Revisiting - Think of a Radio Station (or Podcast) as a Musical Instrument
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Hello, hello, hello. This is Sound School from PRX and Transom. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Back in 2007, Steve Junker was working odd jobs. He re-shingled old houses. He also worked as a bridge tender, raising and lowering a bridge so boats could get in and out of one of the harbors here in Woods Hole on Cape Cod.

He'd never worked in radio, but that didn't stop WCAI, the local public radio station, from asking if he'd like to try it out. They thought he had a good voice and they needed someone to replace an on-air host. In fact, funny story, this host that needed to be replaced, he was finishing up his shift on Morning Edition, the daily news show, and he made some sort of mistake on air. Apparently, it wasn't the first time. He made lots of mistakes. But this time, he turned off his mic, stood up, and he yelled, I'm

I can't do this anymore. And then he left the building for good. I'm told he slammed the door so hard on his way out that the cover to the thermostat popped off. Anyway, Steve said yes, he'd give radio a shot, and he got trained up and started hosting one of the midday shows from NPR. Steve recently told me that from then on, he just kept saying yes. Do you want to host All Things Considered? Yes. Do you want to host Morning Edition? Yes.

The governor's visiting Cape Cod tomorrow. Do you want to interview him? Oh, yeah, sure. I'll do that. There's a big snowstorm. No one can make it in. You live in walking distance, Steve. Can you go to the station and keep us on the air? Yes, of course I can.

Steve went on to file stories. He hosted the weekly news roundup with newspaper reporters from around the region. He launched a weekly program called The Fishing News. This is, you know, Cape Cod after all. In 2017, Steve was asked to be the station's managing editor for news. What did he say? Yes. The station's coverage expanded. He wrote grants to hire young reporters, including someone to work the climate change and environment beat.

Now, all of that that I've just been telling you, it's an overly simplified accounting of Steve's 18 years at WCAI. For instance, I left out all the awards the station earned under Steve's leadership. They cover the walls here. But in short, Steve's fingerprint could be heard in a lot of the programming at WCAI. Now, Steve can no longer say yes. A couple of weeks ago, he was laid off.

WCAI is owned by WGBH, the public radio and TV giant in Boston. GBH has been hurting financially, and last year they laid off over 30 staffers. In May of this year, another nine were let go. And then in June, just a couple weeks ago, 45 more people were laid off, 6% of the overall staff. Steve was part of that round of layoffs, the only one at WCAI to be let go.

This is disappointing to say the least. Steve's a friend, of course. So I have a personal connection here, but I also feel sad for listeners here. The station has lost someone with a unique ear.

Steve liked to think of a radio station as a musical instrument. Think about one of those old organs with all the different little stops on it and layers of keys, and then there's these strange pedals down below that you step on while you're playing, and it can make almost any sound imaginable. It can make like choir sounds and woodwind sounds and brass sounds and even percussion. And I think that a radio station is a little bit like that

but that we are often playing the same couple of keys over and over. And they can be really good keys, like our dedication to bringing timely news to our community. But that it's this cool instrument with all these things that we hardly ever think about trying to use. Like, what can't it do is almost the question you want to be asking. What can't our radio station do? And the only way you find that is by trying different things.

I spoke to Steve in 2023 for Sound School because he was producing a series of curious shows that exemplified his way of thinking. The idea for this series came to him two years earlier during a cold and quiet Cape Cod winter with COVID still in full swing. Like all of us, Steve was feeling cooped up and restless. Sometimes there's this hunger for the world.

And so I started thinking about how we can bring the world to us in a very kind of local way, because our mission is to be as local as possible as a radio station. You know, we carry NPR programming, we carry BBC broadcast programming, but our mission here at the station with the reporters and all the people, it's a small staff, but everybody is dedicated to local programming. How do we make the station feel like it really belongs to the listeners who are here in this region? So we're...

thinking about like, how can we make an international program that feels local? That was almost like the big challenge to tackle.

