KZSU and SSP: The Letters of Stanford Radio
Tags: Features, Stanford, Storytelling, Podcast, Radio

By Niuniu Teo

Walking into the KZSU radio station is a bit like entering a time capsule. Concrete steps lead down to the building, featuring carpeted rooms with a formidable number of multi-colored cables, brown filing cabinets stacked on top of each other, and shelves filled with painstakingly categorized and alphabetized LPs, fraying at the edges. The current show plays from speakers located throughout the rooms. A small group of local volunteers, students, and alumni are nestled into different nooks of the building, flipping through music libraries and exchanging familiar banter, the entire station humming with low-budget love.

KZSU has been broadcasting since 1947, making a switch from AM to the current non-commercial FM frequency of 90.1 in 1964. Since then, it has been volunteer-run, with few major technological updates. It seems fitting that Stanford’s radio station should have escaped the majority of the perpetual remodeling and reconstruction of campus facilities. As an old-school local radio station at a university that is fast becoming known as seeding grounds for the next best thing from Silicon Valley, KZSU’s existence on campus is something of an anomaly. From the decidedly un-ergonomic swivel chairs to the thick black bundles of electrical cords, KZSU is probably one of the most low-tech buildings on campus. Watching volunteers patch feeds from KZSU’s booths to the main station by hand, an observer can’t help but feel like it’s only a matter of time before the station, is consumed by obsolescence.

One of KZSU’s most persistent threats to its existence lies in funding. It is funded mostly by special fees, through ASSU’s Voluntary Student Organization funding system, subject to the voting whims of students. However, the community KZSU serves ranges far past the Stanford student body.

“This is the great tragedy of KZSU and will eventually lead to the station’s downfall,” said Jack Wang, who has held several positions at the station.

Wang, unmistakable with his signature baseball cap and beaten running shoes, was an indispensable member of KZSU for more than two decades — ever since he was a student at Stanford in the late 1980s. He began as a music DJ, but went on to serve as KZSU’s assistant chief engineer, program director, chief announcer, producer, sports advisor, and new employee trainer, among other things. With his French Bulldog, Monty, who is something of a local celebrity, always nestled at his side, Wang was a constant, capable, and cheerful presence in the station — until he left last winter for London with his wife.

The KZSU office

ASSU’s special fees elections have failed the station twice in recent years, once in the 1990s, and once in the 2000s. Wang is convinced that the next time this happens, the station will shut down.

“If KZSU were to ever close its doors,” Wang said, “the immediate impact [on Stanford] would be felt in its sports coverage and its role in emergency preparedness. And that closure also shuts down vital broadcasting of live sports events that maintain the university’s relationship with its worldwide alumni and family following.”

KZSU is currently in dialogue with ASSU to figure out a better way of allotting money to the organization.

“We’re trying to help the ASSU understand where we’re coming from,” said Alex Muscat, KZSU’s Assistant General Manager. “Because we’re serving a community, not just Stanford.”

Alex Muscat is a junior at Stanford, and a music DJ at KZSU with a show called “A Visit From Drum,” which airs every Friday from four to seven p.m. The show’s description on the KZSU online schedule is: “Rhythmic deconstruction for the betterment of society. Drum is certainly not dead.” Muscat is a strong believer that, even in the age of Spotify and Pandora, the radio DJ still contributes something worthwhile to the music scene.

“I think the value of broadcast radio, specifically music radio, is kind of just that there is a human there who’s making these choices and sometimes you make mistakes,” Muscat said. “I’d rather have that than the perfect computer program doing it. I think having a human there is really important.”

However, even the casual observer might have discerned that the way we disseminate information has completely transformed in the past few decades — mostly in favor of concise, hyperlinked text content, and, in the process, away from the human touch. These changes are due, in large part, to technological innovations. Algorithms recommend songs based on what we’ve already listened to, tweeters we’ll agree with based on whom we’ve retweeted, and the list of computerized aggregation goes on. Alex’s preference for a human curator doesn’t seem to be something that has directed the media revolution in any obvious way.

A look at the numbers, however, projects a rather optimistic future for radio.

“What gives radio its staying power?”

First, AM/FM radio stations are still the source of 55 percent of the music listened in the US, according to a study done by Nielsen, as of August 2014. Internet/streaming radio devices follow at 44 percent.

Also, though the radio industry has yet to overtake the newspaper publishing industry, its projected trends tend upwards, unlike the floundering newspaper industry. According to IBISWorld, an Australian research company that specializes in the industry market, the US radio industry revenue is projected to rise from 20.6 billion dollars in 2014 to 22.3 billion dollars in 2018.

Additionally, according to eMarketer, the time spent reading newspapers per capita has decreased from 31.4 in 2009 minutes to 21.7 minutes in 2012 — meanwhile, weekly time spent with online radio in the U.S. increased from 391 minutes to 586 minutes. In other words, people are spending more time listening to radio every day, as they spend less time with newspapers.

The numbers also show a surprising number of the younger generation becoming regular radio listeners.

Studies done by NPD Group, a market research company, show that although internet radio only accounts for 15 percent of radio reach in the U.S., 57 percent of 18–25 year olds and 55 percent of 26–35 year olds were reached by free online radio in January of 2012 — a number that is only expected to increase. Over 90 percent of US consumers who are millennials listen to the radio at least once a week.

