In 2018, NFCB featured Mike Lupica, Education Advisor at WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey, for a Community Radio Profile. Though only 6 human years have passed, we’ve all lived through a global pandemic, multiple election cycles, increasingly disastrous climate crises, dramatic changes in our economy, technological advances, and so much more. After last month’s inspiring chat with T from WMMT, we decided to check back in with Mike to catch up on what has changed at WPRB since the onset of the pandemic, and how his leadership perspective has evolved.
For a bonus experience, read through his super engaging 2018 profile here: https://nfcb.org/profile-wprbs-mike-lupica/
SM: In our 2018 NFCB profile you touched on how your station’s freeform nature brought the community together. A lot has happened since 2018, namely a global pandemic. What changes did you notice in regards to your station’s role in the community during or after the pandemic?
ML: As all of us now know, nothing can blow up an operation that’s reliant upon volunteer power like a global pandemic. But I’m grateful to that same community of volunteers and broadcasting weirdos for coming together to stave off what could easily have been the end of WPRB. That said, things are still far from being back to the way they were pre-Covid. There’s a long-running program on WPRB called “The New Abnormal,” and that pretty much characterizes our existence now, though we are adapting to the new environment as best we can. Basically, when the world started re-opening, the university that WPRB operates adjacent to (and which is the home to our main studio and offices) implemented much stricter access rules that essentially made the station’s physical space a students-only zone. As an independently owned non-profit with a staff comprising a 50/50 mix of student and community volunteers, half of our staff (myself included) were unable to return to our shared workspace.
From 2020 through 2022, WPRB managed to stay on the air by implementing a complex system of home broadcasting. This worked out far better than I ever believed it could, and kept the station relevant during a time when listeners were hungrier than ever for human-curated radio and the type of connection it fosters. But DJs doing their shows from home also transformed WPRB from being a unified physical space of collaboration, to a place where volunteers largely program in isolation. When I think back on my three decades of radio, the most valuable experiences are often rooted in the person-to-person interactions – even things as basic as getting to know a DJ with radically different music taste just because they followed my program for a season or two. When you’re invested in community radio to the point where it’s the first and last thing you’re thinking about every day, losing those connections is a complete tragedy, especially for those who only end up doing radio for a few years in college. I often worry that some of our DJs are getting a diminished experience as a result of our present limitations.
But despite the doom and gloom, I’m proud of the trajectory we’ve taken so far. In 2022, WPRB opened a satellite studio location off-campus. This space (which we refer to colloquially as “The Barge”) allows me to conduct my advisory work with students in a proper setting, and also includes an office for our operations manager, longtime WPRB DJ Jon Solomon. With help from our listeners who donated essential equipment to the cause, we built a small studio here which has allowed our non-student staff to get back to making radio using real equipment, as opposed to the laptop-and-USB-mic days of deep Covid. Since opening the doors to The Barge, our live broadcast ping-pongs between here and our campus space multiple times each day, and that’s introduced a lot more technical upkeep into my daily work.
And while the current setup is definitely an improvement from the days when everyone was working in isolation at home, we now face the challenge of what feels more and more like operating two different radio stations on the same frequency. That’s why we’re still aiming towards a future when everyone can be back together under a shared roof and restore that spirit of internal community.
SM: Music discovery has changed in so many ways since we last spoke with you. In reflecting on your station’s archival efforts in the late 20-teens, and the rapid growth in presence of digital streaming platforms, how have you managed to keep your programmers engaged in new music discovery and in what ways are you seeing folks weave together that new music with the station’s mighty archives?
ML: The station’s archival efforts are multi-dimensional, with some projects being more formal than others. Our current Production Director Pat Grate spent all summer digitizing an incredible CD collection that was donated by the widow of a beloved WPRB host who tragically passed away from cancer. Our hope is that Pat’s efforts will create a workflow for WPRB to finally tackle the enormous archival task of digitizing its existing CD library, which (due to the fragility of the medium and diminishing support for its hardware), is very much an “at-risk” collection.
Elsewhere, on the day-to-day side, all of the new releases added to our music library receive a detailed review from one of our DJs, which helps to establish a greater sense of object permanence than an unmarked record or CD would usually have. While this is a time-consuming task, the long term benefits of maintaining an annotated archive of underground music can’t be overstated. Although we are not a college radio station, we still have an educational mission, and part of that is encouraging programmers to explore new music as well as old stuff. I characterize this approach as being “part pioneer, part archeologist” in that it’s so exciting to discover new things that are happening around the fringes of any genre, but it’s just as heart-stopping to discover the foundations of these weird scenes and subcultures that paved the way for them. WPRB’s best programmers have always been those who take this approach to heart and let it guide their music discovery, and this also helps prevent new DJs from falling into the worst of all traps, which is sounding like a tourist on their own airwaves.
