“There was an overwhelming response from the community: I’m sure it took everybody in management by surprise,” John Schaefer, the program’s host, said in a telephone interview. “It took me by surprise.”
“There were people writing not just impassioned emails, but really thoughtful emails,” he said, “making points about what public radio should be.”
The station had announced Oct. 10 that it planned to end “New Sounds” — which was often the first place to hear future Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, avant-garde rockers and music from different parts of the world — by the end of the year, along with most of its remaining music programming, as part of a shift to more news and talk.
The protests were immediate. “Why would they do that?” the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson, who was the program’s first guest in 1982, said in an interview when the news broke. Julia Wolfe, a Pulitzer-winning composer, spoke of the vital role the program played in new music circles: “It was huge, because we were just kids, and we did this crazy thing, and there it was, on the radio.” The composer Gabriel Kahane set that quotation of hers to music, and posted it on Twitter.
Some listeners took to social media to say they were dropping their WNYC memberships. Others protested last week at a WNYC community advisory board meeting. And many WNYC staff members spoke out against its cancellation — including at a tense staff meeting last Friday with Goli Sheikholeslami, who began work as the station’s new president and chief executive officer this month. (In her email inviting the staff to the meeting to share their thoughts, Sheikholeslami wrote that she was “not yet here when the decision was made” to end the program.)
On Monday, Sheikholeslami announced that the program had been saved: It would continue to be broadcast seven nights a week, and to be available online at newsounds.org. Several other threatened features, including Gig Alerts, were preserved as well.
“I appreciate your candor, your thoughtfulness, and your commitment to our mission here at New York Public Radio,” Sheikholeslami wrote in an email to her staff. “I’ve also read the heartfelt responses from our listeners and the larger New York City cultural community who have come to rely on John Schaefer and ‘New Sounds’ for musical discovery, creative inspiration, and access to a community of music lovers they can’t find anywhere else.”
Asked whether any foundations had threatened to pull their support from the station because of the cancellation, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, a spokeswoman for WNYC, said in an email that the decision to reinstate it had not been financially motivated. “Funders and members were among those who were disappointed with the decision,” she wrote, “and the feedback we received from many constituents led us to the decision we announced this morning.”
Anderson said in an email that she was delighted by the reversal, and that she hoped it would help the station’s coming pledge drive. “Both the cancellation and the reversal,” she wrote, “reminded me of how vital these shows are in the middle of the vast sea of commercial and straight up pop music.”
And Schaefer — who had asked Anderson, his first guest, to be his last — said that he still looked forward to having her back on the show.
“It’s not going to be the interview that we feared it would be,” he said. “She does have a fine new recording that I’ve wanted to discuss.”
This article originally appeared in
.