The popularity of radio among millennials (aged 18–34) seems to spell good news for the industry — 68.4 percent of American millennials who listen to network radio are college graduates, and 70.8 percent of them have annual household incomes above $75,000, as shown in a recent study by Nielsen Holdings titled, “Bridging the Generation Gap: Network Radio is Growing Young.”

It would seem that, though it is gif-less, link-less, and tweet-less, radio has sprung up somewhere in an undiscovered space between reported journalism and the personal memoir, and the demand for more is only increasing — demanded by the tweeting, texting, and otherwise socially networked millennials.

As former bastions of print journalism succumb to the cyber-chaos of Twitter, Buzzfeed, and Facebook, radio, for all its low-tech clutter, has not only retained its consumer base, but expanded it to include the new generation as well.

Which bring us to our central question: Why? What gives radio its staying power? Inefficiencies are embedded in the medium itself — for example, listeners have no power over the amount of time it takes to consume its content, and radio requires a narrator who constantly repeats previously established points, both to introduce new listeners to the subject at hand, and to remind old listeners about previously established points (since listeners cannot scroll back and jog their memory themselves). From the clunky mixers to the constraints on the narration style, so much of radio implies inconvenience and inefficiency, in an era when those two qualities seems to be at the bottom of the list in creating attractive content.

A simple answer lies in the fact that it’s easy to do other things while listening to the radio. Eighty-five percent of radio reach is through AM/FM radio, most of which occurs while people are driving. Of course, this alone cannot fully explain radio’s newfound popularity with the younger generation, on whom the future of radio depends.

Millennials are especially attracted to a new form of radio journalism that has become wildly popular on a global scale. The form embodies a spectrum between the memoir and news — most consist of a story researched in-depth and narrated by a trustworthy narrator. A few examples of this form are Ira Glass’s This American Life, which reaches about 2.2 million listeners per show, and its recent spinoff hosted by Sarah Koenig, Serial, which has about one million unique listener downloads for each episode, according to Podtrac.com. The form takes nonfiction journalism to a level of intricacy typically seen in novels and memoirs, and it is often streamlined for easy internet access from mobile devices. It is also often more cost-efficient than traditional journalism, since it often relies on aggregation and personal interviews instead of traditional reporting.

This trend manifests itself on Stanford’s campus through the Stanford Storytelling Project, which, on its website, describes itself as an arts program that explores the “transformative nature of traditional and modern oral storytelling.” Unlike KZSU’s underground time-capsule rabbit hole, the Storytelling Project exists mostly online. Most of the work and publicity it receives happens through the internet — instead of cables and filing cabinets, it relies on Soundcloud and Google Docs.

“Our voice is kind of like a fingerprint. You can hear, in some ways, echoes of where they’re from, echoes of how they kind of comport themselves in the world, you can feel a personality in a voice.” — Jonah Willihnganz, director of the Stanford Storytelling Project

It has hosted events on campus, bringing in speakers from Ira Glass to Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). It also hosts a weekly StoryLab, which offers a one-hour workshop followed by two hours of one-on-one mentoring by the staff. However, its most prominent feature is its weekly radio show, called State of the Human — a show that, according to its website, has the stated mission of sharing “stories that deepen our understanding of single, common human experiences.”

Each show of “State of the Human” consists of a series of stories that develop upon one overarching theme. The structure is similar to that of This American Life, or Radiolab. The host, or narrator, is not simply a curator of facts, but also plays the role of an uneducated layman and explains his or her journey to becoming the educated narrator he is at the time of hosting the show.

Nina Foushee ’15, the co-managing editor of the Stanford Storytelling Project, believes the human voice offers something that text just doesn’t.

“When we read a text, and we’re just focusing on that and we don’t hear human voices,” Foushee said. “What we think about, when we think about the written word, is this big narrator coming in and codifying it, [which] just doesn’t resonate with people in the same way.”

Nina Foushee ’15 works at the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Jonah Willihnganz, the director of the Storytelling Project, similarly believes the appeal lies somewhere in the subtle expressions of the human voice.

“We have, I think, a very visceral and unusual relationship with the disembodied voice,” he said. “It’s the sign of presence.”

His voice is gentle, scratchy, and thoughtful; he folded his hands in his lap before continuing.

“Our voice is kind of like a fingerprint. You can hear, in some ways, echoes of where they’re from, echoes of how they kind of comport themselves in the world, you can feel a personality in a voice,” Willihnganz said. “So, when we hear stories in the disembodied voice in podcasts or the radios, I think we have a much stronger sense that we are having this experience of consciousness in contact with another consciousness. […] I think it’s one of the reasons for its resurgence today.”

The original advantage of radio came from the fact that information could reach infinitely more people and travel infinitely faster through radio waves than through print newspapers. Today, in the age of notifications, alerts, and constant access to the internet, this is no longer the case. Radio has become perhaps the most inefficient mode of communicating large amounts of information to the mass public. And yet, it has persisted and evolved, in large part due to the comfort and comprehensibility offered by the human voice. Though the advent of internet radio streaming may render the mixers and cables in the KZSU station obsolete, it seems that the radio show itself will persevere into the future and continue to play an important role in how we pass on our stories.

Niuniu Teo ’16 is the features editor at West. She may or may not have a poster of the word “wanderlust.”

Photography by Yuto Watanabe ‘15.