'The Jazz Station' Starts Streaming

88.7 WSIE FM, broadcasting at 50,000 watts from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the only radio station in the St. Louis market and the surrounding region that broadcasts modern American jazz seven days a week. But now listeners around the world can hear their favorite jazz from WSIE through the streaming audio feature on the station’s new website—wsie.com.

The Jazz Station, as it’s known, has been broadcasting jazz full-time since the mid-1980s and recently began offering the audio stream. “We had great help from our Marketing and Communications team and our Information Technology Services department,” said Greg Conroy, station director/general manager. “They worked together to give us a great looking website and also to provide the streaming audio.”

Conroy also announced WSIE-FM has begun broadcasting its own CD collection digitally. Thousands of tunes have been entered into the station’s digital server and are being broadcast through high-end software and a digital board.

“Our staff has been working since August entering our own CD collection into the server and we recently began the new broadcast process,” he said. He explained that many of the station’s public service announcements and underwriting announcements were digitized a few years ago and have been broadcast on-air, but that the station has relied for the past several years on music supplied through a satellite service.
“We also have added several selections by St. Louis area jazz musicians in our effort to further our presence as the jazz station for the Edwardsville-St. Louis region.” Conroy said he welcomes submissions from area jazz professionals for review and possible inclusion in the station’s playlist.

In reference to the satellite feed used by the station for the past several years, Conroy said the service had done a great job of keeping up with trends in modern jazz but that the station’s use of student announcers “now enables us to further our core mission of training students in the art of broadcasting.”

He also explained the radio station’s news operation has used student announcers over the years under the guidance of Tom Dehner, a professional broadcaster with some 30 years of radio and public affairs experience.

In addition to the station’s own music, WSIE continues to broadcast NPR Jazz programming on Sunday mornings—Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz and JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. Also on Sunday mornings, the station features Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis provided by WFMT-FM in Chicago.

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