Rice, UH sign final KTRU sale deal

By Seth Brown     10/21/10 7:00pm

Two months after the university announced KTRU's pending sale, the University of Houston and Rice signed a deal that will transfer control of Rice's student radio station's transmitter and FCC broadcasting license to KUHF, so long as the FCC approves the sale.President David Leebron sent out an e-mail to the student body Oct. 13 announcing that the deal had been signed.

According to Leebron, the past two months have been used to finalize details of the sale, but declined to give examples of these details. He said the fundamental points of the sale remain unchanged.

"Legal agreements have a certain complicated structure," Leebron said. "Some of the details took longer than anticipated."

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Leebron said that while confidentiality was initially necessary to get to a point of basic agreement on the deal, the UH Board of Regents had to make the deal public two months ago in order for it to go forward.

McMurtry College junior Marie Thompson said that she was concerned by the confidentiality involved in the sale, but that the university's communications since the sale was announced have assuaged her concerns.

"I'm not the typical student - I'm not completely outraged," Thompson said. "I'm still concerned because it seems hypocritical, but [the administration has] been cooperating."

Leebron said he expects the approval process to take several months. The process consists of a 30-day comment period, during which members of the public can comment on the sale, and a succeeding period during which the FCC itself will review the sale.

KTRU Station Manager Joey Yang said KTRU intends to petition the FCC on the grounds that transferring the license would not serve the public interest.

"In Houston, you can currently find NPR on the air; you can currently find classical on the air; and you can currently find KTRU on the air," Yang, a Lovett College junior, said. "We would argue that it's not in the public interest for the sale to happen and [for] there to only be NPR and classical music."

Yang said the Paul Hastings law firm of Washington, D.C., agreed to do pro bono work for KTRU to help them file a petition to deny the transfer with the FCC.

Leebron said he thought there was no reason the sale would not be approved by the FCC based on past practices.

Yang said he was disappointed that there was not a greater degree of direct communication between the administration and KTRU's student leadership. He said that he only found out that the deal had been signed shortly before Leebron sent out an e-mail to the student body Oct. 13.

In light of the sale, Yang said KTRU has begun a shift toward being more listener-friendly and engaging more with students. To that end, Yang said KTRU will be working to have more concerts on campus and will be holding a pub night in the near future, as well as giving away tickets to upcoming concerts, such as Fun Fun Fun Fest and Jason Derülo, to Rice students.

Yang said that although KTRU will continue playing underexposed music, after the sale, there will be a shift toward emphasizing the interests of the station's DJs. He said the station's programming can change without sacrificing its eclectic nature.

"In the past we had the mentality 'If you start tapping your foot, take it off the playlist,'" Yang said. "We're moving more toward being more accessible - programming what we like to hear and what we think other people will like too."

Thompson said she listens to KTRU occasionally, and that she thinks the shift makes sense given the circumstances.

"I think KTRU took the sale as kind of a wake-up call to be more flexible and responsive to their audience," Thompson said. "I think that's a good idea, trying to be more adaptive to the situation."

Yang emphasized that KTRU will not be abandoning things like improvisational jazz or Thai garage punk, but he said that even music individual DJs are already familiar with may be new to most of the student body and even many other DJs.

"We still want to program really diverse music, but we have a slightly different idea of what that is," Yang said. "We don't think it's that far off that students who have hated KTRU before are going to listen to it now and say 'Hey - I haven't listened to KTRU before, but that wasn't bad.'

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