UGA to consider shedding itself of WUGA-TV
Lee Shearer @LeeShearer
The University of Georgia might divest itself of public television station WUGA.
UGA President Jere Morehead on Wednesday appointed a group of administrators and faculty to get answers to some basic questions about the station, which became a financial drain on the university after the UGA Research Foundation bought the station five years ago.
Morehead asked the group to determine how much money the university has invested in WUGA, how much money UGA spends to keep it going, and where the money is coming from.
The group should also determine what educational value the station provides to students and how integrated with the UGA educational program it is, he said.
Early next year, probably February, the group will give him a recommendation about the station's costs and benefits, he said.
The UGA Research Foundation's board of directors voted in 2008 to buy the TV station, which at that time was a commercial, for-profit station called WNEG based in Toccoa. The board set aside $5.8 million to buy the station, upgrade its equipment, move its studios to Athens and subsidize costs for five years.
Administrators and teachers in UGA's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication said the station would become a kind of combined profit center and learning lab.
Students could get real-world experience at a commercial TV station, tapping into Athens music halls, UGA sports teams and university research labs for content, at the same time generating advertising revenues to cover the station's operating costs.
But the economy went into recession, advertising sales fell, the programming did not materialize and the station began losing money at the rate of about $1 million per year.
In late 2010, UGA officials announced a plan to convert commercial WNEG into a public TV station, WUGA. In January 2011, UGA shut down the WNEG news operation, laying off more than a dozen workers.
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