Ideastream agreement to program Cleveland State’s WCSB spurs pushback from students, community members
Mark Oprea / Cleveland Scene
Students and community members protest outside of the City Club in Cleveland, an Ideastream partner.
A decision to replace eclectic programming on Cleveland State University’s WCSB with a jazz format from Ideastream Public Media has ignited backlash from students and community members, who say the move abruptly ended the radio station’s decades-long commitment to reaching underserved audiences.
Former WCSB staff, students and local listeners have held rallies, canvassed outside Cleveland venues and created a petition against the change that has collected over 3,000 signatures. Their efforts have caught the local media’s attention and rallied support from the Cleveland city council.
“They might silence us on the airwaves, but that doesn’t mean we’re silent,” said Alison Bomgardner, a CSU senior who had served as WCSB’s GM since 2024. “We’re definitely going to lift our voices as one communal group to keep pushing forward.”
Meanwhile, executives at Ideastream and CSU say they view the partnership as an opportunity for hands-on student career development. As part of the agreement, Ideastream and the university will offer internships in journalism, radio and TV production, marketing and graphic design. Ideastream CEO Kevin Martin said the internships will furnish skills that go beyond “the insulated bubble of a campus.”
“What we can offer is career development,” Martin said. “I know there’s been talk of Ideastream being complicit in silencing [students’] voices, but what I would say is that we offer students the ability to learn professional voices.”
‘Laboratory of the cool’
In the nearly 50 years since WCSB signed on in 1976, it has become what Bomgardner calls “the laboratory of the cool.” With an effective radiated power of 630 watts covering the greater Cleveland area, WCSB aired 98 weekly programs hosted by students, alumni and community volunteers before the format change. Shows featured a diverse array of genres, including rock, hip-hop, jazz, blues, punk music and talk programs.
Lawrence Daniel Caswell, a former WCSB GM who worked at Ideastream for 11 years, said the mix of student and community programs was integral in the station’s mission to “serve Northeast Ohio with music and programming that they could not otherwise get on the radio.”
“Even though we were a student organization, we utilized it in order to achieve that mission,” Caswell said. “We really saw folks in the community who could provide programming to communities who did not have programming provided to them.”
Caswell said community members in Northeast Ohio have long cherished the station’s variety and fresh perspectives. Reflecting on their own experience, Caswell added that WCSB was instrumental in introducing them to new experiences as a child, long before they ever got involved with the station.
“It really cracked my head open,” Caswell said. “Listening to punk, dancehall, the late-night talk shows … and the Arabic programs, all these shows that were like windows into greater worlds. … I think that’s what WCSB has always been for folks, a window.”
Bomgardner, who hosted a freeform show called Squirm, said the station gave CSU students a platform to express themselves while creating a vibrant and inclusive radio community. The station had 26 official student staff for the fall 2025 semester and was on track to have 40 total by the end of its training period, she said.
Bomgardner said the partnership with Ideastream neglects what made the station unique to students and the community.
“Our experimentation, our history of being the boundary pushers, is what made WCSB’s legacy so great,” Bomgardner said. “That’s why WCSB has been around for 50 years, because there’s a community of people that want to continually do better in this community and for our underground weirdo scene that we have in Northeast Ohio and beyond.”
In an opinion piece for Cleveland.com, columnist Leslie Kouba highlighted the value student voices brought to Northeast Ohio.
“WCSB provided cultural programming to its Cleveland area audience,” Kouba wrote. “The student voices represented a variety of perspectives on news events. It was a voice for the students and the community. And now it’s dead.”
‘This doesn’t usually happen’
Ideastream had been seeking a terrestrial signal for JazzNEO, Northeast Ohio’s only full-time jazz programming stream, since its launch in February 2024. Initially available online and as an HD2 simulcast on Ideastream’s WCLV, the goal was ultimately to broadcast on a primary FM signal for broader access, Martin said.
Martin and CSU President Laura Bloomberg began discussing the future of WCSB in February when they met to explore ways to strengthen Ideastream’s relationship with the university. Martin said the idea to put JazzNEO on WCSB formed after Bloomberg expressed a desire to tailor the station for student career development.
“She happened to mention the radio station they have, which she didn’t believe most students were even aware of. … It was not related to their curriculum in any way,” Martin said. “Her highest priority was to invest in career development and degree curriculum aspects for her student body.”
CSU administrators did not respond to a request for an interview.
The conversations progressed over the next few months. WCSB’s student organization, the campus club that operated the station, did not have input in the discussions due to a nondisclosure agreement. Martin said NDAs are common when negotiating proprietary information surrounding terrestrial radio operations.
