WCPE chief goes after Goliath again

WAKE FOREST -- Deborah Proctor looks tired, and it's easy to understand why.

For the past month, she has logged 16-hour days battling a federal decision that could bar public radio stations from streaming music over the Internet.

The campaign has thrown small WCPE-FM into the fray over digital copyrights, and it's a fight that Proctor, the nonprofit station's feisty general manager and founder , says she can't afford to lose.

"We feel we're one of the vanguards trying to keep classical music alive," she says, "and we're fighting rules and regulations that are choking us."

WCPE celebrated its 25th anniversary Friday. That speaks to the station's resilience and its manager's remarkable passion for radio.

With all its operating money coming from listeners' contributions, WCPE airs nothing but classical music to an audience that extends far beyond the Triangle.

And now the station is taking on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a law that Proctor says punishes broadcasters that have done more to promote the sale of classical music recordings than anybody else.

Before long, Proctor predicts, radio listeners will routinely go online to tune in to a radio station in another state or country. It's a potentially immense market that WCPE and other radio stations want access to.

But recent negotiations between the federal Copyright Office, which sets fees for Webcasting, and the recording industry, which wants compensation when music is streamed over the Internet, have yielded rates that many stations say they can't afford . The rates will take effect Jan. 1.

WCPE, for example, estimates that it would have to pay royalties of nearly $250,000 a year by 2007, assuming that its Internet listenership -- which now averages about 1,500 around the clock -- continues to double every year. That would be a prohibitive chunk of the station's $1.5 million annual budget.

At the moment, this cause is consuming most of Proctor's time.

She's networking with other station owners, talking to members of Congress, submitting statements to decision-makers and keeping up with the appeal that WCPE and three commercial stations filed last summer in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

All the while, she's managing a staff of 20 full- and part-time employees and making sure that the station's high-voltage transmitter is working without interruption. Many nights, she's not in bed until 3 a.m. after working the last few hours in her home office, a five-minute drive from the station.

"She's a masterful engineer, an accomplished business brain, a steadfast crusader," said John Graham, the station's outreach engineering director. "And if she's unhappy with something, it will be known. It's not the Southern way, but it's the correct way to run a company."

Small station, global reach

WCPE has stayed healthy in a shrinking market of classical radio stations and managed to maintain revenues despite the tough economy.

In fact, WCPE's outward expansion has been vital in a recession that hit North Carolina listeners particularly hard. Today, Proctor said, 15 percent of the station's listeners can be found outside the state, and their contributions are making up for losses on the home front.

WCPE beams its signal via satellite to three dozen affiliated stations and an equal number of cable-TV systems nationwide. The Internet audio stream reaches listeners on all seven continents via the station's Web site, www.theclassicalstation.org.

"I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I've always been fortunate enough to be on target with what's happening in broadcasting," Proctor says. "Digital broadcasting is the future, and we had better be there in the forefront if this station is going to be around 25 years from now."