About WHRW

It's All Up To You

Many WHRW success stories are ours largely because our most successful ideas wouldn't have been properly incubated and allowed to grow in a more commercial setting. Daniel Jan's European Ethnic Melodies Show teaches us that even polka and traditional European music shows on other stations have Top-Forty mentalities of their own, and would balk at the wide variety of music our Resident Ethnomusicologist plays in one show. The 23-year-old Mad Trivia Party has seen more than thirty regular cast members come and go since its inception in 1979, and maintains the wacky, irreverent quiz-show format even though the show reinvents itself every few years. It is a revered station institution handed down through the generations of WHRW's broadcasters. Peter Post's Solid Gold Spectacular illustrates that other oldies stations only scratch the surface of classic music. And our own Uncle Pete is (hopefully) teaching our incoming freshmen that there was punk long before a band called Green Day. These are only examples; there are more shows, too numerous to mention here, that are the result of hard work, dedication, knowing one's audience, and an unequalled passion for broadcasting, year after year.

Members of WHRW can affiliate with several different departments, whose purpose is to support the jocks who do their kind of thing. We have music departments for those who like rock, pop, jazz, space, techno, folk, urban music, latin music, classical, and just about every other kind of music. Our Radio Theatre department is for jocks who want to continue the legacy of classic "theater of the mind" radio and more modern, theme-show, radio-drama, or skit-comedy formats. Our news department does everything from rip-and-read to full-scale investigative reporting. On the administrative side, our Public Affairs and Public Relations departments are always looking for new ways to promote the station and help the station promote worthwhile causes; after all, if we're not entertaining someone, we might just as well be talking into our own portable tape recorder (we hope that WHRW teaches that one can entertain and be entertaining without first forming a focus group).

Anyone can be a WHRW engineer, whether a college student of Binghamton University or a member of the surrounding community that can make a small weekly commitment. Our programming year is broken into three seasons (spring semester, summer, and fall semester). After one of those seasons apprenticing under one of our more experienced engineers and passing a simple aptitude exam, anyone can do their own radio at WHRW.

WHRW is one of the last free-format terrestrial radio stations in the country. You can count the rest of them on two hands (and you could be missing a few fingers, too). Our management does not tell any engineer what to say or what music to play. Of course, because our license is governed by the Federal Communications Commission, there are a few words we can't use. But no serious broadcaster with something important to say ever really needed them.

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