Steve thought some more, and he remembered there are a lot of towns in England that have the same names as towns here on Cape Cod. We serve a town called Truro. There's a Truro, England. There's a Barnstable in England. There's a Barnstable on Cape Cod. We're in the town of Falmouth. There's a Falmouth, England. And it just so happens that many of these towns are located in Cornwall, a county in England that juts out into the Atlantic like Cape Cod does. In fact, the two peninsulas practically point toward each other across the ocean.

And then there's this fun fact. Marconi, back in 1903, the early days of his radio transmission experiments, he sent the very first two-way transatlantic signals from Cape Cod to Cornwall. So with so many commonalities, it made sense to Steve to find radio stations in these towns and email them. Out of the blue. And Steve didn't have anything more to share than his nascent idea of co-producing something with a radio station in another country. What would they make? He had no idea.

So he wrote to a bunch of stations and got a positive response from Source FM. Only get this, Steve hadn't written to that station. Someone at another station forwarded the email to Source FM.

And where is Source FM located? Falmouth, England. You're always looking for signs, and so this was a sign, right? I'm always looking for signs. Maybe it's just me. Source FM is a volunteer station, like a community station here in the States. After getting the email, Steve looked at their website, saw how dedicated they were to local community, like WCAI, and he thought, yeah, this is a good fit.

which was further reinforced when he spoke to Simon Neald. He hosts a couple of music shows at the station, and he's on the board of directors. And once I talked to Simon, and his energy was so upbeat and non-prescriptive, he was much more interested in exploring the idea than rushing into a formalized idea of what it could be. I felt like, oh, once it's a conversation between people, something can grow out of it.

But the question remained, what? What would they produce? Steve talked to his staff. They initially thought, well, maybe we can co-report something. But Steve was wary of that. CAI is a small station. He only has a couple of reporters on his staff, and he didn't think he could take them off their beats to co-report stories. They needed an idea that was less of a lift. So both stations got on a video call, four staffers from each station, and they started listing issues each community faced. They found a lot of common ground.

Climate change, as these peninsulas sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean, we are kind of on the forefront of impacts of climate change, whether that means increased intensity of storms or storm erosion, coastal change, and they too have that. We're both tourist destinations for seasonal tourist destinations, which means there's

you know, correspondence in economy, but there's also a lot of correspondence in pressures on housing. Affordable housing is vanishing in both communities. The list kind of went on and on, and I think there must have been 12 items on there that we both, like, put a tick mark against. As they batted ideas around, they eventually agreed on one fundamental, connect people. If we have this list of, uh,

topics and issues that we can start working off of, we can find people at the center of those stories and connect them in direct conversation so that they're talking to each other and we're just recording it and producing the program out of that. And once we made that leap as an idea, it became fairly straightforward in that, you know, that's kind of like what we do already. Was there ever a test run or did you guys just like, let's go?

Well, the test run was supposed to be this conversation between two grocers, a small town grocer in Cornwall in Falmouth, England, and a small time grocer in Martha's Vineyard. Small time, he runs one of the biggest grocery stores, but he's an independent grocer on the island of Martha's Vineyard. And put them together and talk about this pandemic experience. And all

Almost as soon as we started the tape running and we were done all our check, check, check, and we got to use the signal, okay, can you hear us? And there's a bit of fussing because everybody's in their – we're in the grocer's office and maybe the Wi-Fi isn't really that great, the internet connection. But we finally get it up and running. And as soon as they started talking like, hi, hi,

the rest of us just kind of fell silent. Well, I'm Chris and I'm the manager of the shop. People are amazed by how much we've got on our shelves. We say we would like expandable walls like in Harry Potter where they can grow, particularly in the summer. My name is Steve Bernier. I own Cronig's Market and I'm on the island of Martha's Vineyard in the state of Massachusetts.

It sounds very similar. I'm curious, Chris, how big a footprint do you work out of? How many square feet? Square, oh, we're small. It really felt like, oh my gosh, this is going to work. These people have something to say to each other. And the test was, that was supposed to be a test, and we just thought, this is great. We're going to, this is one piece. You know, we don't have to go any further than this to see if this is going to work. But I'm just curious, Chris,

March 13th, 2020, when this pandemic hit, how you managed? Well, when it started, we were very worried about vulnerable people. We have a lot of elderly people in our village, and we were worried about those people not being able to get their food because they were told... The other thing that we learned from that first conversation that is...

