Luke Dennis is the President of Miami Valley Public Media and General Manager of WYSO 91.3 FM, based in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As a non-profit, community-owned public radio station, WYSO is committed to amplifying the voices of the Dayton region.
Tune in to learn about how Luke is dynamically leading WYSO, dedicated to furthering its mission of serving the Miami Valley and beyond with information and inspiration that improves lives and builds community.
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Episode Transcript:
David Bowman: Welcome to creating the future. I’m David Bowman
Evelyn Ritzi: and I’m Evelyn Ritzi,
David: and today we’re joined by Luke Dennis, the general manager of Southwest Ohio’s nonprofit community owned public radio station, w y, s o 91.3 FM, welcome Luke. We’re so glad you’re here.
Luke: Thank you. Really glad to be here.
David: So for those who don’t know w yso has a fascinating history, can you walk us through the story of how WYSO was started.
Luke: Yes, sure, we’re really proud of our history. We were put on the air in 1958 by three undergraduates. They were 19 and 20 years old. They raised all the money, they did the engineering. They put the tower up on the roof of the Student Union, and started broadcasting as a 19 watt station, wow, and now we’re a 50,000 watt station that serves 14 counties. So the public radio, the history of public radio, comes out of a strong connection to the educational world. The left the lower end of the dial has always historically been restricted or made available for educational purposes, so there were lots of radio I should say it all happened at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, which was a very dynamic place in the 50s, 60s and 70s, with as many as 2000 students, a lot of them science nerds. Stephen Jay Gould was a student at Antioch college. So the engineering students had been doing radio experiments for decades, running wires through Steam tunnels. They had a station called WABS, the Antioch Broadcasting System, and it was all AM at that time, yeah. And as FM started to become more popular, that’s when WYSO was put on the air by these three students who just had a vision for a radio station that served not just the campus but the broader community and the language that they put together when you listen to the first broadcast from February 8, 1958 Charles Kettering was part of the first broadcast. Lots of luminaries got involved, and these young men, there was three men who put it on, and one of them is still living, and he’s on our advisory board. They kind of read their mission statement, and they said, Hey, this is a radio station that will serve the community. We’re not going to sit here in an ivory tower cut off from the community. We’re going to open our doors to the community, and that has been our our mantra since 1958 love that. So yeah, a cool history at the station, one that we brag about.
David: So what do you think it is about? WYSO roots that still shapes its identity today?
Luke: That piece of the our mandate to keep the doors open and to serve the community, to listen to the community, to make radio with the community, yeah. I mean, right. I mean, if you ask my parents, or anyone who grew up around here in the late 60s and in through the 70s, every hour on WYSO all week long, was a different program hosted by a community member, right? Like you got your deadhead, Grateful Dead hour. You had reggae shows, polka shows. That is what still drives us today. There was a movement across the country in the 80s where radio stations, public radio stations, really professionalized and began to, they didn’t really, I mean, they kicked out their volunteers, right? They became professionalized to the point where everyone running the station was a full-time employee. Why? So never did that, and we’ve actually reinvented the model of community engagement. So it’s not so much people hosting Grateful Dead shows or reggae shows, but we when we invite the community into the building, now it’s to make a four minute feature story that we might plug into Morning Edition or All Things Considered. So it’s almost a citizen journalism kind of a model, is what it’s evolved into, but it has its roots in that early, the early days of inviting the community in, yeah, yeah.
Evelyn: That’s so fascinating. And that brings us to you, our special guest today. Could you tell us a bit about your story, your journey, and what first sparked your interest in radio, audio storytelling, and eventually what led you to WYSO?
Luke: So sure, yeah, I’ll try to be succinct. Let’s see. I grew up around here, so I grew up listening to WYSO and I knew that my parents donated because they had the T shirts. Went to Wittenberg for my undergrad, kept listening to y, so moved to Boston for grad school, and it was the beginning of being able to stream y. So, I could listen and hear Vic McCuneus, or I could hear what the weather was like. And my home, you know, in my my hometown, I’m from Wilmington. I was in a graduate program, a PhD program in theater history, and I was very lonely, and it was very isolating. And I really wanted, like my interest in theater was the communal, creative aspects of theater. And I ended up in this very academic program, spending all this time by myself, and started thinking that I wanted to drop out of grad school. And the thing that attracted me the most at the time, like as I looked around the arts community of Boston, I could see that access was a huge issue, yeah, that there were huge barriers to regular folks participating in the arts scene because of dawn, you know, it’s very expensive, and public radio is I saw that it was this free thing that had a mandate to serve anyone with a radio or an internet connection. And I was really interested in some of the early storytelling programs that were coming out of public radio, like This American Life. So I wrote a letter to WBUR in like, 2002 or three. And I said, you should hire me, because I’m interested in what you do. You know, like I I think I’d be great at it. And they actually responded, and they were like, we loved your cover letter, but you don’t have any experience, so maybe get some experience and come back and reapply. So that was in 2002 and then 10 years later, in 2012 I got a job at WYSO, so it’s always been on on my radar, and I just had to take a an unusual path to get there. And I worked for the Muse Machine here in Dayton. I worked for Victoria Theatre Association, which is now called Dayton Live. So I was still, I was doing storytelling work and arts education, primarily. And then I met Nina Ellis, who was running WYSO. And I thought, you know, if she ever offers me a job, I would find a way to take it. And did in 2012 so there you go. That’s pretty that’s actually the shortest I’ve ever told that story. So I feel pretty good about that.
