Chicago Public Radio general manager Torey Malatia wants to leave himself some wiggle room. As CPR adds a second frequency for Chicago broadcasts, probably late next year, it’s gearing up for major change, and Malatia doesn’t want to say just what that change will be. But the general direction is pretty clear: Malatia doesn’t believe that WBEZ’s hybrid formula really works. The talk-by-day, jazz-by-night regimen that’s produced there and broadcast on CPR’s three frequencies amounts to “two radio stations in one,” he says. As a result, “nobody’s really getting what they want.” While a few listeners stay tuned for both, for the most part there’s one audience for talk and another, much smaller one for ‘BEZ’s music. With mushrooming competition from the likes of satellite radio and podcasts, a breakup’s on the horizon. Either late next year or early in 2007, talk will claim the mother ship, 91.5, and music will be sent off to WBEQ in Morris and a beefed-up WBEW, out of Chesterton, Indiana.
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The split became an option earlier this year, when the FCC gave CPR permission to pump up the Chesterton signal from 7,000 watts to 50,000 watts. After installing a new transmitter and a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of antennas, WBEW’s reach will jump from a population of 400,000 to 4.1 million, and Chicago public-radio listeners who want music will just have to move down the dial to 89.5. There will be a little static, though: Morris and Chesterton will get music with a Chicago hook, other cultural programming, and news with an emphasis on their geographic areas, but many listeners in those areas won’t get ‘BEZ’s talk shows; on the other hand, jazz fans in, say, Lincoln Park will learn more than they might want to about public affairs in northwest Indiana, and music will drop out of earshot entirely for listeners in the north and northwest suburbs. Even with its new muscle, the WBEW signal will reach only as far north as Evanston and as far northwest as the Kennedy expressway.
Malatia says the expansion is overdue, pointing out that “most major cities in the country have more than one full-power public-radio outlet.” As things stand, CPR hasn’t been able to air much of the “arm’s length list” of national and international programs available to it. With two 24-hour services, he says, “we’d be able to do more original production and bring in more outside programming.” Of course, there’s an economic reality to deal with: it costs more to produce than to acquire programs. “In order to make this work, we’ll stage the amount of original production introduced on both services,” Malatia says. “The worst thing we could do is to throw open the gates and say, ‘OK, we now have 24 hours a day–let’s do nothing but a bunch of call-in shows because that’s all we can afford.’” Along with shows produced elsewhere, expect a fair amount of rebroadcasting: Worldview, for example, he says, might run at 1 PM and again at 9 PM.
