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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 11, 1985)
—7 ]ect happens in December. One unique aspect of KTAM is its mobile Friday morning entertain ment team. The show goes on the road to some location in town. Sometimes it's a busy intersection or a popular business. Most of the time they don't know where they're going until they get out on the road. That's how they ended up broadcasting from Bryan Mayor Marvin Tate's breakfast table one Friday morning. KORA-FM, also known as ”98 Country," can be found by tuning the frequency modulation dial to 98.3. It went on the air in 1966 and programs country music 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It too reaches out some 30 miles in all di rections. Program director and morning drive good humor man Roy Gene stresses the station's committment to public service. "We’re special- on the dial be cause of the public service work we do," Gene says. "We try to involve ourselves in all of the local charities and fund-raising events. We try to get involved as much as possible with all of the local organizations. Every year we get more and more (organizations) that don't know about the kind of services that we have available. I think it's gotten to the point now where after five years of really pursuing public service- /public interest projects that were a natural choice for people to come to when they need help in fund raising or publicizing local events. We try to keep the slant on local events." In September, KORA won the Texas Association of Broadcasters Radio Public Service Award for the second time in three years. It has worked to- raise money for the Mus cular Dystrophy Association, the Brazos Valley Rehabilitation Center, the March of. Dimes and others. KORA also participates in Radio M*A*S*H. Gene says A&M organizations take advantage of the services KORA has to offer. KORA has co promoted the Memorial Student Center's All Night County Fair and has been involved with the Off- Campus Aggies. "I think that in the last couple of years we've been especially sur prised by the response that we've re ceived on campus," Gene says. "I think that a lot of students are ac cepting us as radio station first and then as a country radio station sec ond." As far as special programming goes, KORA features "American Country Countdown," the "Silver Eagle," a 90-minute program of re corded live music, and various sim ulcasts throughout the year. KORA also has a committment to local news and sports concentrating on what's happening the local area. Paul Harvey can be heard on KORA as well. KTAW-FM The remaining pair of commercial sister stations is KTAW-FM/WTAW- AM. KTAW-FM, "Maximum Hits 92K," 92.1 on the dial, began broadcasting in 1964. It broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week from its studios and tower bn Mobile Avenue in Bryan with an effective radius of 35 miles in all directions. The station is owned by Radio Brazos, Inc. 92K used to have the call letters WTAW-FM but the potential for con fusion with the AM station is more than obvious so the letters were changed a few years ago. And like all radio stations in town, 92K claims it has something that makes it differ ent. "Probably our contests kind of make us the different radio station in town," says Bill Turner, music direc tor. "We try to go with lots of contests all of the time — lots of chances to win prizes each day." Some of those contests are Meal Ticket Jeopardy, Pepsi Play-It-Or-Pull-It, and the. K- Klub. Special programming includes the No. I Brother of Soul loe Daniels on Saturday mornings, "Superstar Rock Concert" every Saturday night, and "Countdown America" Sunday mornings. 92K does have a news commit tment with four newscasts daily, Monday through Friday. The em phasis is on local and university news. KTAW is big on audience partici pation. They have a 24-hour request line and do market research. Turner says he thinks this helps them keep in touch with the college student. "A lot of our promotions deal with college students," Turner says. "There are various sororities we've teamed up with for promotions. Generally we try to stay in touch with the college student by checking the record stores and monitoring the phone lines." . Down the hall from KTAW is their sister station WTAW-AM. "Super country" tunes in at 1150 and is an AM stereo station. They are the only regional radio station in Bryan-Col- lege Station with a daytime range of 80 miles in all directions. At night they are directional and are much stronger to the south. WTAW has been in existence 63 years. They were the original radio station licensed to A&M back in 1919. There was some experimenta tion for a few years and in 1922. the station went commercial. The call letters stand for "Watch The Aggies Win" and WTAW is one of only a handful of stations west of the Missis sippi River that retains the "W" as its first letter. The first play-by-play football ever broadcast was carried on WTAW in 1919. The game was A&M vs. Texas and the Aggies won 7-0. It was an unbeaten, untied season for the Ag gies. A&M retained the WTAW license until October of 1957 when it was sold to private enterprise. Today WTAW is a contemporary country music station. "Our station is a personality- oriented type radio station," says Ron Elliot, program director and morning jock. "We don't put em phasis just on music. It's the enter tainment. It's the news every hour. It's the special programming and the sports. In a very fine recipe, we're trying to be that overall type of infor mation station where if somebody wants to know what's going on, whether it's adverse weather, a ma jor crisis, or something that some body needs to know about right away, then hopefully we'll give them the message and they’ll know that they can turn to WTAW to find out what's going on." WTAW does think about Aggies. Right now, they're into the third year of the Annual Aggie Ticket Ex change. Beginning at noon on Fri days before home football games they match people who have tickets with people who want tickets. That continues through kickoff. They also run a feature called "This Week at Texas A&M." WTAW runs UPI net work news and local news every hour. KANM-FM is a student-managed station broadcasting on 99.9 cable. The studio is in the Pavilion and it broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It got rolling in 1973, and since then has seen some interesting times. "We've been located all over campus," says Station Manager Chris Dominy, a senior mechanical engineering major. "We once were located in the back of a barbershop over where the old Midwest Cable used to be located." The best way to describe the for mat of KANM is to say it has no set format. Volunteer jocks pull four- hour shifts and do about whatever they want. "We like to just say free format," Dominy says. "It ranges from punk to classical and everything in be tween. We don't have any commer cials. We don't have to patronize anybody. We can put out the best music. Having a free format with 42 dee-jays, we have 42 music direc tors and the input there is much more valuable than having just one music director." III . II . .. .Btji iMU-FM yiiiiiMi.'.ii^iirirriiiii KAMU-FM, 90.9, is the public ra dio station in the Brazos Valley. Li censed to A&M, it signs on at & a.m. and signs off no earlier than mid night depending on what kind of late-night programming is sched uled for the weekend. KAMU is housed in the Moore Communications Center with KAMU-TV and has a broadcast range of about 30 miles in all direc tions. Its inaugural broadcast was in 1977. "What we play and do is not done anywhere else within the general area," Program Director Larry Jack- son says. "The people who live within a 30-35 mile radius won't find anything comparable on the dial." KAMU carries many National Public Radio features including the popu lar news and information programs "Morning Edition," and "All Things Considered." It also produces its own features tailored for the local area. Being a public radio station car ries with it the need. of having, to raise money from the listeners to meet expenses. Program funding can be generated from businesses and individuals underwriting the cost of putting a specific show on the air. A modest underwriting credit at the beginning and end of a show is as close to a commercial as public radio can get. "Except for an initial loan from the University, all of our programming funds come from'private contribu tors and corporate underwriting," Jackson says. It would be impossible to list all of what KAMU offers, but suffice to say there's really something for every body. If you haven't caught "A Prai rie Home Companion," then you're missing a benchmark program of what public radio is about. □