“I was bunkering down for the first day of finals when I got an email saying that a few thousand people were tuned into the station,” said Mason Daugherty ’25, station manager of Bowdoin’s student radio station WBOR at the time.
Radio stations do get occasional spam messages, so he initially assumed it was that. But, when Daugherty logged into the station’s streaming dashboard, he noticed that online listener numbers at WBOR, which typically only amount to about hundred or so, were off the charts.
“We bumped our server capacity to handle the increase… and I had to make a few optimizations,” said Daughterty in a segment that aired recently on WBUR and NPR’s jointly produced news magazine program, Here and Now.
It turned out that the increase in traffic was all down to a game called Internet Roadtrip, where virtual players, using Google Maps to navigate, travel together in a virtual car, voting on whether to change direction, honk the horn, or change the radio station. As the virtual car was traveling through Maine, a surge of actual listeners tuned into WBOR.
When they became aware of the situation, said Daugherty, several of WBOR’s DJs—including him—joined in with the game’s group chat to engage with players and take some requests for their thousands of new listeners.
“It felt very validating,” he said. “College radio as a whole has seen ups and downs much like the rest of radio has in the age of streaming, and more and more people are beginning to come back to, and appreciate, local voices they might be familiar with, and human taste and curation in a world that has increasingly become driven by recommendation algorithms.”
Listen to Here and Now host Robin Young interviewing Mason Daugherty ’25 on July 2, 2025. The story was also covered on May 25, 2025, by The Boston Globe (behind paywall).
