Pulse of the Bay: Episode 1

In the very first episode of Pulse of the Bay, we dive right into what makes 97.7 FM WVCB-LP Ashland so special. This isn’t just another radio station—it’s something created by the community, for the community. Host Fred Clark sits down with Corey Scribner, Tim Pavlish, and Tonia Simeone to chat about how WVCB came to life and what it stands for.

One big takeaway? Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. WVCB is powered entirely by volunteers who care about making this a space for local voices to shine. From forming committees to building the station from the ground up, it’s been a true group effort—and there’s always room for more folks to jump in and get involved.

Another theme that comes through loud and clear is how much we want to celebrate the unique culture, people, and creativity of the Chequamegon Bay area. Whether it’s local music, storytelling, news, or just something fun, WVCB is all about reflecting who we are and sharing the things that matter to our community.

We also talk a lot about how welcoming and accessible this station is. You don’t need radio experience — just a good idea or a willingness to help out. Got a show idea? Want to lend a hand behind the scenes? We’re here for it.

Most importantly, we’re embracing that authentic, sometimes perfectly imperfect vibe that makes community radio so special. It’s about real people, real stories, and creating something meaningful together.

Pulse of the Bay, Episode 1 Transcript

Fred Clark:
Hello and welcome to Pulse of the Bay, the news and public affairs show from 97.7 FM, WVCB-LP, Ashland, Wisconsin. We are the voice of Chequamegon Bay.

WVCB FM is community radio. Our programming, music, news, documentaries and discussions strengthens our sense of place and a connection among communities along the south shore of Lake Superior. I’m Fred Clark. I’m one of your hosts for pulse of the bay.

WVCB intends pulse of the bay to be our flagship program for sharing news events in depth discussions with interesting people of all kinds throughout the South Shore and Chequamegon Bay.

And you’re joining us today on our very first program. I’m excited, and I hope you are too. What better place to start our first show than to feature some of the people who’ve helped found this new low power FM station right here in Ashland.

I’m really feeling fortunate today to be right here in downtown Ashland at 417, B, West Main Street, along with some of the people who have helped make wbcb possible. That’s Corey Scribner, Tonia Simeone, and Tim Pavlich. Corey, Tonia, Tim, welcome to your own radio station. Thanks. Great to be here. Yeah. Thank you, Fred. Appreciate it. Excited to see what comes with this. All right. Well, I am too, and as I said to you guys before we started, I feel like I’m in a job interview here with my supervisors, but hopefully that’ll go okay.

Let’s start by learning about WVCB. You all I know, have been working hard, along with the rest of your team the early stages of standing up a new radio station, and that can’t be easy, but tell us, where are we today, and what are your plans for the station?

Tim Pavlish:
Well, we received a broadcast well, not a license, but a construction permit from the FCC back in February of 2023 since then, we’ve become a non profit organization, a 501(c)3, we’ve formed a board of directors, and we’ve created some by-laws, and we’ve also just got some volunteers to join subcommittees. One of the subcommittees is the fundraising committee, so working on grants and soliciting individual donors, a communications committee that’s working on the website design and social media, and then a programming committee that’s sort of looking at show development and finding hosts, and then a technical committee who’s working on the equipment that’s going to be needed. And then also a finance committee that’s kind of running the finances of the station. And we’re looking for more volunteers. So if you’re interested in helping as a volunteer, reach out to us at our email address, which is volunteer@WVCB.org.

Fred:
Well, sounds like an all hands on deck proposition and lots of room for people with different skills and different talents. We’ll talk more about that through the show. I’d love to know what was the inspiration for a new radio station today? Did one of you lose a bet in a bar, or were you on the top of a mountain and had an epiphany that just came to you? Tell us the story of how this thing got started.

Tonia Simeone:
Well, Ashland used to have a community radio station, you might remember, and it was well loved and listened to. Some of us are carryovers from that old station, and I think some of us just saw the need for a platform like this and wanted to be part of its genesis.

There’s so much local talent here, and so many cool things going on all the time, and I think there’s also a strong sense of unity and pride in the communities of the Chequamegon Bay, but we have lacked a media outlet that you know brings all of that together and offers us a way to just express our cultural identity. So we’re hoping WVCB can be that conduit for connection and a source for information and entertainment that just feels uniquely us, by us and for us.

Fred:
That’s fantastic. And certainly the newspaper here in Ashland is an important resource for people, but so many other ways for people to get information to compliment that, and it sounds like this station will be just a really important resource for people coming going forward. So you’re all volunteers. I should say we all are volunteers. And of course, you all have day jobs.

I wonder if you would just each like to tell us a bit about yourself and. And how you came to be involved? Tonia?

Tonia:
I’ve lived in Washburn for 15 years, and I have two kids in the Washburn public school. I went to college for technical communications, so media and film. I worked in news television out of college, and I did some radio drama as a kid at the radio station where I grew up. So I also grew up in a house where WPR and WOJB were just always on in the kitchen. So I think radio has had a big role in how I developed as a thinking, feeling human.

