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PDF: entrepreneurship-at-cornell-2007-program.pdf

Monday, September 10, 2007

Slope Radio Heads Uphill

Source: http://cornell-eclips.blogspot.com/2007/09/slope-radio-heads-uphill.html

PDF: cornell-universitys-eclips_-slope-radio-heads-uphill.pdf

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Slope Radio, Cornell’s online radio station that has become an established campus presence after one semester of operation, plans to expand into new offices and television broadcasting in 2007.

The concept for Slope Radio sprang from an experiment in the fall of 2005 by its three creators, Yaw Joseph Etse ‘08, Alex Zahn ‘07 and Jeff Bookman ‘07, who began an online broadcast from their fraternity house.

Lindsay France/University Photography

Yaw Etse ‘08, right, and James Norton ‘08 banter about myspace.com and other hot topics on the radio program “Open Mic with Joey & Jimmy,” which airs live on sloperadio.com Friday nights from 6 to 8 during the semester. Copyright © Cornell University

“We had some friends abroad who heard it and said we could do something more legitimate with it,” said Etse, the organization’s president and information technology director. Those friends have since brought “The Gong Show,” a variety program on the London School of Economics’ student radio station, to Slope Radio.

Over the summer, Etse met with Tracy Vosburgh, the university’s director of multimedia development and production, who became the group’s adviser. She referred him to Michael Tolomeo of Cornell Information Technologies, who helped with logistics and with using CIT’s multimedia server for the broadcast.

Slope Radio began broadcasting over the summer and officially launched Sept. 4. The service broadcasts online at http://SlopeRadio.com 24 hours a day, with a variety of live shows offered between 4 p.m. and 2 a.m. from a studio in Appel Commons. The rest of the day, an automated computer program plays music including hip-hop, reggae and indie rock.

“If you tune in, you’re going to hear anything from country to rap, and people seem to have been pretty receptive of that, overall,” Zahn said. “In essence, it’s good that we have no specialization.”

The live programming includes music, news, comedy, interviews with performers coming to Ithaca, and talk shows on topics from sports to sex. Zahn’s show, “Pit Stop,” Wednesdays from 6 to 8 p.m., explores music, musicians and trends, and provides historical context.

“One day we did a show on bands that had evolved thanks to Myspace, which is a huge scene in itself,” he said.

Students are always dropping by. During the “Open Mic” show on Fridays, “we usually do a top 10 list and talk about recent events and have freshmen come in and talk,” Etse said. “It’s intended to be comical.”

All 23 shows are archived and available as podcasts on the Slope Radio site, which has around 1,000 listeners a day, Zahn said. Besides entertainment, the service provides practical training for broadcasters. (WVBR-FM, owned by the nonprofit Cornell Radio Guild, is managed by students but operates independently of the university.)

“A lot of students feel there aren’t enough opportunities to practice the production side of broadcasting,” Etse said. “We’re working with Geri Gay [chair of the Department of Communication] to set up some kind of lab, hopefully for credit.”

The student activities fee and some donations have helped with equipment and operating costs. “It’s been a problem getting advertising and funding because we’re new,” Zahn said. “We don’t need a lot, but it would be nice to have better microphones and sound quality. Right now we’re making do.”

Slope Radio’s student officers will be working during the winter break on revamping programming and on steps to establish a channel on CUTV.

“We’ve talked about getting our own channel that has Cornell news and Cornell events,” said Zahn, who has co-hosted “Campus Insights” on Ithaca’s public access station. “We could even maybe move to satellite [radio] if we get a big enough following the next few years.”

Participation in Slope Radio is open to anyone in the Cornell community, and the station is taking proposals for new shows and applications for officers, producers and DJs; for information see http://sloperadio.com/cgi/wp/community.php.

“It’s a lot of work to get it running,” Zahn said. “We want to have shows that are politically driven or news-driven. We would like to provide another venue besides the Daily Sun to know what’s going on.”

Slope Radio will move its operations to 107 Willard Straight Hall next semester, over spring break.

“Looking down the road, we really feel like Slope Radio is a service, and a way that students can express their opinions,” Etse said. “Next semester, we’re really focusing on getting more student groups to have their own shows.” The Whistling Shrimp improvisational comedy group has already approached them to do a show, he said.

Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec06/SlopeRadio.dea.html

PDF: slope-radio-looks-to-expand.pdf

Slope Radio, Cornell’s online radio station that has become an established campus presence after one semester of operation, plans to expand into new offices and television broadcasting in 2007.

The concept for Slope Radio sprang from an experiment in the fall of 2005 by its three creators, Yaw Joseph Etse ‘08, Alex Zahn ‘07 and Jeff Bookman ‘07, who began an online broadcast from their fraternity house.

Lindsay France/University Photography

Yaw Etse ‘08, right, and James Norton ‘08 banter about myspace.com and other hot topics on the radio program “Open Mic with Joey & Jimmy,” which airs live on sloperadio.com Friday nights from 6 to 8 during the semester. Copyright © Cornell University

“We had some friends abroad who heard it and said we could do something more legitimate with it,” said Etse, the organization’s president and information technology director. Those friends have since brought “The Gong Show,” a variety program on the London School of Economics’ student radio station, to Slope Radio.

Over the summer, Etse met with Tracy Vosburgh, the university’s director of multimedia development and production, who became the group’s adviser. She referred him to Michael Tolomeo of Cornell Information Technologies, who helped with logistics and with using CIT’s multimedia server for the broadcast.

Slope Radio began broadcasting over the summer and officially launched Sept. 4. The service broadcasts online at http://SlopeRadio.com 24 hours a day, with a variety of live shows offered between 4 p.m. and 2 a.m. from a studio in Appel Commons. The rest of the day, an automated computer program plays music including hip-hop, reggae and indie rock.

“If you tune in, you’re going to hear anything from country to rap, and people seem to have been pretty receptive of that, overall,” Zahn said. “In essence, it’s good that we have no specialization.”

The live programming includes music, news, comedy, interviews with performers coming to Ithaca, and talk shows on topics from sports to sex. Zahn’s show, “Pit Stop,” Wednesdays from 6 to 8 p.m., explores music, musicians and trends, and provides historical context.

“One day we did a show on bands that had evolved thanks to Myspace, which is a huge scene in itself,” he said.

Students are always dropping by. During the “Open Mic” show on Fridays, “we usually do a top 10 list and talk about recent events and have freshmen come in and talk,” Etse said. “It’s intended to be comical.”

All 23 shows are archived and available as podcasts on the Slope Radio site, which has around 1,000 listeners a day, Zahn said. Besides entertainment, the service provides practical training for broadcasters. (WVBR-FM, owned by the nonprofit Cornell Radio Guild, is managed by students but operates independently of the university.)

“A lot of students feel there aren’t enough opportunities to practice the production side of broadcasting,” Etse said. “We’re working with Geri Gay [chair of the Department of Communication] to set up some kind of lab, hopefully for credit.”

The student activities fee and some donations have helped with equipment and operating costs. “It’s been a problem getting advertising and funding because we’re new,” Zahn said. “We don’t need a lot, but it would be nice to have better microphones and sound quality. Right now we’re making do.”

Slope Radio’s student officers will be working during the winter break on revamping programming and on steps to establish a channel on CUTV.

“We’ve talked about getting our own channel that has Cornell news and Cornell events,” said Zahn, who has co-hosted “Campus Insights” on Ithaca’s public access station. “We could even maybe move to satellite [radio] if we get a big enough following the next few years.”

Participation in Slope Radio is open to anyone in the Cornell community, and the station is taking proposals for new shows and applications for officers, producers and DJs; for information see http://sloperadio.com/cgi/wp/community.php.

“It’s a lot of work to get it running,” Zahn said. “We want to have shows that are politically driven or news-driven. We would like to provide another venue besides the Daily Sun to know what’s going on.”

Slope Radio will move its operations to 107 Willard Straight Hall next semester, over spring break.

“Looking down the road, we really feel like Slope Radio is a service, and a way that students can express their opinions,” Etse said. “Next semester, we’re really focusing on getting more student groups to have their own shows.” The Whistling Shrimp improvisational comedy group has already approached them to do a show, he said.

Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec06/SlopeRadio.dea.html

PDF: slope-radio-looks-to-expand.pdf

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source: http://eclips.cornell.edu/company.do?id=289&clipID=8451&tab=TabClipPage

Transcript

Zahn02_programming

Well initially we were just basically thinking okay, well we’re the creators, so we’ll have our own shows, and that happened but at the same time even with that we realized some of us were better doing different things than having our own show and then that went from there and we said, well you know what, we can’t just have our own shows, and we can’t just have our friends involved, which started out with because that was the easiest, you know you tap your resources, oh you know we’re going to start this radio station, want to have a show and all your friends are involved but that creates a problem because you have a limited amount of people who want to listen. So when we went through programming we had this gigantic and completely unorganized search for people who wanted to be DJs. We got a ton of e-mails sent in with resumes of why they wanted to be a DJ, what interested them in the station and it was really tough to go through all that and find the differences between them. But as we went through each resume and we looked at each person we sort of saw, you know, this person would fit well here, this person would fit well here and when we had similar shows that sort of sounded the same we would e-mail these people and be like, well we have a show like this that’s sort of like yours, what can you make different about your show so that it stands out from the other one. We made sure when we were going through the programming that each show was really different somewhat and so it started off like we were just saying, you know, let our friends be involved, let them talk about whatever but then we thought about the integrity of the station and how good would the station be if you let people just go on and their pitch to you is, oh I’m going to have a show where me and my friends just talk ’cause we’re like really funny, so that’s what we’re going to do. And you know, that doesn’t really work out ’cause then you’ll have dead air where people are talking about nothing and they have nothing to say and it’s just bad. So initially we kind of underestimated the effort we would have to take to do programing and at this point, now, once we’ve sort of diversified and made sure that when everybody applies, they look at our schedule that we currently have and they make sure that their show isn’t in any way, shape or form similar to anything that’s already on there and with that we come up with a gigantic array of just different shows that are … each unique completely from the other ones. We’ve got shows ranging from like a new type of music which I haven’t even heard of and I’m huge into music called anti-folk and we had shows talking about sports and reggae and rap and rock and classic rock and whatever. Everything’s on there, we just had to make sure that whenever a DJ came, their idea was different from somebody else’s. So through that interview process we just basically would make sure that that happened.

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source: e-clips - http://eclips.cornell.edu/company.do?id=289&clipID=8450&tab=TabClipPage

Transcript

Zahn01_slopeRadioOrigins

Okay well it’s basically a conglomeration of three different ideas. The three founders of SlopeRadio, one of them is a junior, his name is Yaw Etse, one of them is my friend who’s a senior Jeff Bookman and then there’s me. When we came up with the idea, we were all in different parts of the world. I was in Australia abroad, my friend Jeff was in London abroad for a year and Yaw was here at Cornell, and we all have different backgrounds, which sort of came together to create the idea. Yaw is amazing at creating websites and just computer design, internet everything; he’s great with that. His major is related to just computer science, so that’s like what he’s just great at. Jeff was at the University of… the London School of Economics in London and he was doing a radio show up there called the Gong Show in their college internet radio station. And I was in Australia and I had just gone abroad and I left the TV show at Cornell called Campus Insights, the semester before and I started hosting that as a sophomore when I won a… sort of like an American Idol type search for like the anchor even though nobody watches the show, I won this contest to be the anchor and I became the anchor of that and it was so much fun, we got all my friends to come on, we had… it was sort of like the daily show, we have like… it was like fake interviews and news relating to Cornell but we made like a funny touch on it, and coincidentally enough, the girl who I anchored it with is now working as a production assistant, soon to be an anchor for Bloomberg TV. So she’s doing well, she graduated two years ago. So yeah we had the TV side with me, Yaw was really amazing at internet and Jeff was already doing a radio show and we were just thinking, you know, what’s like… you know, what’s something fun that we’ve done at Cornell over the years and when we were all together before everybody split up and went their separate ways for abroad, Yaw had a little station in our frat house where he just like went on like Friday nights, have everybody come in and you can broadcast in the internet, so easy these days, that he would just have people come in and just talk about like going out, what they’re going to do tonight and like you could actually hear it from anywhere. So he’d have his friends listening and it was just a really tiny thing and we were just thinking why isn’t the communications aspect of like… what students really want to do at Cornell, that they can easily do at Syracuse or at Ithaca, why isn’t that here. Like a school like Cornell, why doesn’t it have the … why aren’t the resources there basically to be on the radio or to be on TV easier, to do stuff that a lot of people want to do at different schools and college radio is such a big part I think of a lot of colleges that why isn’t that here. I mean we were just thinking about this and we just threw out some ideas and talked on AIM and we were just like, well why don’t we just make that happen, how hard would it be to make that happen.And we thought about it and we said, well you know, one of our biggest challenges might be the fact that WVBR exists and WVBR, you know was founded by Cornell students but at this point it’s run off Cornell’s campus and it’s sort of gone into it’s own thing by being run by people from the Ithaca community and it gives Cornell students a chance to be a part of something but at the same time the freedom of expression, the freedom to have your own radio show, the freedom to basically do what most colleges do with college radio isn’t there. You can get a lot of I guess, chances to work and see, like how you run a production studio but we’ll give you that too with what we’ve created and at the same time you can have your own show, and that’s what … we were wondering about. We’re like why isn’t this here. So that basically is the … that’s the idea of how it came about like, why isn’t something that we find so relevant not on campus and since I was already on the TV show and Yaw was great at making websites and Jeff had mastered this… you know, college radio format, why don’t we bring all those ideas together and make it happen on a wider scale once we all get back to school. So that’s basically the idea came about.

