FEATURED
WICN Radio aims to grow alongside the Worcester community VEER MUDAMBI
“
W
Tom Nutile is an on-air host, left, and David Ginsburg is general manager at WICN Friday, January 22, 2021. RICK CINCLAIR
“Culture Beat,” airing back to back on Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. “Venture Forum” spotlights entrepreneurs in Worcester County, discussing their challenges and successes. “Culture Beat” focuses on the arts and culture scene in and around Worcester. The show developed from a two-minute segment by Nikki Erskine of the Worcester Cultural Council every Thursday morning. This stopped for a time when Erskine was unable to come into the station during the shutdown, but when restrictions were lifted, she pitched the idea for a full show, sharing events and activities for people to get involved during the pandemic. Like so many other nonprofit organizations, WICN faced serious funding issues with the
5
with a commitment to diversity of content. As one of the few remaining jazz stations in the country, WICN has kept the genre as its mainstay but is expanding to better reflect the wide variety of residents’ musical tastes, including Latin, soul and bluegrass. This extends to the station’s talk shows as well — both existing and new additions. “One of my goals was for the station to have a more NPRish feel during the day,” said Ginsburg, himself a co-host of “Business Beat,” a business and economy interview show airing Sunday and Monday evenings. Lately, the focus has been on having guests from different nonprofit organizations and some start-ups by people of color. Two new shows just debuted as well, “Venture Forum” and
WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
this cultural and socio-economic diversity will trickle down into their programming. WICN is primarily a jazz station, but under Ginsburg it has taken steps to evolve into a community media platform and resource. Residents can tune in for a dose of hyper local news or a respite from national headlines. “We’ve had a lot of great GM’s running the station,” said Tom Nutile, member of WICN’s board of directors and on-air host, “but when David came in with a radio background, he took a larger look at the station and realized we should be a cultural resource and a go-to place for the community.” The station historically has been the voice of arts and culture in the city, said Ginsburg, and his driving goal is to expand on that
J A N . 28 - F E B . 3, 2021
hen I was a kid,” said David Ginsburg, Worcester resident and radio host, “there was a definite sense of Worcester being jealous of Boston — wanting to be a big city and not really getting there.” Over the years, like an awkward teenager following in the footsteps of a famous sibling, Worcester has come into its own. No longer solely defined by its comparison to Boston as the second biggest city in the state, Worcester is now a destination in its own right with a character all its own. Downtown Worcester in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Ginsburg continued, was not a place you would go without reason. He chuckles that “if you had told me that in 20 to 30 years, I’d be working there happily, I’d have said you’re crazy.” This change has become most apparent in the last several years. “Worcester has undergone significant growth over the last decade,” and 90.5 WICN Radio, where Ginsburg is the general manager, plans to change with it. Worcester’s designation as a Gateway City has likely contributed to this growth, with immigrants resettling here, since these communities are a gateway of opportunity for new Americans. Midsize cities like Worcester anchor regional economies so the cities have rebuilt and attracted new investment. Ginsburg is keen that WICN “always aims to grow and reflect the community.” The city’s only NPR affiliate, WICN is a small station and Ginsburg said, ”95% of our people are volunteers who do this for a love of music.” The station has five employees, three of whom are part time so while they don’t have as much room for diversification as they would like, they have been trying to increase diversity on their 15-member board. “That has been a deliberate effort“ according to Ginsburg. Presumably,
advent of the shutdown. Their underwriting funds were hit particularly hard. Now, they conduct quarterly on-air fundraisers. “This year, we were blown away with how generous our listeners were,” Ginsburg said. While he can’t emphasize enough how grateful they feel, they also needed to do more. To provide themselves with a buffer, they opened up the recording space to the community at affordable rates, as a base from which to broadcast virtual events. Even for in-person events, the rooms are big enough for social distancing and he emphasized that they were “sanitizing everything by the book.” Since the start of the shutdowns, which gave people more time to listen to the radio, WICN’s new role has become more important than ever, providing the community both with a voice and a way to stay connected. For a station that is so grounded in the community, its history is relevant. The station started out as a joint venture between Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the College of the Holy Cross as Worcester Inter Collegiate Network and was an alternative rock station, which, Nutile said with laugh, might have contributed to them being evicted from the Holy Cross campus. Their musical journey eventually took them from rock to classical and finally, jazz. “Worcester has always been a big important city,” said Nutile, “but I believe we have a cultural renaissance taking place — perhaps slowed down a little by the pandemic but there’s more opportunity out there.” He reminisces that when he was a kid, there was much more jazz on the radio, which has decreased over time but made what WICN does even more important. Aside from diversity and better reflecting the city of their listeners, for Ginsburg, it boils down to a very simple objective. “In the end,” he said, “you’re trying to reach and engage an audience.”
