Let's get it started

[image provided by (jennY) on flickr through a Creative Commons licence]

Alright folks, it's go time. As of yesterday, the WALT Spring 2007 season has officially commenced. Once again, we have a great line-up. We have new DJs who will be doing their first shows this week. We also have some veterans, myself included, who will be doing their last "first" show. We are still adding some shows on, so I'll wait to report on numbers of shows and DJs for a week or so.

The schedule - along with the streaming and podcasts - should be available within a couple of days. Hold tight until then.

If you are interested in writing for this blog, please shoot me an email (jrtaylor --a-t-- davidson --d-o-t-- edu). We'd like to have music reviews, concert reviews, news from the music industry, etc.

A New Year for WALT... and its blog

Happy New Year to WALT DJs, our listeners, and members of the entire Davidson community. I hope everyone is enjoying the beginning of 2007. There has been a lot of sadness with the departure of people we knew and people we admired: Gerald Ford, James Brown, and most recently and most sadly, Jay Chitty, a senior at Davidson College who died in a plane crash in Charlotte. Hopefully the year will only improve after these unfortunate losses to our communities and to our country.

On that note, I wanted to go ahead and announce on behalf of the WALT Eboard that Wes Cobb '07 is our new Station Manager. Under his semester of leadership, we will press forward with our fourth annual Battle of the Band, continue to improve and expand programming, and boost our listenership and community involvement. Taylor Ansley, who will be going into emeritus mode as he finishes his honors thesis in Political Science, has served the station well and we are all thankful for his dedication to WALT, its DJs, and its listeners.

Having stepped down as Program Director, I will be looking after the blog during my final semester at Davidson. With the help of our technical director Owen Bussey, we have successfully switched to the updated version of Blogger. Over the next week or two, I will be working with the layout of the blog to make it more interactive and hopefully a little more user friendly. Please bear with me while I play around with the new layout and features.

My goal for this space in the spring of 2007 is to turn it into a place where like-minded music-lovers can gather to share stories, links, videos, music, comments, and viewpoints. We had a great start in the fall, from off-the-wall clips on YouTube to album reviews to concert schedules. I think the next step is to get more people involved in sharing these and other ideas with us.

So, on that note, drop me an email [jrtaylor (at) davidson (dot) edu] if you care to become a contributor to the WALT blog. In the meantime, enjoy the first few weeks of 2007, and we'll see you soon when WALT gets back on the air later this month!