, pre-recorded thing that we ask for donations, and we push more on social media.
4:46: So, you know, the industry’s changed, but, you know, we’d have people performing in the lobby.
4:51: We’ve had DJs live on air mixing.
4:54: It can be an exciting space.
4:56: I would say Chance the Rapper is one of those that sort of will last a long time because everyone knows what he is.
5:01: That’s probably the big one, but, you know, I had another student that grew his hair and then cut it all off and we captured that and like half of his colleagues from the radio station that semester were in watching him cut off, you know, I think it was like 16 inches of hair.
5:16: He had really long, beautiful black, straight black hair, and he cut it all off.
5:20: And I think the motivation is like a, a family member had been sick and had chemotherapy, so he wanted to give back in some way.
5:27: So there’s a lot of touching moments in this space that I think that I have, and I know that every student that has come through here has something.
5:35: That’s all for this week.
5:37: Make sure to stay up to date with our campus and metro news, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on columbiachronicle.com.
5:43: I’m Aaron Guzman.
5:44: Thanks for listening.
Copy edited by Matt Brady
