Chaotic and thrilling: Columbia’s radio station is live from the student protests

“The turning point was certainly immediate, very sudden … We received a tip at 4am that there would be a demonstration on Columbia’s campus, and pretty soon after that, we went live on air.”

The presenter, Georgia Dillane, is describing the moment on 17 April that student radio station WKCR was thrust into the spotlight with its quick news updates from inside the university grounds.

As students established a pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawns, the station dropped its usual mix of music and specialist programming in favor of breaking news.

From the station’s HQ on Broadway, Dillane has become a familiar voice behind the mic, alongside several colleagues and a team of journalists in the field reporting on everything from yet more police arriving on campus to performance arts clubs entertaining classmates. In the seven days since the encampment was founded, clashes between students on one side and university administrators and the NYPD on the other have only intensified, following the arrest of more than 100 students last Thursday.

WKCR’s broadcasts can be as chaotic and thrilling as live radio gets. Last Wednesday, as NYPD officers began arresting student protestors and the daughter of US representative Ilhan Omar, Isra Hirsi, was suspended by the university, WKCR reported live from the encampment, patching in student reporters across campus. The unpolished dispatch – with audio gaps as reporters’ phone connections failed and the hosts trying to stay abreast of all the moving parts – conveyed the atmosphere of upheaval on campus.

The station’s 19 reporters have been working for up to 18 hours a day – while trying to keep up with their studies. “Everyone on the team is in undergrad except for one guy who graduated last year,” says Dillane, who is also the station’s program director. “We’re largely under 25”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with Columbia’s campus sealed off to reporters and much mainstream coverage centered on the institutional response, the university’s student media has come into its own. Columbia’s journalism school is one of the top journalism graduate programs in the nation, and the undergraduate student publications Bwog and the Columbia Daily Spectator are also reporting from within the encampment. (WKCR is not affiliated with the Columbia Journalism School.)

On Tuesday night, when rumors spread that the national guard might be deployed at Columbia by midnight, WKCR’s presence felt more crucial than ever. With confusion and panic everywhere following the news that the university would be making a decision about dismantling the encampment, a flurry of students and New Yorkers descended on the campus. On WKCR, the station manager, Ted Schmiedeler, and his colleagues calmly narrated the scenes they were witnessing, with students organizing themselves ahead of possible arrests.

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As well as dissecting an email announcement sent out by Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, WKCR’s teams also reported that the deadline from the university for action against the protesters had been extended, several hours before the university acknowledged that talks were still ongoing. They spoke, too, about the accessibility issues facing disabled students as the campus continued to lock down; about counter-terrorism police being deployed to campus; and about a delay in communications to students at Barnard College.

Last Saturday, reports on social media began to spread that WKCR was being taken off air by the university’s public safety team. Dillane and Schmiedeler are keen to stress, however, that this was not an example of a heavy-handed approach to student media but rather the result of a misunderstanding. The building that houses the station was being shut down, but staff did not know that the WKCR team had the right to stay inside 365 days a year. Although Dillane describes the incident as “startling”, with the entire field team racing back to the office to offer support, it was quickly resolved. “I was a bit frazzled because I was on air, describing what was going on,” says Dillane. “But they left and we were able to carry on.”

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The WKCR studio is tucked into a small corner on the second floor of Columbia’s primary student center, Lerner Hall. The undergraduates managing the station scurry between four tiny rooms: the server room, the main studio, the record library and a recreational lounge. While it’s certainly cramped, the space has a cozy college charm. The walls are covered in vinyl records, concert posters, Polaroids of former DJs and hand-painted cartoons. In the past week, however, the students have transformed their lounge into a makeshift bedroom, plopping lumpy couch cushions into a corner to make a bed. They’ve slept, chatted and eaten countless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here; anything to keep themselves and the rolling coverage of the encampment going.

Under normal circumstances, WKCR is a New York public radio station managed by the Columbia students. According to Schmiedeler, 95% of listeners are not enrolled students; they’re members of the greater New York community. WKCR is primarily a music station, preserving the history of influential jazz, classical, opera and folk artists from across the world. It also hosts regular programs such as its birthday broadcast series , which celebrates the lives of a musicians; on Thursday, Ella Fitzgerald tracks were interspersed among daily news updates.

Retaining the regular schedule has been a challenge, but Schmiedeler stays committed to the balancing act. “We’re playing in between press coverage: Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge. We’re staying true to the music that has built this station over the years.”

In the studio, Dillane acts as a producer, coordinating incoming material from reporters. Schmiedeler likes to be particularly speedy with his interviews. “I set it as a goal for myself to get an interview into the Slack [messaging] channel ready to go within two minutes of it ending,” he says. With so much of the material coming in fits and starts, broadcasts are often improvised.

Field reporting is also part of WKCR’s DNA. As one of the first radio stations to broadcast to the Manhattan area in stereo, in 1964, the station became the only source of live coverage of the 1968 university sit-ins, when students occupied several buildings to protest the university’s financial ties to the Vietnam war apparatus and the gentrification of Harlem.

At the time, about 50 to 60 students worked in shifts as soon as the occupation began, providing students and the city with raw footage of the demonstrations.

This time around, WKCR’s live reporting is painting an unscripted portrait of Columbia’s diverse student body, to maintain a sense of impartiality and fairness in its coverage. The station’s ethos is that any person on campus can be a source, whether a student in the encampment protesting for the liberation of Gaza, another waving an Israeli flag on the perimeter of the lawns or a member of local government.

Interest among fellow students in the station has also increased, says Dillane. “I think we have always been a voice for the community and the student body, and in this moment we all knew that that was needed right now – especially knowing that we could be in there when others couldn’t.”

Peers from many different backgrounds and with a multitude of viewpoints have come to them, and, Schmiedeler says, allowed them to tell their stories.

“When they see other students, they tend to trust us a little bit more,” he says.