Don't Touch that Dial

There’s telenovela drama in this radio saga. Rhode Island’s public radio station was the neglected stepchild of WBUR before being cast off without warning. When the Boston station got a new patriarch, it was welcomed back to the fold. Stay tuned as WRNI becomes free at last.

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Joe O’Connor takes the long, galloping strides of a man who is at once in control and totally out of control. Already talking as he blows into the cramped, bare-white walled conference room, where six of his employees huddle for a manager’s meeting, he apologizes for being late; a barrage of emails required his immediate attention as soon as he awoke. “And then I left my coffee cup on top of my minivan and ran it over,” he says as he throws his briefcase in the corner, where he will forget he left it until later that day.

Such is the life of the man who brokered the deal a year ago for Rhode Island to take local ownership of its National Public Radio station, WRNI. The man who in the process had to flip his
hat around countless times a day as he was at once an employee of Boston University, which had owned the station since 1998, and, now, the general manager of Rhode Island Public Radio, the group that bought the station from Boston University and awaits Rhode Island Attorney General approval to take complete ownership. Independence Day, they call it. And the clock is ticking.

As if the members of his tiny staff don’t already know, O’Connor reminds them what’s at stake. “Right now, [Boston University’s] WBUR is paying that $86,000 per month it takes for us to be on the air. They’re on the hook for that very significant bill every month,” he says. When the paperwork is complete and the keys are exchanged—they (meaning RIPR, meaning Rhode Islanders) will be on the hook for that bill, which is going to increase to some $115,000. And so while they skim over “things previous management didn’t pay attention to” and bemoan the fact that “there are a lot of things we should have done a long time ago” —and cruise around the room updating the status of an FCC application for a power boost and grant applications for three additional correspondents and the need to somehow promote an upcoming
immigration series by correspondent Nancy Cook—the talk all comes back to one thing: money.

In particular, how are they going to convince the 44,000 Rhode Islanders who presently tune in to donate the huge sums of cash required to simply stay on the air? How are they going to increase their audience, through signal expansion and guerrilla marketing, to reach even more potential donors? Where are they going to find the funds to increase local programming, in addition to the syndicated fare they play, so that more Rhode Islanders will fall in love with their radio station…and give money? These are the daunting questions that greet O’Connor, a five-time Emmy Award-winning former television network news producer, in early-morning emails; these are the questions that consume him as he drives by East Side restaurants and coffee shops and hardware stores—whose patrons simply must be public radio listeners—wondering why they aren’t already corporate underwriters. These are the questions that distract him to the point of running over his coffee cup. 

“It’s been a fast and furious last few months with a skeletal staff, but we need to tidy up,” O’Connor says as he takes a sweeping glance at the Allied moving boxes littering the conference room. Potential major donors will be visiting the station, he says, and, given the fact that he’s the first general manager of a public radio station who has offered to shave his legs in exchange for a mil-lion-dollar donation, the least the staff could do is clean. 

And then O’Connor raises the big question. “The day we close, Independence Day, do we wait a day to celebrate before we put our hands out?”

Ah, the sweet double-edged sword of Independence Day. The day that Rhode Island will no longer be a surrogate to Massachusetts for its public radio. The day that WRNI will no longer be able to enjoy the comfort of being owned by Boston University’s WBUR, one of the most admired media institutions in the country.

In other words, be careful what you wish for, as a RIPR board member puts it. There’s a lot riding on this. Not just the future of Rhode Island’s very own National Public Radio, but righting
the wrongs of the past. 

It all started at a dinner partY a decade ago. Eugene Mihaly, a transplanted businessman from San Francisco and a public radio junkie, was complaining to his dinner companion about the fact that Rhode Island was one of only two states in the entire country without a National Public Radio station.

They decided to change that and traveled up to Boston to meet with Jane Christo, the infamous general manager of WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. Christo was a maverick genius who, since 1979, had singlehandedly transformed WBUR from a rinky dink college radio blip-on-the-dial into a $20 million operation with an audience of more than a half million. Although she was roundly criticized for her autocratic rule, for lording over WBUR as if it were her own personal fiefdom—“an absolute witch to work for,” says Mihaly , she was also admired for creating inno-vative programming, such as “Here & Now,” “Only a Game,” and “Car Talk,” which were broadcast live from her Boston studio and syndicated nationally to NPR member stations. 

Christo agreed to bring NPR to Rhode Island, though not because she felt any sense of professional camaraderie. “She had an imperialist streak,” says Mihaly, and desperately wanted to grow her station. “That was her motivation. She always wanted to build WBUR into a national institution.” Christo convinced Boston University to purchase a broken-down Portuguese-programming AM station, while Mihaly and a few others formed a support group called The Foundation for Ocean State Public Radio [FOSPR] and raised close to $4 million to refurbish a studio housed in The Rhode Island Foundation’s headquarters at Union Station.