One day last October, Jay Allison received an email from an employee at CAI, the radio station he heads in the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. There was a real-estate agent showing someone around the station, the employee said; did Allison know anything about that?
“And then very quickly, maybe within a day, it seemed like it was sold. There was an accepted offer,” Allison, the founder and executive producer of CAI, told me. “They didn’t talk to me, they didn’t talk to the staff, they didn’t talk to the community. They did this in the dark.”
“They” are GBH, the Boston-based public radio station that owns CAI. What GBH had sold was not CAI itself but the Captain Davis house, the physical home of CAI since it launched 25 years ago. It’s a move that, on paper, might have looked like a way for GBH, which laid off 4% of its workforce last year, to secure a quick cash infusion. What happened instead was the beginning of a furious campaign, led by the Woods Hole community and audio producers from around the world, that to many looked like a proxy war for the soul of audio.
But first some history: Back when CAI launched, in September 2000, the Captain Davis House looked very different. “It was kind of an eyesore,” Allison said. “It had asbestos siding on it, it was gray and stained, and in the wrong light it looked haunted. But it sits at the top of town, and it’s right next to the historical society and the public library and the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, and that’s why we originally chose it. We can connect to the islands from here and make it clear that we want to serve as much of the region from one spot as we can.”
The house changed over the years. Through a combination of fundraising, dipping into the station’s coffers, and a grant from the Woods Hole Community Association (WHCA), a local nonprofit that manages historic buildings in the village, the asbestos was removed, the siding repainted, the deck restored, and the historic building — built in 1842 for a sea captain who sold dry goods out of a store on the bottom floor, and later used as a printing shop — turned into a modern public radio station, right at the head of the town’s main street. But starting a public radio station is a difficult endeavor no matter where you are, and Allison entered into an agreement with the radio station that was then known as WGBH (both GBH and CAI dropped the Ws from their names in 2020): the reporters and producers on the Cape would take care of making the radio if WGBH could handle the operational side of things. WCAI became part of WGBH but continued to do its own thing out on the Cape, away from the hustle of the city.
It didn’t take very long for the station to build a reputation that reached far beyond its radio waves. A year after CAI went live, Allison founded Transom, an audio training center and website that became the de facto school for anyone who wanted to learn how to make radio. (Take a look at the staff lists of most radio stations and podcasts in the U.S. today and you’ll inevitably find a few Transom alums, most of whom spent a few months at the Davis House learning the audio ropes.) In 2003, Allison founded the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), which quickly became the largest database of public radio programming in the country, and in 2009 he founded The Moth Radio Hour. All along, he continued to build CAI into a newsroom of about 15 people, plus a rotating cast of visiting producers.
“CAI marked out a sound and a feeling that’s different from most of the straight news stations around the country,” Ira Glass, the founder and host of This American Life, told me. Part of that sound is the Sonic ID, bite-sized chunks of audio that play in between regular programming and are, essentially, audio portraits of every nook and cranny of Cape Cod. “There’s one which is just some kind of scallop clacking on the beach,” Glass continued. “That is a very idiosyncratic thing to play on the radio uninterrupted…they dare to be weird, and have the good sense to do it at a level that it’s not so weird that people don’t understand what the hell they’re doing. And people buy into it, they feel ‘This is our station. This is our sound. This is local. This is us.’ It’s a very special station with a very special relationship to its audience. They really saw that as part of their reason for being.”
For many audio producers, CAI — and its sonic identity — represents the idealized version of radio that they first fell in love with. As the audio industry shrinks and moves away from odd, sound-rich radio to talk podcasts headlined by big names with little room for weirdness, places like CAI are increasingly precious. So it makes sense that when news of the sale of the Davis House broke, the Woods Hole and audio community alike erupted in anger. Then they began to mobilize.
Within a week, between independent donations, a $300,000 pledge from the WHCA (which came together after an emergency WHCA board meeting), and a separate $300,000 pledge from the nonprofit Woods Hole Foundation, a campaign to save CAI had raised $2 million in an attempt to pre-empt the sale and buy the building from GBH so that CAI could stay in its home. People from the Woods Hole community and the audio world alike also sent letters to the GBH board expressing their hope that the board would reverse their decision and allow the WHCA, which promised five years of free rent to WCAI, to purchase the building.
“When we heard that the property had been sold, it came as a shock to everybody,” said Catherine Bumpus, president of the WHCA, when we spoke last November. “Woods Hole tends to be pretty passionate about things, and when people get startled they get angry. We like the building. We like the activity that goes on in it. We like the voices that we hear and news and stories that we get. And I know that’s true for a lot of people all across the Cape and islands. It’s just a warm presence to have there, and we want to keep it there.”
Allison and his team at CAI are still unclear about what prompted the sale, which they say they only found out about after the fact. In an open letter to CAI staff and Woods Hole community members, GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg said CAI is losing $500,000 a year and lost $2 million over the past five years, though Allison told me that prior to the sale he had always been informed CAI was hitting its fundraising goals (GBH declined to comment in time for this story). Allison also said GBH has not given him access to any financial statements that support the claim of CAI running a deficit — “It’s a black box,” he said — and expressed confusion about the stated costs of running the station out of the Davis House. GBH’s annual reports don’t separate out CAI, but its own story about the layoffs last year noted a $7 million budget gap.
“It didn’t have to happen this way,” Allison said. “If they had come to us, come to the village, and said ‘we’re in trouble, here’s our numbers. Is there any way we could work on this together? Otherwise we may have to sell the building,’ they could have ended up with the support of the community for whatever they did. The reason they did not is an absolute mystery to me.”
In her letter, GBH’s Goldberg also wrote that CAI’s facilities needed upgrades to comply with regulatory guidelines; CAI staff and the WHCA have been informed that those improvements couldn’t be made in the current building, but GBH hasn’t explained why. A GBH spokesperson declined to provide any comment on the record for this story beyond Goldberg’s letter, which also indicated that GBH intends to find a new space to house CAI without making immediate cuts to its editorial staff.
“It’s not a cheap thing to move a radio station,” Glass said. “So I hope, for everyone’s sake, that GBH will let them stay. I don’t think that the people at GBH are evil, you know? It got into a knife fight that it didn’t understand. The fact that in one week [CAI was] able to raise $2 million from their community to buy this building is just unprecedented. It’s shocking. At a time when radio is losing audience everywhere around the country, to have a community step up and in a week pony up to keep a public radio station going because they’re so attached to it, for GBH board members to slap those people in the face by not hearing what they’re saying seems like a mistake.”
Following a board meeting in December, GBH issued a statement that it would be moving forward with the sale. In an update posted on January 6, the Woods Hole Community Association said it could still buy the Davis House and had pledged an additional $75,000 out of its own budget, but needed to raise an additional $266,000 by this Friday, January 10. If the WHCA does manage to buy the house, it would be up to GBH to let CAI stay in the building.
“Look, I know it’s symbolic,” Allison told me. “It’s not like we won’t be able to broadcast anymore. I know it could exist in the basement of an industrial park. I mean, a radio station could, but this one is in a building which now has been paid for, and used a lot of community funds in the restoration. It’s just that it’s the perfect place to be. And why would you lose it, you know?”
Photo of the Captain Davis House courtesy of Jay Allison
