The University’s student-run radio station, WJHU, has undergone several significant renovations within the past few decades, including a name change from WHSR (Hopkins Student Radio) when going from its AM frequency to FM.
In the past couple years, however, station managers have redoubled their efforts to elevate WJHU to what it once was.
“The radio station has been sort of forgotten about for a number of years now, but this year we’re trying to bring things back,” junior Shareef Ghanem, WJHU’s assistant station manager, said from the basement of McCoy, where WJHU’s sounds are produced and aired.
One of the first improvements that the station has planned is an overhaul of their web site — www.wjhuradio.com — to transform it from an unsubstantial site to “the music go-to” site for Hopkins students that includes a listing of upcoming shows, reviews of the latest albums and an extensive archive of their interviews with bands.
“We’re working with a provisional developer to help us make [the web site] a place where when any student thinks of music, they know they can go to the WJHU web site and find everything that’s going on in Baltimore,” Ghanem said.
The station, which once held the FM frequency 88.1 (now owned by an NPR member station), moved to the web in the mid-1990s and now only broadcasts shows online.
While WJHU has considered purchasing a tower, making it a more conventional radio station, Station Manager Ryan Decker, a senior, explained that sticking to the web format was a smarter move.
“[Getting a tower] is not worth it, the benefit isn’t there. The things that we can do with the new web site is going to be more superior and would allow us to move in a more creative direction than we’d be able to do with a tower,” he said.
Ghanem agreed, saying, “There has been a trend lately where college stations are getting rid of their towers. It would significantly lower our budget, and [not purchasing one] frees up money for us to try to bring in groups and do shows, that sort of thing.”
Another important step in the resurgence of the radio station, the managers said, is to tie it become more engaged with the local music scene, and in particular, the Hopkins music scene.
“We want to branch off to other off-campus venues that aren’t necessarily familiar to Hopkins students,” Decker said.
“Lately it’s become a skeleton but we want the station to function as more than that.”
WJHU recently transformed a station room into a “live room,” complete with a drum set and recording equipment provided by the group, where Hopkins bands could make live recordings.
“We’ve basically made it so that if groups wanted to do a live recording instead of broadcasting straight to the web we can record the set, so if a band wanted to come in and record a few tracks they could,” Ghanem said.
“It’s a way for us to give groups at Hopkins a place where they can iron things out for free and do some really good recordings.”
The idea, he explained, came from visiting the radio stations of several West Coast universities.
“At a lot of colleges I’ve visited, if you go through their old archives you can actually find old recordings of bands that are really popular now. At Stanford, for example, I think they found a recording that the Donnas did when they first got together, which is kinda cool,” Ghanem said.
In the spring semester of the last year, WJHU held an April Fool’s Dance Party at the Ottobar — a small local venue — in an effort to encourage students to explore Baltimore.
“At first we were skeptical if people were going to come, but by the end of the night the place was pretty packed,” Ghanem said. “I think we’re gonna try to do that stuff more often, bring people more off campus.
WJHU raised their campus profile further with the Guiness World Record-breaking Six Day Jam Session (6DJS), in which various musical groups performed continuously for six days.
The event was held as a fundraiser for Orchkids, a program sponsored by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO), and helped bring together the Peabody, BSO and Hopkins communities.
“First day alone they gave us 16 cases of Monster, we went crazy. It was just chaos,” Ghanem said, laughing.
“It took us a year to recover from the Jam Session, we just got crazy burnt out after that,” Decker said.
“It put a lot of equipment into the fray, the station was in a total mess, and our equipment was on the fritz just from being played 24 hours a day for six days straight.
“It took a lot of effort, but it was a good event and it raised a lot of money.”
According to Ghanem, the station’s renovation includes a reliability promise to their listeners as well.
“One of the issues is that in the past, if a listener logged onto the stream and there would literally be nothing playing,” he said.
“If I were someone who logged on and that happened, I’d have no reason to go back, so we’re trying to be more reliable about always having music playing.”
In terms of the shows’ content, Ghanem has no qualms — ”The DJs are all good, we play cool music.”
