The three members of Peelander-Z — a band helpfully described by the local alternative newspaper as "tongue-in-cheek Japanese goof-punk" — have ambled into the station's offices for a midafternoon interview. Peelander-Z's frontman looks determined to live up to his inscrutable press clippings: He sports a mostly shaved head with a ponytail projecting from the right side of his scalp and, opposite that, a lone sprig of hair that points almost straight upward. And he doesn't appear to speak much English.

Between the outlandish singer, the language barrier, and the fact that no one at the station knows all that much about Peelander-Z, the interview seems like a recipe for an awkward disaster. Traditionally such quintessential moments in campus radio would have played to a local audience — students studying by their stereos and townies flipping stations in their cars. But the stakes are higher now for WUOG. No matter how unprofessionally it turns out, today's interview will be available online to millions of potential listeners through the station's live 24-hour RealAudio feed.

The interview, mercifully, ends quickly and without incident. And the next night, when a heavy-metal band heads to the station's studio for a short but thunderous concert, station officials won't just stick the recording in their vaults for posterity; they will post it as the latest installment in Loud Fast Rules, a series of live-performance podcasts that metalheads all over the world can download and play on their iPods.

Some skeptics have predicted that today's increasingly diverse media landscape will render campus radio stations — long known for eclectic fare — obsolete. After all, many students have traded their stereos for computer speakers, forsaking FM radio for iTunes and song swapping. And satellite radio networks, which come with their own imitations of freewheeling college-rock stations, threaten to erase some listeners' need for the genuine article.

But, college stations with a tradition of strong listenership, like WUOG, are finding a bigger audience online, broadening their reach and their influence. Last month, for instance, over 2,200 Web surfers tuned in to WUOG online, and hundreds downloaded the station's podcast offerings. Listeners can visit the station's Web site to view playlists, look up personal blogs of DJ's, and even submit recordings of their own music.

Other campus stations, especially those in well-known music towns like Austin, Tex., and Portland, Ore., have also jumped on the online bandwagon. And DJ's at those stations are discovering that far-flung fans can be just as devoted as listeners on campus.

"A guy from Portland, Me., called me during my show the other week," says Erin White, WUOG's general manager. "I was complaining about the weather in Athens — 'Oh, it's 50 degrees, it's so cold' — and he called to say, 'We're having a blizzard up here.'"

"Getting those calls is a bit of an ego boost."

Masons and Mysticism

WUOG's offices are typical of those at college radio stations — little more than a maze of cramped rooms stashed away on the top floor of Memorial Hall, a building that has become a catch-all for student groups at the university. Obsolete broadcasting devices and ratty furniture are strewn around the rooms, whose walls have accumulated some 30 years' worth of promotional posters, vintage vinyl, and other thematically appropriate detritus.

Although the offices aren't much to look at, they seem a suitable backdrop for Out There, WUOG's most popular podcast program.

Joe McFall opens an installment of the weekly radio show by greeting "everyone out there in radio land, Internet-radio land, and podcast land." Then things get odd.

On tonight's episode, Mr. McFall and his co-host, Raymond Wiley, are examining the bizarre story of James Shelby Downard — a famed conspiracy theorist who claimed that Freemason assassins were responsible for the killing of John F. Kennedy.

"It's a real slice of Americana, more than anything else," says Mr. Wiley of Downard's vision, one steeped in numerology and paranoia.

The subject is par for the course for the broadcasting duo, who have chronicled various tales of the occult and the otherwise unusual since starting Out There at the beginning of the academic year. Other episodes of the hourlong talk show have included interviews with men who bill themselves as "Sasquatch hunters" and discussions of government-sponsored mind-control projects that were purportedly run during the cold war.

Throughout the programs, Mr. Wiley comes across as a sober, Southeastern version of the radio host Art Bell: He is exhaustive in chronicling conspiracy theories and paranormal phenomena, but his interest in the occult seems almost scholarly. At some points, Out There feels like a pirate-radio show created to spook lonely travelers driving late at night. At other times, it sounds like a pair of graduate students reading some very offbeat dissertations.