David: Well, WYSO, it’s so much more than just an FM radio station. It really is a true community collaborator, right? It’s just woven into the fabric of the Dayton region.
David: Can you tell us more about some of the collaborations and partnerships you formed with local artists, not for profit, organizations, businesses, community partners, like, Yeah, talk a little bit about that.
Luke: Yeah. I think everyone gets it that you’re stronger or better positioned for success when you’re collaborative and you for us, it’s all about expanding our reach, and partnerships is a great way to do that, because with Public Radio, even in the strongest markets for Public Radio, it’s a really small percentage of the general public knows who you are, or they might know Sesame Street from their childhood or something like that, but they don’t listen. So we do engage in partnerships strategically, because it makes better content and it hopefully expands our audience. So a couple of examples of partnerships that we’ve forged in the last couple of years, even the Kettering Foundation. This is the Charles F. Kettering foundation. You know, they’re a at one time, for many years, a think tank focused on how to strengthen democracy, and they’ve started moving into a more, I guess, a hands on. How can they show up in the Dayton community and advanced democracy through partnerships. So they are our partner on a return visit of the Public Radio Group called StoryCorps. Yeah, right. So StoryCorps is a really cool model in public radio that they for decades, they have paired people who know each other well in conversation, and that becomes a rich conversation, right? If it’s a father and son or two military veterans or, you know, people with shared life experiences. And the new StoryCorps project is to put two strangers in a room together who happen to sit on opposite ends of some issue? Yeah, probably a political spectrum, right? And it’s called one small step. Is the name of the initiative that could pair somebody on the far left and somebody on the far right together to actually hopefully see that they’re both human beings and that they both love their mothers and they they both love kittens or, you know, like, whatever, like, like, what are the human connections that we’ve lost in this ridiculous, toxic internet cesspool that we’re all swimming in? Right? So the Kettering Foundation saw the value in that. They’re a big time partner, a presenting sponsor, and they’re going to help us celebrate the stories that are collected through a series of events once the series is unveiled. So there’s like one, yeah, cool partnership, right? The veteran and military Center at Wright State, right? You’re a Raider.
David: I am.
Luke: So that’s a great entity at Wright State that serves student veterans, and we have a program called veterans voices that pairs veterans in conversation. So for more than 10 years, we’ve partnered with the VMC to feed pairs of speakers into that program, and we’ve even gone so far as to train student veterans at Wright State to be the producers and the engineers of that series. So again, it’s like, how can we get the community in and make radio with the community? So that’s one that works at Wright State. And one more quick one is the local library system is so strong the Dayton Metro library system. And people, if they know anything about Public Radio, they may have heard of Tiny Desk. Yeah, right, absolutely. It’s a cool NPR project with live music from a desk that’s about this big in DC, and we created a version of that for Dayton called Tiny stacks, where we send like, rock bands or hip hop acts or jazz bands into libraries, and they set up among the stacks and, like, play great music, and that’s a partnership with Carlos Marshall and a few other people at Dayton Metro Library to try to, I don’t know, brighten somebody’s day with some free music, maybe turn them on to a new artist they’ve never heard before, and then our name is attached to it. So they maybe think, Oh, I didn’t know that. Why? So played music. Yeah, right. So you guys did a collab with Yellow Springs brewery, right? We collaborate with them on a beer. Yeah? They make a beer that’s inspired by why? So it’s called Vox Populi, which is the voice of the people, which is me, we try to be.
David: Yeah, if anybody, if our listenership can relate to anything, it’s beer. It’s beer.
Luke: Be sure to pick up a six-pack of Vox Populi. It’s a really good.
David: What is it?
Luke: It’s a pilsner, yeah, yeah. In its early days, it was an IPA, and then they’re like, we think people would buy it more if it’s a pilsner. So it’s like, a summer beer, yeah. Have you tried it?
David: I have.
Luke: Okay.
David: It is delicious. It’s good beer.
Luke: Yeah. So that you and what’s, here’s what’s so we sit in such a great spot because people want to partner with us, yeah? So how cool to have your own beer? We have our own coffee roast from Reza roast called, WYSO caffeinated? So it’s just cool to be able to partner in creative ways, right?