Completely I did not anticipate is the sound of the accents of the voices could carry a lot for listeners just off the bat. Other people saying, how are we going to get food? And that's what we had to start literally straight from scratch was to work out.

how we were going to make sure that these people that perhaps didn't have family around them, didn't use the internet for shopping, that we could actually supply them with food. So I don't know how, Steve, how you found it right at the beginning. Have you ever been to hell? Yes, I think we were there as well. So it was just in a matter of 48 hours, we went from what we would call normal,

into this chaotic state. I love the idea of strangers talking to one another.

Well, it's a great idea if it works, right? But each time we set up one of these conversations, there's a question about how well it's going to work because you're introducing two people who don't necessarily... Well, two people who don't know each other and then you're not quite sure where it's going to go. Turns out, for us, it's worked brilliantly and in part because, and it took somebody else to point this out to me, the two people are engaging each other as peers around a common experience or...

set of information or just work-life correspondence, and they know what to talk about.

So as long as we find two people that have this overlap, they're ready for us to get out of the way so that they can start asking each other questions and compare notes. You know, if we've got two police officers, they are so ready to talk about what it means to police in their communities. And the same with two oyster farmers. They want to know, like, what do you do over there? And why don't you do that? And what's happening with your young oyster farmers? They have so many things to talk about that really the job for us is to

Make sure that they state their name clearly at the beginning. And, you know, just stay out of the way and edit it all up at the end. So it's something fun to listen to. When I started first, there were 34 sailboats. And now there's about 10 on a good day. I suppose the average age is about 63. So...

That's how bad it is. Well, what are the young fishermen doing? Ah, they've done other things, building. The trouble with oyster is it's only for six months, you know, and then if you can't catch enough for a year, you've got to find a job. And then when they find a job, then sometimes they decide not to come back because they've got to keep a job for 12 months. How old's your son? Yeah, he's 30, 36. Does he have any kids? Yeah.

Two kids. How old are they? One is 17. Perfect age. And one is 10. They don't want to do it. Well, you've got to pay them. I didn't know that. That's where I must be going wrong. Yeah. Wow. No, he doesn't like it. He doesn't like the boats. You can tell if people like boats or not. And he doesn't like a boat. He won't go fishing. My boy does. He's all right. But his boy, he isn't keen. He isn't keen.

The generation after me, we have some really nice young people in town here. And there's some very talented growers that work very hard and play hard. And I think the future of the generation after me and probably after them looks really good. And there's a lot of support for our industry here.

It's looking pretty poor for us. We get a lot of pollution, river pollution, stuff coming down the river. The seabed's changing. We've got about half the fishery that we used to have. When I was out first, some of the seabed would be yellow. Now it's all brown. It's all dead. So it's not looking the best for us. That's the way it is. The youngsters will have to sort that out.

WCAI and Source FM have now produced two shows. They're called FAMUTH to FAMUTH. Both are an hour long, and a third is in the works.

The shows included the grocers and oystermen, as we heard, but also young people talking about climate change and a couple of artists and people involved with housing issues. One intriguing conversation was between two police officers. There are profound questions about policing to discuss, responding to people with addiction or mental illness, the use of firearms by police. I felt the conversation about those topics only skimmed the surface.

Of course, the two officers had only just met each other and want to be polite, I suppose. But even though Steve said it was important for the reporters to press record and step back, from time to time they asked questions in an effort to cover ground that was being missed or to dig deeper.

Here's reporter Eve Zuckoff asking the two officers about race and policing. Can I jump in on this? Sure. Race in this country is often a dividing line amongst who trusts police, who doesn't trust police. Do either of you, do both of you feel like it's your responsibility specifically to address the distrust that falls along racial lines? The fact that black and brown communities more often than not are the ones that feel distrust.

Lack of trust. Does that line up with your experience? And do you feel like a particular responsibility to address that? I think responsibility falls on just being a good person and a great community officer. Like if you go out into the community, you treat everybody the same way. I treat people how I want to be treated.

