I’ve always been impressed by WAMC’s triannual fundraising campaigns. Perhaps this pegs me as a nerd but I listen to them for fun. Not all day, mind you. But an hour here, an hour there. If you’ve ever listened to other public radio stations’ exhortations for money their strategy seems to be to bore you to death until you cough up some dough, just so that they’ll return to regular programming.
What’s the secret to WAMC’s success? It started with Alan Chartock, who ran the station from 1981 until his retirement in 2023. Alan didn’t just run the station. He personified it. One of the pledge premiums was an Alan bobblehead. When he asked you for money he left you with the impression that nothing less than the fate of democracy was at stake. He was also very good at picking and choosing fights to make listeners believe that not just a radio station out of Albany, NY but the United States itself was under existential threat; and that the way to continue to secure the fruits of liberty was to pony up generously.
I was so impressed by Alan’s technique that I visited the studio during its fall fund drive in 2011 and wrote a column about him in the Wall Street Journal. Alan had unkind things to say about the Journal, on the air, while I sat there taking notes, which was fine with me. I can’t recall what his beef with the publication was. Its right-wing editorial page? Rupert Murdoch, its owner? But at approximately 9:57 on Sunday night, minutes before the story hit the Journal’s website, Alan called and bashfully asked whether he had anything to worry about?
I found the call unusual but I assured him he didn’t. After all, the reason I’d visited the station in the first place was because I’d admired the way he ran the fundraising campaigns. I hadn’t included any of the remarks he’d made about my employer because they seemed irrelevant to the story. Also, I dismissed them as performative. The fund drives were Alan’s contribution to performance art. He called me back a few minutes later, after the piece had dropped and he’d read it, to thank me and say he was only sorry that his mother wasn’t alive.
Even though Alan is a short man — I’d even call him elfin — he left extremely large shoes to fill. And the station’s current crew is doing an impressive job of maintaining that tradition. Not just raising money to keep the station going — if the existential threats of Alan’s time might have been somewhat coaxed they’re very real today with the Trump administration readying to kill all funding to public radio and television — but also by corralling the “lightening in a bottle” phenomenon that distinguishes not just great radio stations but also select publications.
I’m thinking of the New York Observer, the salmon-colored weekly, where I wrote for many years. Readers told me that the newspaper had such a distinct approachable personality they assumed the writers and editors went out for drinks after they put the publication to bed. Listeners feel the same way about Joe Donahue, Ray Graf, Sarah LaDuke, Ian Pickus and the rest of the team. I think Sarah Gilbert, WAMC’s new CEO, is on the right track taking the station on the road. It helps foster that sense of community and it also gives listeners an opportunity to attach the good-looking face of an on-air talent to the voices they recognize so well.
Yet, one aspect of WAMC’s fund drives has always puzzled me. I started listening to the station more than forty years ago when I’d drive upstate on Friday nights and through the weekend until I returned to New York City on Sunday. The station was as much a part of my experience as the twists and turns on the Taconic State Parkway. But weekenders like me got all the benefits of the station without any of the responsibilities for supporting it. The mark of a fund drive’s success was that it would start on a Monday and often be done by Friday leaving weekenders off the the hook.
As I write this mid-week the drive is in full swing. I don’t know whether it will be done by the weekend. But even if not the station lately gives the campaign a break over the weekend and resumes on Monday. It seems to me that if you can afford to rent or own a second home you can afford to give to the station. I’m not suggesting that those of us who descend on the Hudson Valley on Friday nights are deadbeats. We might be eager to contribute to the station but may be only vaguely aware that a fund drive has even occurred.
I also know that the landscape is a lot different than when I first started listening. Drivers are as likely glued to podcasts as they are to terrestrial radio. And if they’re listening to WAMC they may well be doing so through the station’s app as over the air. Which brings me to my point. You can donate to WAMC online any time at WAMC.org. You don’t have to wait for a fund drive.
And you can do so for selfish reasons. Not because it’s the right thing to do. Or not only because democracy and truth are under threat. I realize that looking back over all the years that I’ve been traveling from the city to Columbia County that finding community upstate takes many forms. One of the most important is when you escape New York City’s gravitational pull, crack the window to allow the perfumed scent of nature circulate through the car and switch to WAMC. Only then can you say that your weekend has truly begun.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
