Press Clippings
From scratch at Cape & Islands; Imagining the sounds of 90.1 and 91.1
At 6 a.m. on March 15, 2000, WNAN on Nantucket Island, Mass., signed on officially. Sister station WCAI serves Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. Both are operated in a unique arrangement with WGBH-FM in Boston.
With public radio already saturating most of the Northeast, it was not common to find two new stations starting up, and it was even less common that the founders would seek and get advice so widely and then set out to break the mold.
Founder Jay Allison, a prominent independent radio producer, led an effort to mark the station with the voices and sounds of its region, creating hundreds of "sonic i.d.'s" that air between programs.
About the sonic i.d.'s :
The idea of the sound modules came out of Allison's 1999 request for suggestions from public radio people across the country. The suggestions received could spark ideas at any station, new or old.
What Allison asked:
We don't want to re-invent the wheel. Or, then again, maybe we do. Maybe invention is the good part. Rolling can be dull. Invent a wheel, let it roll until it drifts, invent another.
In our case, we are inventing two new public radio stations. We wanted advice—concrete proposals or philosophy—anything that would help. Below is the non-theoretical premise I laid out recently in a letter to a group of our colleagues and friends.
— Jay Allison, founder and executive producer of WCAI/WNAN
Dear friends and colleagues,
Let's say you have a pre-natal public radio station like we do, and your community—unserved by the primary signal of any other public station—has told you they want public radio's core news and information schedule, but, other than that, you have a fresh canvas.
You want to find ways to make your new public radio station surprising, interactive, connected to its community. You want its sound to be artful.
Because you have only a small staff and very little money, and because you will be carrying a full feed of existing national programs, you wish at first to accomplish these goals largely in the time between programming blocks and in cutaways, e.g. short spots scattered during the day—essays, soundscapes, oral histories, performance, answering machine messages, live calls, special station i.d.'s, who knows?
You also want to find ways to identify talent in the community who can contribute to your sound and, as you get more money, help create longer programs.
You wish to experiment, create, be original—and still retain the core news and information audience. You want your station to be a proving ground, a laboratory. You wish to design its individual sonic identity rooted in a sense of place—while still pulling most of your programming from the satellite. How do you do it?
About WCAI and WNAN
Allison with volunteers and WGBH-FM manager Marita Rivero outside the Woods Hole studios. (Photo: WGBH.)
Like most public radio stations, WCAI and WNAN came out of the initiative of local volunteers, who applied for and received broadcast licenses from the FCC. But the founders didn't want to require the new nonprofit organization, Cape & Islands Public Radio (now changing its name to Atlantic Public Media), to bear the entire burden of duplicating an entire broadcasting operation, so they reached an agreement in 1998 with Boston's WGBH-FM to operate the stations and hold the licenses.
By arrangement with WGBH, the new stations will gradually develop their own assertively local material to supplement national news/information programming. Initially they will share facilities at Woods Hole, Mass., on Cape Cod, but WNAN may eventually get its own outpost on Nantucket, according to founder Jay Allison.
The planning experiment to develop the aural identities of the new stations was backed by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Web page created Sept. 21, 1999 and revised May 30, 2001
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