You know, you can't be gruff with people. You can't be rude with people. It doesn't matter what color they are. I try to treat everybody the same way to show that we're officers, are human beings, just like everybody else, and we're here to do a job. But as I said, just to treat everybody equally. There's no, in my eyes, there's no difference. If you're doing the right thing, awesome. If you're doing the wrong thing, I'm going to call you out on it. What do you think, Mark?

I am in a unique position. My wife is from Zimbabwe and I get this unique view as a Caucasian English speaking person in the police force in England to be able to see things from her point of view and her family's point of view. And I know everything is not rosy.

But I also know that all of the officers that I know, all of them, to a man, do exactly what you said. They will treat everybody exactly the same. I do take it one step further. There's not that many people from outside of this area, not many officers.

immigrants, not many people of different race in this area. So I'm sure and know those people who are here feel exposed. And so I go out of my way to do everything I can to make them feel more at home and reassured. And I think that our society certainly has been going that way. It's more and more about inclusion.

And we've tried to institutionalize inclusion. And I think it's had a significant impact. There's a long way still to go. Absolutely. We can always be better. We can always make ourselves better through training or just trying to, you know, get more knowledge. Hey, Mike, it's so good to meet a brother officer and, you know, just instant connection.

Absolutely, and likewise. I want you to make sure you stay safe and always watch your six and just enjoy life too. God bless. God bless you.

It's worth noting for a moment how the hour-long shows were put together. When the conversations were edited down, they typically left in the hellos and goodbyes like we heard with the police officers. Steve says that's usually something they'd cut out, but in this case it made sense to leave those in to help the chat feel more conversational. This is Falmouth to Falmouth, our collaborative radio project connecting Cornwall to Cape Cod. I'm Eve Zuckoff from CAI on Cape Cod.

And I'm Simon Neal from Source FM in Falmouth, Cornwall, and we're reaching out to each other across the Atlantic. And we decided that a good place to be for this next link would be down on our respective beaches. As for hosting, Steve said they wanted to get the hosts out of the studio and on location, so it felt like they were kind of talking to each other across the ocean. How many castles have you guys got?

We have lighthouses. We didn't get any castles here in New England. You kept them all for yourself. But what I do see really is a really stunning lighthouse. And looking out straight across the water, I actually see the island of Martha's Vineyard. How do you feel this benefits your audience? Well, I think it does it in a number of ways. And one way which we should not dismiss entirely is just it's

Like it makes for an entertaining hour of radio. And it's homemade. It's produced right here. It's produced in England. We're doing it together. So that's good. But in another way, when you talk about the place that you live to someone else and you hear yourself describing the place you live to somebody who doesn't live there and you hear yourself sometimes describing the problems of the place you live or you hear yourself describing some of the

great things about the place you live to somebody else, it informs, like you learn something about yourself and about what values you have. And when you hear it reflected back to you from somebody who isn't familiar with it, it really does create a wider understanding and a wider conversation. And I feel like that is one of our missions that sort of

Yeah.

And then you hear that this is happening elsewhere. So not only do you have the reflective voice of hearing yourself describing this, but you hear how other people are understanding these very same issues and taking them on as a challenge. You know, it's about connection, right? I wish I had something better to say than that. But to me, connection is part of what it's about. Yeah.

I think it's hard to kind of say, I guess, exactly how someone deals with climate anxiety or just even anxiety in general about the world.

But unfortunately, I think it causes people to compartmentalize a little bit. Like climate change is not an issue I have to worry about right now. And I think on one hand, that can be helpful for you as an individual, but also, you know, in the news, it puts it on the back burner. It puts it on the back burner. Yeah, it's almost like that attitude of I'll cross that bridge when I come to it sort of thing, which is not a great way to think. But there is just so much going on in the world right now.