That said, despite the renewed interest in vinyl, there’s definitely a hesitancy amongst some programmers to incorporate physical formats into their shows. I blame streaming’s dominance for flattening the landscape to the point where, if you’re accustomed to engaging with music on your phone, a release on some huge corporate label looks identical to one on Black Sweat Records or Awesome Tapes from Africa. And it’s not just Spotify that has this effect, even Bandcamp – as much as I value its importance in the DIY community – has the unfortunate side effect of squashing all music into a visually uniform package. And while I love vinyl and have been acquiring it for most of my life, I dislike the shamanistic tropes that many people fall back on when comparing it to other formats. (Doting upon the “feel” and “smell” of records, or whatever.) I don’t like thinking of records like lab specimens, I much prefer them well-loved and beaten up about the edges, and that’s why I think all DJs should be comfortable with vinyl, even if they anticipate their shows being strictly digital. I believe very strongly in the physicality of broadcasting – anybody can engage with music by pressing a few buttons on their phone or laptop, but a real radio person should feel a certain pride in their unique skillset. As I tell every new programmer I train: “Having a phone doesn’t make you a DJ any more than having a wrench makes you a plumber.”
SM: You’ve been in community radio for over three decades – no doubt bearing witness to so many peaks and valleys in giving trends within community radio. As you head into this upcoming fundraising season, how are you thinking differently about audience engagement and membership?
ML: Keeping fundraising innovative and successful is definitely one of the biggest challenges of this work. On the one hand, a listless, perfunctory pledge drive doesn’t animate the staff OR the listenership, which is why I want to chew on glass every time I hear some station trying to motivate pledging by basically saying: “We know you hate this, so let’s just get it over with. Pledge now.”
And on the other end of the spectrum, a multi-faceted campaign with an ever-changing suite of donation tiers and thank you gifts can easily spiral out of control, and result in DJs being unable to articulate its details clearly on the air. So because the architecture of our fundraiser is largely built by student volunteers, we strive for something that’s more ambitious than the typical phone-a-thon, but also realistic enough for station leaders who are also dealing with the stresses of college life to stay on top of. We’ve had a great string of student fundraising directors like Cailyn Tetteh and Natalia Maidique, each building upon the successes of the last, so I’m really happy with the way things have gone. Several years ago, they cooked up a fundraising stunt (now an annual tradition) called the Golden Record Hunt, which is an on-air scavenger hunt that sends listeners to various locations across our broadcast range in search of a well-hidden golden record. (Actually a regular record that’s just spraypainted gold.)
So yes, the thank you gifts change from year to year, but the tentpoles of our on-air campaigns really stay the same, the most important being: “Remind people why they love community radio.” I think it’s a widespread misunderstanding that fundraising shows need to be special in some way, because when “special” translates to a pledge drive featuring live music from an obscure band, or a lengthy interview with some fringe icon from the musical underground, it doesn’t result in active pledging. So while we welcome those sorts of broadcasts at WPRB, we’re always reminding folks that there are 51 other perfectly excellent weeks for them, and that fundraising time is better spent reminding listeners about all those cool interviews and live sessions we aired throughout the year.
SM: The question I love to ask radio-heads: What’s spinning at the Lupica household these days? What music are you excited about?
ML: I’m so grateful for this question because I’m usually just asked about nuts-and-bolts radio operations or managerial stuff! At heart, I’m still a devoted listener and that’s what keeps me coming back to this year after year. Presently, I’m deep in the hole with a new record by Peace de Résistance which caters to my undying love for vaguely glammy and very sleazy-sounding Velvet Underground-inspired art rock. I’m also really loving the new album by Lava LaRue, which is a head-spinning masterclass in Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie crossed with Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism aesthetic, and then fired out of a British hip-hop cannon. And finally, another recent fave are the Lambrini Girls, who blew me away on their recent tour with Amyl & the Sniffers. Bare-knuckled, pissed off, feminist-powered punk rock has never been better, and I love them for reclaiming concepts like gender pronouns and safe spaces from sneering, right-wing goons, and turning the tables to brandish those terms with pride, but with the subtlety of a thrown brick.
And it has to be said that I certainly wouldn’t still be curious about new music if I hadn’t had the incredible fortune to work with so many dedicated music directors over the years. Anyone willing to navigate the foul trenches of paid tastemakers and industry lackeys to make the truly amazing stuff discoverable for radio folks like me has my eternal gratitude.