Through their podcasts, Mr. Wiley and Mr. McFall have found, much to their surprise, that there is an audience for their musings on the Freemasons and MK-Ultra. Out There's fan base isn't huge — on average, about 500 people download new shows the week after they appear online — but it is devoted. Mr. Wiley says he has received e-mail messages from listeners in Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden. And after a show in which he bemoaned his lack of promotional skills, Mr. Wiley was shocked to find that a fan from Pennsylvania had sent him some handsome flyers to post on the campus.

"I haven't even met this person," Mr. Wiley says, "but now I've got his flyer hanging on my wall."

Now Mr. Wiley and Mr. McFall, who are both seniors, are dreaming of careers in radio. Mr. Wiley says he has virtually no idea how to break into commercial broadcasting, but he hopes the program's grass-roots success will help him land a slot on a satellite radio station. "We'll see if the extra podcast listeners mean a damn thing or not from a professional standpoint," he says. "We're just sitting here with 16 episodes to go, hoping for a break."

Obstacles Removed

Many campus stations' efforts to move online were initially hamstrung by Congressional haggling over Webcast royalties — per-song fees that were inconsequential to most commercial radio stations but potentially prohibitive to cash-poor college broadcasters.

The fees were the result of a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. It says the recording industry and artists can be compensated for music played over the Internet.

Several colleges, fearing that online radio would be too expensive to maintain, dropped their online broadcasts.

Since then, radio stations and record companies have reached a deal that reduced the fees and allowed most campus broadcasters to get back on the Internet. And with Webcasting no longer a potential bank breaker, stations like WUOG are finding new ways to embrace the Web.

It was Mr. Wiley, serving last year as the station's general manager, who first recommended that it experiment with podcasts. Station officials, reasoning that other campus radio stations across the country might be willing to pay to use WUOG's best content, had hoped to syndicate a handful of shows. But when that plan stalled, Mr. Wiley decided to go ahead and put some show recordings online at no charge.

"I didn't even know what this stuff was until last August," says Ms. White, the current station manager. "Raymond said, 'Let's podcast,' and I said, 'What the hell's podcasting?'"

Ms. White, a senior studying journalism, has proved to be a quick study. She developed the station's podcasting software herself, and WUOG now uses it to make several shows available for download — Out There, a sports-talk program, and a trio of live-music offerings. Because of licensing restrictions, the station podcasts only talk shows and live performances, not shows that feature recorded music.

The station has hired a syndication and podcast manager, Greg Knauft, a junior who records and edits the programs and puts them online. Mr. Knauft says he plans to start podcasting even more programs when the station secures more bandwidth. (The cost of bandwidth is the chief reason that station officials have asked Georgia's student-activities group for a significant budget increase this year.)

Bandwidth concerns have kept the station from publicizing the podcasts as much as Ms. White would like. But Out There and Live in the Lobby, a biweekly show, have found audiences, she says, and DJ's are learning that podcasting has its artistic benefits.

Mr. Wiley, for example, meticulously edits his live shows before posting them as MP3s, taking time to smooth interview segments and eliminate dreaded utterances like "um" and "er" from his monologues.

MP3 players have helped the station expand its audience and let students like Mr. Knauft listen to live metal on the go, but can sometimes feel like a mixed blessing, says Ms. White. Some staff members, she says, are worried that the devices are diminishing eclecticism on the air.

In the past, WUOG's student DJ's have expanded their musical horizons by scouring the station's stockpile of obscure LP's for hidden gems. Many still do that, Ms. White says. But some staffers have grown concerned that too many DJ's are simply plugging in their iPods and ignoring the station's vast collection of music.

At a station that prides itself not just on its diversity, but also on its obscurantism, students' personal iPod playlists can be a bit too predictable. Listeners hoping for exotic fare have occasionally called in to complain that they are hearing too many college-radio staples and not enough interesting ephemera.