In regards to the future, how do you see the future? Like my future? I guess for me, it honestly kind of makes the future more nebulous, more foggy. Like I'll sometimes think about like, oh, what do I want to do for a career? You know, think way far in the future of like having family, whatever.

whatever. And then kind of when I realized like, oh, but I don't know what the world is going to look like. I don't know where we'll be at with climate change. I think it does make things a little more uncertain. You know, you can't really look at your parents and how they saw the future versus how it is now. You know, I feel like there was maybe a little more security kind of just given that there will be beautiful places, there will be clean water, there's going to be clean air. I feel like we don't really have that

gift of security of environment which kind of upends everything you thought you could have in the future and that's kind of a bleak way to look at it but um i'm not giving up yet i i don't i i'm hopeful that people don't just throw in the towel and say well we're doomed because i don't really think that we are i think when we're put in this situation in which we need to do something there's like definitive action that needs to be taken and there's a pressing issue

we figure it out. We've always figured it out one way or another. So I guess I'm kind of seeing it as like, there's going to be some sort of moment of reckoning that the world is going to have to change its ways. And I mean, we're facing that right now, slowly but surely. I'm glad that you answered that so positively. I thought I was going to be hit with, we're all going to die sort of thing. So it's nice to hear that you have some optimism there.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to talk to me. I think it's been great. I've really enjoyed talking to you. I've never spoken to someone over in America before, so it's been really cool. Thank you. I've really enjoyed talking to you. You've given me some new perspectives on things I hadn't really thought about before. And I also have not spoken with someone from England before, so this is very exciting.

Steve says this sort of program experimentation is baked into WCAI's mission. Try new things. In fact, side note, WCAI was started by Atlantic Public Media, the nonprofit Transom is a part of, which, as you know, is all about pushing the envelope. Several years ago, Steve experimented in another way, an on-air host exchange with a public radio station in Marfa, Texas.

Steve and his family moved there for a while, and a reporter from Marfa moved to the Cape. From time to time, they'd chat with each other on air about life in the two regions and what it looked like to a stranger. And while the desert and culture of Marfa is certainly very different than ocean-bound, waspy Cape Cod, there are, believe it or not, a lot of similarities.

Same with Cornwall, England. There's plenty of overlap. Steve wonders if the next time they do something like this, if they should reach for a partner even further afield culturally and politically. And I think that it would be a much bigger challenge and might be much more dynamic to listen to. And I think about our own country, right? So we're in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We're in a very sort of, you know, liberal, progressive world.

by self-definition place. But so much of this country is thinking in different ways and to have conversations across that gap, I think would be fascinating. And I don't know what that looks like, but does that look like one of our community police officers talking to a community police officer from a state that has a whole different idea of law enforcement? It would be much more of an exciting challenge and more of a tightrope walk.

That's Steve Junker, the former managing editor at WCAI. I chatted with Steve in 2023. A few months ago, Steve asked me to listen to a story he was thinking of airing. WCAI's environment reporter interviewed a real estate broker at a waterfront property she was selling, land that's likely to be swallowed up by rising seas in the not-too-distant future.

It was an unusual piece of reporting because there were no experts, no additional voices, just the reporter narrating and the real estate broker ruminating on the challenge of selling land right next to the ocean, the waves crashing in the background. It was simple and unadorned, a clever way to encapsulate a region-wide challenge with one character and one scene.

Is that radical? No. But it is out of the ordinary. And that's what I most admired about Steve's work as managing editor. He heard the musical potential of a radio station. Thank you, Steve. Radio on, brother. Steve says the hardest part of that Falmouth to Falmouth project was all the behind-the-scenes coordinating of schedules and figuring out how to record.

You can hear what Steve had to say about how they wrangled it all at the post for this episode at transom.org. Massage your radio brain. Subscribe to Over the Transom. It's a newsletter chock full of articles, technical tips, links to some of Transom's favorite articles from over the 25 years the website's been around. And there's even a Q&A section where Jeff Town and I answer your questions about gear, recording techniques, script writing, you name it.

Check out At Transom on Substack or subscribe from the homepage at transom.org. This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling from PRX and Transom. Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison give my scripts the once-over. Thanks to Jennifer Jarrett and to WCAI for allowing me to access their studios. Also, I want to thank Stellwagen Symphonette for the music. I'm Rob Rosenthal. Thank you for listening. ♪

From P.S. and transom.org.