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Gainesville, Florida, home of the Gators, is also the home of what was an absolutely wondrous public radio station, WUFT-FM. Wikipedia writes that the station "is known for its eclectic mix of music programming, from Classical and Jazz to Folk, World Music and Blues." For those of who know and love what it was, this only begins to explain its charm.
Sadly, though, this unique resource has been swept away. What we had is too good to lose. We want it back!
During pledge drives, people speaking in the name of the station often repeat that it is the voice of the membership which determines the programming the station carries. It is our radio station, they claim. It turn out that this is a lie! The management of the station has taken upon itself to change the station's format without considering the views of the listeners.
Join us! We believe we can take it back. Learn about the issues and see how you can help!
See also the story in the Sun about the drop in pledges.
There seems to be rather little enthusiasm for this new all-talk format.
- Write and let yourself be heard. The email address for Dean Wright is jwright@jou.ufl.edu. Don't let him think that only he will get the message. When you send the message, also send carbon copies to
- WUFT-FM (radio@wuft.org)
- the Gainesville Sun (voice@gvillesun.com)
- the Independent Florida Alligator (aconti@alligator.org)
- Our unpledge-monitoring mailbox (classicgvl@yahoo.org; this lets us know about the message you sent)
- To sign up for the mailing list without signing the petition, please let me know by using the contact form. I will set up a better way to do this as I have time to do the necessary programming, but you can sign up now.
There are many ideas floating around about what to do about this situation; it is not clear what path we should take as a community. We might disagree on the course of action to take, but it is clear we agree about one basic thing: the change in WUFT's format is a Very Bad Idea. It seems that the people who decided on this change really don't understand how it affects us.
Now we have an online petition through which you can make your opinions known to those who should have known better. There is a place on the petition form to leave your comments—we encourage you to do so.
See the comments people have written in the petition so far. (With names removed.)
Did you submit a petition entry but did not get the confirmation email? Click here to find what to do.
We're still looking for input about what we need to do to build up the web site.
Privacy policy: This is very straighforward. I log website activity--especially changes in content--but do not share lists of names of users who have signed up for the forums. If you want to identify yourself further, that's your business. There probably will be places on the site where you will be able to leave information for others to use, but these will always be labeled so that the choice will be up to you.
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