Recent rumblings about campus radio at UPEI have motivated me to post some content and opinion about Radio@UPEI and any future endeavor UPEI students may undertake.
My involvement with Radio@UPEI ended in the summer of 2007 after working on the upgrade of the weblogs@UPEI, Radio@UPEI, etc., drupal backend. Before my last semester at McGill, in the summer of 2004, UPEISU President Clare Henderson and I chatted on a number of occasions about the need for a web-based media organization run by students at UPEI. I'm not sure if it was Clare that got the ball rolling on the student side of things, but in the Fall Semester the stars aligned and Justin Doiron started pushing hard for a web-radio service at UPEI while Prof. Mark Hemphill was making noise promoting his BEAT programme and the associated weblogs@UPEI community. Around November 2004, UPEI Web Radio was born as a project of BEAT.
I joined BEAT in the winter of 2005 while I took economics and psychology courses at UPEI. We had an abundance of fun working on a number of sub-projects over the next few years: broadcasting live community events, producing content for the ECMA events in 2006 and 2007, working with MusicPEI, MusicNB, and creating Panther Radio. Ryan Palmer has a good historical overview here.
I can't recall any serious discussion regarding terrestrial radio at UPEI. We all realized that the community we were seeking to engage would probably be more inclined to connect online. Plus the fundraising effort associated with radio would have crushed the momentum we were riding in the area of content creation and independent personal publishing.
I'm not sure if anything significant happened with Radio@UPEI after the summer 2007 upgrade. In the spring of 2008, in consultation with Mark Hemphill and Ryan Palmer (founding member of Radio@UPEI and President of the UPEI Independent Student Media society), we started redirecting the sites to the UPEI homepage. The web server which hosted the sites is still online, just not serving the files. So why take the content down?
The core group associated with Radio@UPEI saw the community grow from nothing to something quite unique and personal very quickly. The term "organic" was often thrown around in our discussions. The success of Radio@UPEI was a result of the practiced notion that anyone could contribute on basically their own terms (we had a few very liberal policies in place around appropriate content). When that growth and vibrancy started to diminish, it seemed like the content had died with the community. The content was never envisioned to be presented in "archival" form, it was supposed to be interactive. (Also, there were very practical reasons for taking the sites offline. No one had the time to maintain the infrastructure, which served terabytes worth of data over the two peak years of Radio@UPEI activity.) Why did the community die?
There are several factors I can formulate as being partly responsible in the demise of Radio@UPEI, but there's one that is quite important when considering future attempts of a similar nature at UPEI: a culture of apathy. The current survey circulating online regarding support for a UPEI Radio station has shown a good bit of positive response from what I can gather, but when it's Saturday night in January and a public event deserves to be covered, good-luck rounding up more than a few good souls. And if a future effort doesn't extend beyond the comfortable realm of pre-programmed music and syndicated content, don't bother with it. It will be as relevant to the community as all of the other low-quality traditional media outlets in Charlottetown.
That's all for this post, I'll follow up shortly with an attempt to round-up some of the great Radio@UPEI media still online and provide further dissection of the decline of Radio@UPEI and what a future initiative should look like.
