Talk:WRVU

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"Licensed to Nashville, Tennessee, United States"[edit]

How exactly is a station that is not on the air, and hence not licensed, "licensed to Nashville"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.160.130.28 (talk) 01:07, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on what the "station" is, because the wording of this article is a mess, and the split between the WRVU and WFCL articles complicate what is present and what is the past. Let's see if I can untangle this:
  1. The actual history: There was a Vanderbilt-associated college radio station branded as "WVU", but with no official government callsign, license, or formalities, because it was a low-power carrier current service. In the 1970s, the FCC issued a license for a station on 91.1 MHz, with city of license of Nashville and callsign WRVU, to Vanderbilt Student Communications, who used the callsign as the brand name for its college station programming. In 2011, VSC let Nashville Public Radio (NPR) manage the 91.1 station for a new "91classical" service, changed the legal callsign to WFCL, and moved the "WRVU" programming to a subchannel of NPR's 90.3 WPLN-FM. In 2014, VSC sold 91.1 outright to NPR, and moved the "WRVU" programming to Internet streaming only. So as far as the government is concerned, 91.1 at Nashville has never shut down or been replaced since the 1970s: It was just sold in 2014 and continues today.
  2. Wikipedia split: Usually a "station" article on Wikipedia follows the licensed station, but in a few cases, the Wikipedia article follows the brand/programming from station to station. This article appears to be an attempt to follow the programming: That is, it's about the "Vanderbilt student" service that was on carrier current, then on 91.1 from 1970s to 2011, then on 90.3-HD3 from 2011 to 2014, then on the Internet at https://wrvu.org/ since. Then there's a second article, WFCL, that follows the "91classical" service starting in 2011.
  3. It appears that this WRVU article has been modified over years with no consideration for continuity, with present-tense verbs still used both for things that are long past and for things that are current.
So, in short: The 91.1 station is still licensed for Nashville, but the Vanderbilt college radio service that uses the name "WRVU" has moved to Internet-only and is no longer attached to any government license, and therefore no official frequency, callsign, or city of license. So whether it is now "licensed to Nashville" depends on whether you consider "it" to be the 91.1 license (which has a city of license) or to be the Vanderbilt college radio service (for which "city of license" is not really a thing after 2014). --Closeapple (talk) 03:24, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've now re-arranged the article and hopefully rewritten any material with present-tense verbs for past information. It still needs references for a whole lot of stuff. --Closeapple (talk) 07:33, 10 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]