Stephen Janes: Sophomore Takes the Plunge Into the Internet Radio Stream

When sophomore Stephen Janes (Communications) toured CSU Dominguez Hills as an incoming freshman, he was told that the campus had a student-run Internet radio station. The former co-editor-in-chief of El Segundo High’s Bay Eagle newspaper was enthusiastic about expanding his journalistic skills and signed up to be trained as a disc jockey.

“I thought I’d try this out to broaden my range, since I want to go into sports broadcasting as a career,” says Janes. “So I stopped in at KDHR and talked to Matt [Stuart, former director, KDHR]. I was the first student assistant that he trained, and I got to do the things he did – helping people with shows and promoting the station.”

At the end of 2005, Stuart left his position at KDHR, and left his protégé in charge as the production assistant.

“The two and a half weeks before he left, he crammed me with information about stuff he hadn’t taught me before,” Janes says. “I was worried that the day he left I’d be out of a job and the radio station would dwindle to nothing. But Guy Witherspoon [general manager, Associated Students, Inc.] said, ‘Stephen knows what he’s doing, so why don’t we give him a shot?’ So they let me run things down here the same way Matt did.”

Janes has jumped into the leadership role with both feet, sharing knowledge with new DJs, expanding the station’s offerings – currently, approximately 15 DJs regularly do shows – and spreading the word about KDHR by attending new-student orientations, providing music for student-housing events, and helping hosts promote their shows on the station’s MySpace site. He intends to begin running remote broadcasts from Toro sports events, which would be the first-ever live sports coverage from the CSUDH campus. And he is constantly recruiting new volunteer DJs by promoting the educational opportunities to be gained from the experience.

“If there is something that interests you in music, like editing, broadcasting, or Web site developing, that training is available here,” he says. “You may not want to be on-air, but maybe you want to learn how to do cutting and make tracks for us, or how to maintain our Web site. I take the knowledge that I have in each category and spread it to everybody who works here so they can help the others learn.”

Janes’ own show, “The Jungle with Stevie J.,” has evolved from featuring classic rock and sports talk back to a music-only format. He finds the challenge of marketing shows to the diverse Dominguez Hills audience just part of the learning process.

“We’ve got to mix it up and let people know that we don’t do just one kind of music,” he says. “Music itself has diversity to it – I’ve realized that more since I’ve been working here.”