WKNC Launches New Blog

It must be 2009: the world has gone digital.

WKNC 88.1 FM, N.C. State's student-produced radio station, has launched a blog.

“In an effort to reach out to our online community and encourage interaction with our listeners we have carved out an Internet outpost where WKNC listeners can come to find all of the newest and most up-to-date information about all of our music formats,” Kyle Robb, the station’s general manager, stated in the official press release on January 1st, 2009.

Robb, the program director, and the webmaster are all administrators of the new blog, and their job is to filter comments, approve posts and basically oversee the whole blog.

Robb said ideally this blog is a place for people who listen to WKNC to come together and join a sort of community. He said the main website for WKNC would get a lot of traffic, about 50,000 page views a month, but that people weren’t sticking around on the site for too long. In an attempt to keep people on the site for longer periods of time, the station tried to launch a forum, but there still wasn’t much community-building going on. That lead them to the idea of starting a blog.

The blog is updated regularly, about four times per day just in the first few weeks since launch.  Robb said that they want to “entice people to build a community by giving them regular content, and give people a reason to stick around the site.”

Many of the station’s DJs write for the blog, and Robb encourages anybody on the WKNC staff to write as well. According to the official press release, “The staff actually started posting to the blog in November so there would be plenty of content to welcome new readers, including information on local artists and shows, music news and reviews and station promotions.”

The blog is organized into categories so viewers can browse posts in Local Music, Daytime Rock, Multimedia, Promotions, Weekend Specialty, Underground Hip-hop, Afterhours or Chainsaw Rock. There is something on the blog for every musical taste.

The blog also features podcasts of all the talk shows and interviews on WKNC. WKNC is hoping to collaborate with the Technician’s “88.1 Pick of the Week” album review and have the review read on the air, interspersed with music, Robb said. 

Robb said that the blog is influenced by newraleigh.com, goodnightraleigh.com, indyweek.com and even pitchfork.com.

The new blog has already been featured on both newraleigh.com and newsandobserver.com. Robb said that there has been a lot of support from the local blogging community. The blog has enjoyed off-the-bat success, with 4,391 page views from 1,362 unique visitors since January 1st. 

Visit WKNC’s new blog at http://wknc.org/blog/.