When students head back to the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School this fall there will be a swanky new addition to the building – a state-of-the-art radio studio broadcasting reggae tunes. No need for a mic-check. You heard, or read, that correctly.
WYOB (“We’re Your Oak Bluffs”) Radio is the brainchild of Oak Bluffs resident Skip Finley, with the backing of Mike Carter, the owner of Carter Broadcast Group, and Tony Gray, a nationally known radio-programming consultant. Before “retiring” to become the director of sales and marketing for this magazine and the Vineyard Gazette, Finley spent thirty-seven years in the radio business. He was the outright owner of four stations and at one time or another responsible for as many as forty-three stations across the country.
When Carter and Gray received the license for the low-power station last year, therefore, they knew just the man they needed to lure back into the radio game. Though Finley was skeptical at first about this low-power station – mind you, he has owned 100,000-watt stations – he finally decided that transmitting his knowledge to the younger generation was the best use for it.
“I want to teach kids how to do real and professional radio; not this underground crap, not college radio. Just the real deal,” Finley said recently with his trademark brand of straight talk.
The station, at 105.5 FM, will start out as an extracurricular activity with the hopes that by September 2016 it will become a part of the Career and Technical Education program the high school provides. Students will vie for positions such as news director, general manager, and program director as if they were at a professional station. Finley hopes to find aggressive kids who are not afraid to push the limits, to, as he said, “reinvent this tradition of media.”
The station won’t provide live feeds, however, until Finley is confident that the students are ready. “This isn’t Facebook,” he said. “It’s the government airwaves. You can’t slander and libel people.” Throughout the fall, Tuesdays and Saturdays will be dedicated to voice tracking (recording) for the coming week. If all goes well, Saturdays will become live talk show sessions some time in December.
As for the reggae theme, Finley says that it’s not competitive on the Island in the long run. But once the students have learned the ropes, he’ll let them change the format of the station if they want.
The worst-case scenario for the new program is that no one shows up for class, but Finley is confident that he will have the students’ attention from the get-go. “This is a brand new toy,” he said. “The first time a kid hears himself on the radio, that’s the cool kid in high school.”
That, he claimed, will be the ultimate fascination. And coolness, at school or elsewhere, is something you get the feeling Skip Finley knows all about.
For more information, go to wyob.org.
