Words can be delivered through print, voice, music, and more.
Today I had the pleasure to speak with Isobel Breheny-Schafer, the assistant director of student media and general manager at the WUSB radio station. Through radio, words and information can travel through real time with planned programs and hosts.
Radio can bring a community together with a common language, and music is the main focus of the WUSB station.
Throughout the day, we also learned the importance of choosing the right thoughts in a concise manner. We wrote stories that will soon be posted!
DJ Drew commands the booth at WUSB, the college radio station at Stony Brook University, where nearly five decades of student and community radio come to life. (Photo by Shirley Jiang)
On June 27, 1977, at 5:30 p.m., Stony Brook University’s WUSB radio station signed for the first time, playing “All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople.
Over 48 years, the station at 90.1 FM has served the Stony Brook area with ever-changing technology while keeping the interest of the people in mind.
The station can be heard in Long Island, Southern Connecticut, Brooklyn, Queens, and Westchester County with more than 6,000 listeners each day.
This year, for the 48th anniversary, the founding general manager and faculty advisor, Professor Norman Prusslin, was interviewed on the history of the station and the live concerts it used to produce on campus.
Playing “All the Young Dudes” became a yearly tradition along with playing music from the 70s to invoke nostalgia.
Along with music from the 70s, the WUSB airs music ranging from jazz, punk rock, pop, world music, local music, international music and exclusive music. The station also covers music history and includes public service announcements.
Isobel Breheny-Schafer, the assistant director of student media and general manager of WUSB, said the public service announcements increases the exposure of local non-profits to a larger audience and “makes all of us feel very good.” Featured nonprofits include libraries, children’s hospitals, veterans’ homes and events such as blood drives.
Students hold positions including program director, music director, student sports director, DJ and alumni sports director. The station also depends greatly on volunteers. There are more than 2,000 of them-students, faculty and community members who are required to complete volunteer hours. The volunteers can be compensated with college credits or work as paid interns.
“Music wouldn’t be the way it is today without the radio,” said Andrew Sivillo, also known as DJ Drew, a SUNY Oneonta graduate interning at WUSB. Radio allows the community to stay informed and is a source of social discourse, Sivillo said. DJ Drew enjoys hosting weekly shows and loves psychedelic rock, jazz fusion and power pop.
Breheny-Schafer has witnessed changes in the radio industry along with improvements in technology. The station started with an analog phone system, analog sound board for broadcasting, printed news reports, analog phone lines for transmission and often received music on vinyl and CDs.
Today, the WUSB relies on ethernet lines for transmission, digitized boards and soundboards and receives music from online sources such as Spotify and music companies.
With the development of phones, the station is now portable.
“I listen to the radio in the car,” Breheny-Schafer said. “I listen to it on the computer in the office. The radio is always on in my house. I have different radios in different rooms so I almost always have the radio on.”
I woke up excited for the day. I brushed my teeth and put on my formal attire to get ready for the day. We walked towards breakfast where I ate some vanilla yogurt and granola. Then we headed to the newsroom to start our third day at the Robert W. Greene Summer Institute or High school Journalists with a pep talk.
The pep talk was from the Ditch Weekly, a newspaper created to cover the Hamptons from a different perspective by middle- and high-schoolers. We heard from Billy Stern and Harry Karousos. They explained how the paper was born.
After the pep talk we headed over to the broadcasting room. There we created a prompt of giving news. The Greene team received an experience of being on camera, having a script to read, holding the cameras, controlling the graphics, etc. It was a moment to learn what it’s like to broadcast.
Once we finished the prompt, we headed over to lunch around 12 p.m. We were then ready to head over the WUSB radio station as a group. Frank, Gavin, Shirley, Araya, and I walked around campus and enjoyed the scenery. A wall stood out to me. The wall had many words of reassurance and important powerful messages.
As we entered the radio studio, we saw where the magic was created. We met DJ Drew, who spoke to us about the importance of having a radio station. It was an opportunity to gain knowledge of the beauty of music and the history of it.
At the end of our interviewing with Drew, we began to walk to Mount Hall to meet up with the rest of the group for a field trip! In our matching Greene Team shirts we walked to get on the Wolfie bus to be on our way towards Nassau County for our trip.
We arrived at News12!! It was an unreal experience to see my childhood in front of my eyes. Something that I believed I would only see on television. To learn the fact on how they function, the behind the scenes work and visit where they record was a surreal experience I could have only dreamed about.
After learning about News12, we got on the bus to head back to the school. Once we arrived on campus, we headed towards the dining hall to eat dinner around 5:30 p.m. There I ate tater tots and water for a light dinner. To conclude the day we began to walk towards the dorms. My dorm mates and I took turns showering. Then I went to my bed to rest for the next day ahead.
