Drew Frankel

Drew Frankel, the general manager of the campus radio station WMFO, garnered considerable support for his idea to let the Allocations Board distribute the funds to a variety of student organizations, as it normally does with Student Activities Fee funds. Frankel specifically discussed how WMFO would employ $12,000 of the extra funds to purchase an automation system.

"An automation system will allow us to broadcast when there is nobody in the studio. This would be extremely helpful during the summer when we still broadcast but cannot fill our schedule," Frankel said.

WMFO also needs a $25,000 upgrade in equipment for the studio because most of the equipment was designed in the early 1980s by Tufts engineers, Frankel said. The expansion in technology would also be used to set up remote broadcasting, which would benefit the Tufts community and surrounding towns, according to Frankel.

WMFO members highlighted the importance of the radio to town-grown relations, as it is broadcast throughout Medford and Somerville and some DJs are local residents rather than students. "[The funds could be] something that will have a long-term affect on the station , and the community as well," Frankel said.

Drew Frankel

General Manager
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Drew Frankel (contact Drew)

Junior and WMFO General Manager Drew Frankel said he's extremely excited to kick off the new semester, and more importantly, a new era for WMFO.

"One of WMFO's biggest accomplishments of the last semester is that we have a completely full weekly program schedule," he said.
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The full DJ schedule and new Web site may seem like small steps in the growth of WMFO, but the newly interactive radio station will reach even more listeners with the creation of the Acoustic Café series spearheaded by Frankel himself.

The acoustic concerts will function as only one part of the Acoustic Café, which includes on-air performances and interviews with each week's artist.The shows will also be recorded for posterity and may be played on the air after the event.

WMFO-sponsored shows once occurred on campus quite often, but their frequency decreased rapidly over the last few years.

Frankel said he's glad the station will be bringing them back.

"The more I thought about it, the more I realized how cool of an idea it really would be because it benefits all of the groups participating," he said."There's a major incentive for artists to play in front of a college crowd and an even bigger incentive to get some concentrated airtime.We're essentially offering these artists a full one-hour feature on-the-air entirely devoted to them, which is something that you don't see coming from other radio stations."

Building a Reputation

The timing could not be better for such an endeavor, according to Frankel.

"For us, we're getting the opportunity to show Tufts what a tremendous resource we are and we get to make some noise - albeit acoustic noise - on campus.For Brown and Brew, they sell more coffee.All in all, it's a win-win-win, especially for the Tufts student community," Frankel said.

And so the Acoustic Café idea was born.But it takes more than one man to get a project of this magnitude off the ground, so Frankel brought his idea to the WMFO community for help.

"We assembled a group of both student and community member DJs and started working on it ...It was truly a group effort open to anyone on staff who was interested in helping out."

After getting the idea into motion, the issue of finding artists became increasingly important.

"Just as a test," Frankel said, "I posted a classified ad on Craigslist[.com] in early December to gauge interest, and within 24 hours we had already received close to 30 responses."
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We sought to book a broad range of artists spanning different styles of music, and I think we did a pretty good job," Frankel said.

Some of the artists also came from personal contacts within the station itself.

"We also made use of a bunch of connections that folks on our staff have to touring artists and booked some performers through those connections," Frankel said.

In order to book artists from a diverse range of musical genres, Frankel and company enlisted a taskforce of listeners and advisors to help choose the performers."We invited all of the members of our staff, over 100 students and community members, to get involved in the planning process, and all who expressed interest were involved in the selection of the artists," Frankel said.
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According to Frankel, Tim will be performing with an acoustic trio, made up of guitar, bass and hand drums.
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"The WMFO Acoustic Café Series is definitely just the beginning of our involvement, Frankel said.

Drew Frankel gm@wmfo.org
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Front (L to R): Drew Frankel, Jenny

Drew Frankel gm@wmfo.org

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