College Radio, USA
WSUM, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s licensed student radio station, is an award-winning station with over 200 members. Getting to this point, however, was far from easy. Between the years of 1952 and 1993, five different stations attempted to achieve success on campus, including WMHA, WLHA, WSSO, WSRM, and WLHA (again). Each station failed for reasons spanning from money to trouble with the FCC over, let’s say, “creative student wiring.”
The radio station, which was known as WLHA, began in 1952, but went off the air in 1993. It restarted when a group of volunteers, including Stephen Thompson, a member of a former student radio group, founder of the Onion AV page and now of National Public Radio, and Dean Troyer, the newly elected Student Services Finance Chair, submitted a budget and proposal to the SSFC, the Associated Students of Madison and the UW–Madison administration. Dr. James Hoyt, former chair of the UW–Madison School of Journalism, and General Manager Dave Black, a journalism graduate student at the university, were asked to lead the effort to bring a student radio station back to UW-Madison. The university approved the project in June, 1995. The key to the proposal was getting Dr. Hoyt and Dave Black involved to add long-term stability to the project and getting the administration to apply for the FCC license. The station began in 1997 with an internet-only broadcast. In 2001, the FCC agreed to a radio tower to be built in the town of Montrose in southern Dane County. The proposal was met with contention from local citizens of Montrose, but after a lengthy legal battle, the tower was constructed and terrestrial broadcasting of WSUM began on February 22, 2002, at 2:22 PM.💝Donate
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