And I think what excites me about WVCB is the potential for community strengthening and the creativity it will hopefully facilitate. I mean, I just can’t wait to see what the community comes up with for programming. And I think right now, especially our area, could really use a news source that is reliable and local and ethical. And I was also just a fan of Jeremy Oswald’s Deep Cuts music show back when that was on the old station, so I’m just really glad he’s bringing that back on WVCB.

Fred:
Fantastic, yeah! Tim?

Tim:
We’ve lived in Ashland for 15 years. I don’t have any radio background at all. I’ve just always been a listener of community radio, and I just love it so much. There was a group of us that was kind of trying to revive WRNC, the Northland college radio station back in the day, but that permit was surrendered to the FCC. So we were waiting for a new filing window from the FCC to open up. Turns out, in hindsight, we realized it only opens up every 10 years.

So as we waited for years for a window to open up, we finally saw it in I think it was November of 2023 and the group of us that was working on the WR and C resurrection sort of said, are we going to do this? And if we don’t do it, we can’t do it for 10 more years, so we should probably do it. And so we said, Yeah, let’s do it.

And that was kind of how we got involved with it. The excitement that I have for it is I just love community radio in part because everyone’s trying to be professional, but it’s really unpolished, but that just is what makes it so authentic and real, and that’s what I really love about community radio.

Fred:
Oh, fantastic. Corey?

Corey:
My family was born in Ashland, and I was born in Superior, and it took me about 40 years to get back here. So I finally moved back here, and we were having our house painted, and I happened to see a flyer for house painting on the Madeleine ferry. We hired the house painter, I started talking with him about music, and it turned out to be one of our committee members, Dane, and he said, “there’s this other project (the WVCB radio station) I think you’d be interested in”.

I had been involved in radio and music here and there for 20 years, off and on, very amateurish, but hey, you know, it was fun. And I ran into Tim and Elizabeth, who are also on our committees, at the community fair that we had here in Ashland, started talking and volunteered for the station.

I love tinkering on technical side of things, and we needed that. So I jumped in. And now here we are sitting around a table recording our first show. And this is pretty exciting.

Fred:
Wow. A different pathway to be at this table with all three of you. And I’ll just say that I have a total of about, I think, right now, about eight minutes of experience but I’m learning quickly.

But likewise, it’s been really fun to be able to plug into this just emerging effort. So, Tim, you mentioned the opportunity for a new license for a radio station. Tell us about low power community radio. What does it mean? How is it different than other radio stations we might be familiar with?

Tim:
It’s non commercial, it’s educational. That’s very broad definition of that through the FCC. So we have to be educational in some way, shape or form. But that can be mean many things.

Low power is that, you know, it’s not a super strong signal. It probably will reach Washburn, and just outside of Washburn, maybe further. But we are going to stream online, so you’ll be able to tune in anywhere in the world to listen to what’s happening in the Chequamegon Bay and South Shore regions of Lake Superior.

Fred:
A lot of us are familiar, of course, with Public Radio, and there are independent public radio stations around. But community radio is different, right? It’s fully self funded, self supported.

Tim:
Yep, self funded, self supported. I think one of the main differences is that a community radio station just has total freedom to be what the community wants it to be, and what the volunteers that work at the station want it to be. You don’t have an umbrella organization from some other city that’s telling you what kind of programming you have to do or what kind of music you have to play.

So you have grassroots freedom to do what you want for the community and make it kind of the best thing that it can be for the community that it’s in. I think that’s one of the benefits of community radio. You can really make it for the people in the region that it’s in, and really a product of the energy and the talent and the community effort that goes into it.

Fred:
Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you who are anywhere near the South Shore. You may occasionally listen to WTIP which is, I believe, 90.7 FM broadcasting out of Grand Marais, another low power station, and that signal carries all the way across the lake, and it’s a good station to listen to for a model. But I’m hoping one of my future visits to Grand Marais, I’ll be able to pick up WVCB going the other direction.

So tell us about the programming. What are the plans for, what this station’s actually going to carry?

Corey:
Definitely educational-related content, news-related content. That’s the focus and what we hope to have the most of. But then we’ll have music, of course, because there’s lots of people that love lots of different kinds of music, and we have several people that were at the old station that hosted shows.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that there are a couple other people that may be filled in on shows, you know, from maybe the Washburn area that have a record store. I’m just doing a plug in case he’s listening. We would love for him to do a show as well. And, yeah, we’ll do those kind of things. And then what people want in the community, if you have an idea, write to us at shows@WVCB.org and let us know what you’re interested in, what you want to share with the community. Because we can bring that to life on the radio through audio. Let’s do it.

Fred:
So if I had a particular interest, and say, Gregorian, chance I could come to you and you can help me create a show about that?

Corey:
We might have to work on our mic techniques and so forth with those low frequencies, but yeah, we could do it.