Bomgardner said the first indication of any changes to WCSB was when student staff temporarily lost keycard access to the station early in the week of Sept. 29.
“It kind of put into our minds, ‘Oh, this doesn’t usually happen,’” Bomgardner said. “It put us on our toes, so we were kind of expecting the unexpected.”
Bomgardner said she and other staff received emails from the university Oct. 2 about two concurrent meetings scheduled for Friday morning, one for WCSB’s executive staff and one for general staff. The abrupt notice filled her with dread.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night,” she said. “It was a lot of worrying, a lot of speculation. … I saw what was coming ahead. I saw the pattern that was being laid out for us. I felt what was going to happen, and it just made me more nervous in the end.”
Ideastream and CSU’s boards of trustees authorized the eight-year operating agreement Oct. 3, which also happened to be the 15th annual World College Radio Day. Along with Ideastream’s control of WCSB programming and the new internship opportunities, the specifics of which are not yet finalized, CSU will retain the station’s FCC license and receive 1,000 underwriting announcements and 1,000 on-air announcements about the partnership on Ideastream stations. The university will also gain a seat on Ideastream’s board of trustees, which Bloomberg will fill, Martin said.
Ideastream will continue to produce JazzNEO’s programming at its headquarters, where it is currently creating a modernized jazz studio thanks to a $1 million donation from local supporters Chuck and Char Fowler.
Bloomberg and VP for Student Belonging & Success Tachelle Banks confirmed the partnership with Ideastream to students and community members later in the morning of Oct. 3 without taking questions or comments. WCSB had already begun simulcasting JazzNEO by the end of the second meeting, Bomgardner said.
Not long after the announcement, Cleveland police arrived to escort staff from the station. Bomgardner posted on the student organization’s Instagram page to share the news with students and community members. She said the university’s sudden announcement stunned and captured the student body’s attention, in one way or another.
“A lot of the campus community was, I would say, half and half of people being in immense grief and shock over this kind of thing happening,” she said. “The other half of the people were like, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of that station before, but my friend has.’”
WCSB’s student organization held a silent protest on campus the following week to mourn the station’s loss, which approximately 200 students, community members and WCSB alumni attended.
Bloomberg and Martin appeared on Sound of Ideas, Ideastream’s daily public affairs program, Oct. 14 to address student and community concerns about the partnership. Bomgardner and Caswell joined them. They said they felt that Martin and Bloomberg didn’t fully acknowledge their questions.
“I could see the prewritten little packets they had in front of them,” Bomgardner said. “Kevin Martin kept falling back on jazz in the jazz community, and Laura Bloomberg kept saying she acknowledged this thing but wouldn’t do anything about it. It was very passive responses to some, in my opinion, pretty hard-hitting questions.”
Navigating the ‘best route’ forward
WCSB’s student organization, now operating as XCSB, is in discussions with the university to determine a path forward. Bloomberg floated the idea of the student organization embracing “streaming, podcasting or the creation of online content” during her appearance on Sound of Ideas. Bomgardner said the organization is still figuring out what it wants to do.
“What I can say is the station will never be back to what it was as an FM frequency on Northeast Ohio’s dial in the same status and capacity as it was, which is unfortunate,” Bomgardner said.
Left without an official hub for its programming, XCSB is continuing to mobilize and raise awareness about the operating agreement. Bomgardner said one way XCSB staff are organizing is through guest hosting appearances on other local college stations.
Caswell said they have heard more community members lament the station’s loss as more people become aware of the partnership.
“I have not stopped hearing people talk about the loss that it is,” Caswell said. “There are people who relied on that station for programming or relied on that station for connection and community.”
The Cleveland City Council unanimously passed an emergency resolution Oct. 21 urging CSU to return WCSB’s access to the student organization after community members submitted over 250 public comments demanding the restoration of CSU students to the air. Martin said the resolution “holds no legal weight” and that the agreement will continue as planned.
“I’ll take my direction from CSU, and I think for them it’s a matter of really whatever they feel needs to happen,” Martin said. “They really believe that there’s a lot of value in expanding a relationship with Ideastream with this particular program and format. I think they’re committed to it. They have not said otherwise.”
In the meantime, Bomgardner said XCSB will persist and continue to serve the community, despite the university’s decision.
“This decision really demonstrated that the university doesn’t have this college radio station’s community at heart, so we’re looking into every single opportunity we can to try to navigate the best route for our community forward, not for the university to move forward with us,” Bomgardner said.
The theft is so brazen and shocking. They want to strip Cleveland dry.