"We've got to get DJ's to not just play stuff off their iPods," laments Ms. White at a meeting of the station's board of executives, "but a lot of DJ's are intimidated by playing vinyl."

Ms. White says she would love to digitize WUOG's vinyl collection, but that would take time and money, and the station has other technological needs to cram into its budget. And station officials first want to improve the way they stream their radio signal online. Making it available as an MP3 stream instead of a RealAudio stream would allow listeners to tune in via a variety of software programs, including Apple's popular iTunes. Getting mentioned on iTunes' list of Internet radio stations has been one of the staff's goals for the year, Ms. White says.

Courting the iTunes Crowd

Because of Athens's well-deserved reputation as a town with a bustling music scene, WUOG is uniquely positioned to draw listeners to the FM band. "As long as people in the area have cars, we'll have listeners," Mr. Wiley says.

Neither Mr. Wiley nor Ms. White has any trustworthy way of determining whether WUOG's radio audience has faded in the era of iTunes. In fact, most campus stations have only the vaguest of notions about the size of their listenerships. Some large-market stations subscribe to a service, run by Arbitron, that measures radio audiences, but most see little reason to spend the money.

It is almost as difficult to make broad claims about the success of college stations' Internet streams, according to Will Robedee, chair of Collegiate Broadcasters Inc., an association of college radio and TV stations. "Anecdotally, there are generally under 20 listeners at a time to any college Webcast," he says.

But even if online streams and podcasts aren't making a huge splash now, officials at WUOG think the technologies may pay off more richly in the not-too-distant future. To keep Web surfers coming back, WUOG's Web site posts a steady diet of announcements, playlists, and weekly charts in blog format. The Web site also links to pages set up by DJ's for their shows using the popular social-networking site MySpace. Though most of the blogs are fairly bare-bones, they do typically offer details on what DJ's have played on recent shows and provide teasers for future episodes.

The strategy seems to be working. More than 10,000 people stopped by WUOG's site in February.

Sense of Place

Most DJ's are pleased that the blogs and online broadcasts can bring in new listeners, but some worry that all the online outreach could strip their shows of a sense of mission and place.

Courting the iTunes crowd isn't always easy for a radio station that cherishes — and, in fact, codifies — its position outside the mainstream. The mission statement that WUOG programmers use to determine what gets played runs about a page long, but Ms. White boils it down to a simple maxim: "If you don't need us, we don't need you."

Once musicians make it onto Atlanta's commercial alternative-rock station, they are personae non gratae on WUOG playlists. Every CD that makes its way into WUOG's new-music stacks must first be heard, accepted, and briefly reviewed by a station staff member. That process offers plenty of opportunity for lengthy debates about whether certain indie bands made good — acts like Rhett Miller and Sufjan Stevens — have grown too popular to benefit from college-radio exposure.

So DJ's like Mr. Wiley say they are somewhat conflicted about the implications of podcasts and Web streams. Even college-radio DJ's long for larger audiences, but some worry that a bigger audience might distract them from the core mission.

"It's cool to get out there and do this new technology," Mr. Wiley says, "but sometimes you worry that you're cutting the legs out from under college radio."

Still, when skillfully crafted shows go out over the air, station officials say, it is hard to fret over which medium people are using to listen.

Just minutes after the Japanese goof punks leave the studio, a DJ named Zachary Smola takes the reins for the latest installment of his weekly Brazilian hour. As he moves through the set list — an expertly selected collection of sambas, jazz pieces, and pop tunes from the nation's Tropicalia movement — he types notes into the computer (one song has "suave four-part female harmonies," another is "phenomenal jazz-funk") so that listeners can follow along in real time.

With Memorial Hall almost emptied out for the day, WUOG's staff has turned up the music and opened its doors, letting the gorgeous, pastoral folk-pop of Milton Nascimento echo through the stairwells and corridors. There may be no one listening in the building, or even anywhere on the campus. But there could be someone tuning in online, and that's all the validation that most campus DJ's will ever need.