Source: http://aem.cornell.edu/undergrad_news/index.htm

PDF: aem-undergraduate-alumni-update.pdf

BusinessWeek, in addition to the release of its first-ever rankings of undergraduate business programs last spring, has created a web site aimed at helping undergraduate students sort through their b-school choices. Drawing attention to AEM’s Undergraduate Business Program are recent stories featuring students Mark Zimmerman ’08 and Alex Zahn ’07. Mark’s unusual marketing assignment during his summer internship at Sinek Partners—to help a homeless person in New York City increase her revenue by creating more effective signage—was showcased in “Selling Sympathy.” And Cornell’s new student-run radio station, SlopeRadio, co-founded by Alex and two other Cornell students, was featured in “Good Morning, Ithaca.” (Be sure to tune in to this innovative new Internet radio station!)

Faculty and staff features on BusinessWeek online include a profile of Rich Curtis, senior lecturer of AEM 324: Finance, in the “My Favorite Prof” section. Curtis earned this distinction based on our students’ responses to last year’s BusinessWeek rankings survey. Interviews with Amy Benedict-Augustine, director of CALS Career Development, and Ann LaFave, director of CALS Admissions, are featured in “Cornell’s Fresh Take on Career Counseling” and “Cornell’s Deep Roots.”

AEM also got a nod in Forbes when it featured Seth Flowerman’s company, Career Explorations, in “The New Business of College: Dorm Room Titans.” Seth, a junior in AEM, founded his company when he was only 16. Career Explorations operates a summer program for high school students that brings them to Manhattan or Boston for an internship.

Source: http://aem.cornell.edu/undergrad_news/index.htm

PDF: aem-undergraduate-alumni-update.pdf

BusinessWeek, in addition to the release of its first-ever rankings of undergraduate business programs last spring, has created a web site aimed at helping undergraduate students sort through their b-school choices. Drawing attention to AEM’s Undergraduate Business Program are recent stories featuring students Mark Zimmerman ’08 and Alex Zahn ’07. Mark’s unusual marketing assignment during his summer internship at Sinek Partners—to help a homeless person in New York City increase her revenue by creating more effective signage—was showcased in “Selling Sympathy.” And Cornell’s new student-run radio station, SlopeRadio, co-founded by Alex and two other Cornell students, was featured in “Good Morning, Ithaca.” (Be sure to tune in to this innovative new Internet radio station!)

Faculty and staff features on BusinessWeek online include a profile of Rich Curtis, senior lecturer of AEM 324: Finance, in the “My Favorite Prof” section. Curtis earned this distinction based on our students’ responses to last year’s BusinessWeek rankings survey. Interviews with Amy Benedict-Augustine, director of CALS Career Development, and Ann LaFave, director of CALS Admissions, are featured in “Cornell’s Fresh Take on Career Counseling” and “Cornell’s Deep Roots.”

AEM also got a nod in Forbes when it featured Seth Flowerman’s company, Career Explorations, in “The New Business of College: Dorm Room Titans.” Seth, a junior in AEM, founded his company when he was only 16. Career Explorations operates a summer program for high school students that brings them to Manhattan or Boston for an internship.