Fred:
Okay, excellent, excellent. Tell us about plans for streaming and then for broadcasting. I presume that the station will be streaming first.

Corey:
Yes, we’re going to go for streaming first, because with with the FCC regulations and the actual broadcast antenna, it requires, just that. It requires a fixed antenna somewhere, and we have to report that to the federal government. This is where it stands on this latitude and longitude.

So until we get that physical location of the antenna, we’ll be streaming. We’ll have it on WVCB.org, we’ll have an app that you can download. You can listen to it on things like TuneIn Radio, the app, that’s kind of a ubiquitous radio streaming app.

So just like what I do when I’m driving between here and Superior, and put it on in the car and stream it and listen all the way there.

Fred:
Fantastic, yeah.

Tim:
And there are some rules that the FCC has for like, minimum amount of broadcasting that needs to be done. So we’re kind of thinking we’ll stream first, because we don’t have to fill that required time.

When we do go live on air, we’ll have to do at least five hours a day, six days a week, for at least 36 hours a week. So as we build up towards that, we’ll stream and kind of add programming to our web stream. And then once we kind of have that capacity for the programming that we need to have to be on the on the broadcast, then we’ll start broadcasting as well. And we need to build out a studio and have a physical place to actually broadcast from.

Corey:
And another thing is, you we’re all new to this too. So if anybody feels like maybe it’s intimidating to do a show, let’s have a chat, because we’re all in the same boat. We’re gonna learn together and make great stuff together here.

Fred:
That’s what community radio is about, right? Yeah, so, so don’t worry about your don’t worry about it being a little rough around the edges, because we’re all here to learn exactly. Yeah, cool.

And even before streaming, the website’s live today and you’ve got content on the website, I know you’ve got an events page. And will there be sort of pre-streaming content available on the website?

Corey:
Yeah, just this show, for instance, the Pulse of the Bay show will be on the website as a click to play — so there will be a play button, we’ll have some information about the show and more information as we develop new shows.

And we do have the events calendar, for events all around the region here. People can actually submit those to us as well.

Fred:
Okay, so check back on the website regularly and begin looking for on demand content.

Corey:
Yep. And you can subscribe to the calendar specifically, or you can fill out the form and get newsletter that we have so you can find out more information as soon as we put it up.

Fred:
Excellent. So here it is. We are March 13, and what’s coming up in the near future, any events or activities for the station here in the next few weeks?

Corey:
We’ve got the Honest Dog event on the 28th Friday, 6pm to 8pm.

Tonia:
Yeah, DJ JFRO, who is Jeremy Oswald from the Deep Cuts radio show. He’s going to be spinning records from his personal collection in the back room at Honest Dog Books in Bayfield, and they have their wine bar open. It’s great vibes. It’s a good time.

We’re raising money for the radio station and just meeting people who might want to be volunteers and just hanging out together.

Fred:
And if you haven’t been in the in the back space at Honest Dog Books, it’s it’s like being in your grandparents old living room surrounded by books and maps, and it’s just a wonderful community space. Yeah, excellent. And again, WVCB is all run by volunteers and and I think that’s really the signature of community radio. So Tonia, how can people who have an interest in getting more involved, what can they do? What kind of activities are open for people, and how do they learn about it?

Tonia:
Well, like we said, we’re looking for volunteers. So if you feel like you have a special skill to contribute, or if you’re just interested in radio in general, get in contact with us by sending an email to info@WVCB.org.

And you can donate on our website. You can suggest a show to us. You can interact with our social media. That’s really helpful for getting the word out, and just tell your friends and family about it, too.

We want to hear from you, your show ideas, what your hopes are for the station, what kind of music you like, because for this station to be a reflection of you. We need to hear from you.

Fred:
And if I was the person in your shoes being responsible for finding that six hours a day of programming, I’d be saying, raise your hand. Tell us what you’re interested in.

Corey:
I may have convinced my father to read public domain books, but he’s good at it, so it might actually become a regular thing.

Tonia:
We’ve had a lot of cool show ideas suggested to us already, and we’re just waiting for folks to step up and say, I want to host that. So local sports broadcasting, Ojibwe, story telling, youth radio drama. There’s no end to amazing ideas. So if that sparks something in you, please reach out to us.

Tim:
Yep, we had a donor reach out with like a box of old time radio sound effects equipment, and he really wants to give this to the radio station. So if somebody wants to host radio drama, using that sound effects gear be super cool.

Fred:
Very nice. So we could recreate a Western with the horses. Wonderful!

So inspiring. I’m glad to be part of it. And again, you can contact the team at info@WVCB.org or check out the website WVCB.org.

I’ve already heard people in the community say that if you want to learn what’s going on, they’ve got the best events page around already.

Thank you all so much. And for our listeners, thank you for being with us on our first episode of pulse of the bay, and we’ll be back for more. So stay tuned and let’s all just remember to take care of our community, take care of our lands and waters around us, and take care of each other. Thank you.