When Andy Bienstock first went to work in a radio station at the Johns Hopkins University in 1980, the tiny, three-room studio was in a dormitory basement, next to the laundry room and beneath a snack shop. The hum of the dryers next door was muffled by a wall of egg cartons -- rudimentary but effective sound-proofing.
The 10-watt station, then known as WJHU, was far from being a radio powerhouse. "On a good day we could reach Northern Parkway," Bienstock recalled. "There was nothing glamorous about it, but it was more fun than you can imagine."
Bienstock was a freshman at Hopkins then, with his own jazz show. A quarter of a century later, he still has the jazz show, but the station has grown in leaps and bounds around him.
Known as WYPR, the call letters it assumed in 2002 under new ownership, the 10,000-watt FM station reaches about 174,000 people a week across several Maryland counties, and can be heard in parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
Bienstock now is the station's program director, responsible for ushering in new shows designed to make WYPR what he calls "Maryland's public radio station." It's an ambitious goal that drives everything the station does, from buying a new transmitter to hiring a former ABC News correspondent, Sheilah Kast, to present a Maryland-centered morning talk show that is scheduled to begin next month.
But as they prepare for today's start of a weeklong fund drive, one of three the station holds every year, WYPR managers are itching for a burst of growth in their paid membership of about 13,000, a small number relative to the size of the station's audience. They may not get it.
"That's quite the case in public radio," Bienstock said. "We put a high-quality product out there for free and then ask people to support it. It's wonderful when they do."
Whether as members or not, listeners over the last four years have heard an increasing number of new programs produced in-house, including the weekly magazine show The Signal and several four-minute programs -- Radio Kitchen, Skywatch and Digital Cafe among them -- that are used as "drop-ins" during broadcasts of National Public Radio's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Those local slots are filled also by news stories produced by WYPR's own news department, which is staffed by a quartet of former Sun reporters.
