UND needs a student-run radio

During my undergraduate, I worked a short semester as a DJ for KSLU, the school radio station. It was pretty far gone at the time, and soon after it folded completely for a few years due to lack of funding for a slow breakage of equipment.

Recently, it's been revitalized by a determined group of students and is back on the air and on the web (albeit only on the campus itself due to copyright issue). I mention this because it occurred to me the other day how different radio is than print media, and how different college radio is than commercial. I was listening to WZBC out of Boston College at the time, and two things occurred to me: first, that I had been listening to straight music for nearly an hour and hadn't heard a word from either a DJ or an advertisement, and second that this was the most excellent selection of music that I had heard all week.

This, of course, was the result of one DJ's choice to just shut up and play music during his or her show, in my opinion an excellent choice. That this person happened to have a similar taste in music consisting entirely of bands I had never heard of before just added to how well it worked.

There's more to radio than just music, however. It's an interesting medium, because it can be your second or third multitask and still have an effect. As much as I love the Dakota Student as a college newspaper (and a necessary part of life in a school of 12,000 students), it has a limited scope and purpose: to report the news on campus and be the voice of the UND students.

It's a twice-weekly update on the words and deeds of the UND community. Studio One can be more than the DS, but it remains a situational medium centered on a TV.

A student-run radio station on this campus could fill in the rest of the week. It could be a source of the daily news that isn't covered by the DS, the latest happenings on campus, and a break from the repetitive grind that is commercial radio. It could be a brand new horizon, because college radio just may well be the best way of finding new music on the planet. A student-run radio station can more accurately follow the pulse of life at UND than most other media. It could be faster than Facebook.

The campus is full of outgoing and intelligent people who could start something like this. If you are a writer, a talker, a singer, a designer, an advertiser, an engineer, or already a DJ, this would be a chance to show off your work and gain some real experience. It would be a chance to bring the campus together and fill in the gaps left (unintentionally) by other campus and local news outlets. It would be a chance to share your favorite music (or stories, or political analyses) with the rest of the student body. It would be a chance to make sure everyone knows about your organization's upcoming events.

A student-run radio station at UND would be a daily centerpiece to a diverse student body, a complement to the Dakota Student and Studio One, and a vast improvement over commercial radio in Grand Forks. I can't be the only one who thinks it would be worthwhile to create one.