Eveyn: It’s such an iconic brand, you have too going back to the history, but you touched on it a little bit. But I don’t know if folks know about the Center for Community Voices and that you actually provide the hands on learning to tell audio storytelling like for regular everyday citizens. Can you talk a little bit about this and the idea of Amplifying Voices of the community and what that means to you
Luke: Sure? Yeah, this was a really smart, strategic move that Nina Ellis made. My predecessor in the general manager job is Nina. Was Nina? She still lives in Yellow Springs, so when she showed up in 2009 there, the station was in trouble. It was losing money. And it was still we were suffering from this sense of broken trust, or a loss of trust with the community that dated back to the kind of 2001 2002 timeframe when a station manager came in and said, Hey, everyone, the way to save the station and make money is to eliminate all the local shows and replace them with syndicated national shows that fundraise better in other markets. And that was so foolish, you know, I didn’t understand this community, and there was a huge backlash. There was a citizen led, listener led movement called keep WYSO local. They hosted a jazz funeral for WYSO and marched in front of the building, you know, like it was a it was really devastating for the community to have beloved local shows eliminated. So when Nina was hired, she knew that she didn’t have the money to build the staff up to do local journalism, so she started training community members to make radio with her, and I was in the first community voices class in 2011 before I got a job there. So it’s been our secret sauce since Nina got to the station, and it’s become the lens through which we make decisions, and it’s how we show up in the community. We always describe ourselves as having three content divisions, news, music and storytelling, and they are. They’re all equally important, and they work in a nice complementary synergy together, but it’s the storytelling piece that is what the Center for Community Voices does. So it’s just really important to us, and so important that when Nina stopped being the general manager and I became the GM, she became the director of the Center for Community Voices. So it actually became a formal division of our company. And at this point now, we have one of Nina’s proteges running the center. His name is Will Davis, who taught at right state for many years, and we lured him back to Ohio from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he had been teaching podcasting. So the center is the place where we’re trying to be 21st Century and be perfecting or working in the digital storytelling realm, right? So that’s if you hear a podcast at y so if you hear a high school student who made a story, it’s probably it probably came out of the center.
David: Along with creating new content, WYSO plays a really important role in preserving the records of conversations, culture, events, news, you know, things, things from the past, right? Yeah. So can you explain the work that WYSO Archives does, and why it’s so important to preserve the stories of the past for future generations?
Luke: Well, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m 47 and I just read “1984” for the first time. I read “Animal Farm” a long time ago. I love Orwell. And the main guy in “1984” if you know it, his main job, he sits at this desk all day long and the and the administration, the people running that you know that country, are constantly rewriting history. So if something is said in the history books that they don’t like or disagree with, this guy’s job is to rewrite history. So eventually, and when they do that, when they change a newspaper story, they then seek out every existing physical copy of that paper and they burn it. So it’s as if the past has actually been erased. Yeah. And if that happens long enough, or if we live in a society like we do now, where disinformation is presented as fact, you start to it gets so slippery, and you start to lose a sense of reality, yeah, and that’s where we’re sitting right now. That’s why it’s so critical to preserve with factual historical accuracy the conversations and events of the past, and not just the things that happen in Chicago or New York or LA, but the things that happen in small towns across America. So why? So has been documenting the life of this community since 1958 and we’re not going to allow someone to come in and delete all of our records, right? I mean, the past is the present, like our country is the way it is because of things that happened yesterday and 10 years ago and 100 years ago. So we see that we have a role to play in preserving the conversations and the records of what’s happening here, whether it’s good news or or scary news or, you know, and our specialty at why so has been the civil rights movement. We have a very strong collection the women’s movement. People like the documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert had one of the first feminist radio shows in the country in the late 60s. It was a music show called The Single Girl. We have digitized records of her show. We’re really strong on the Vietnam protest movement. So that’s all the you know, those are quarter inch magnetic tapes from the 60s, 70s, 80s. When you get into the 90s and the 2000s it gets a little dicey. But I want folks to know that we’re not just preserving things that happened before I was born. We also are establishing a digital asset management system where the reporting that we did yesterday will be preserved for future generations. Yeah, right. So it’s a, it’s an act of resistance.
It’s paving a path for the future to understand what happened. So it’s a, it’s actually an entire division of our organization. Now it’s, we call it the Center for radio preservation and archives, and that is locally focused. And then we also have connected to the Center for radio preservation and archives, a $5 million grant funded initiative called the HBCU radio preservation project, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation, and we run it. You know, like little, little old WYSO runs this national initiative that is working with 29 radio stations that are licensed to historically black colleges and universities. Yeah, so these are public radio stations on the left end of the dial. Most of them have no resources to do preservation work, and most of them like why so was 15 years ago, have a bunch of treasure, you know, old tapes sitting in ziplock bags or trash bags or in a closet somewhere, that the longer you wait, the more challenging it is to digitize and preserve old audio formats. So we are helping them preserve their records too.
David: I think too, like when I think about, like that historical news, right? And you think about the history of this country, and it’s really easy to get swept up in infinite scroll and just doom scrolling, and the world’s awful, and you find yourself, it’s one thing to be informed, but it’s another thing to be panicked or filled with anxiety. Yeah, and I think you can live in a news world that isn’t reality. You sort of are talking with people you don’t know and you know, concerned with problems that you can’t really influence necessarily, all everywhere, all around the world, all at once. But when you listen back to, you know, old, you know, Birmingham, Alabama in the civil rights movement, or Kent State in Vietnam, like
there are issues that other generations dealt with. And, yeah, and things, and there’s, it’s sort of odd to say, but it’s sort of comforting in that, okay, well, humans grappling with hard things isn’t unique to today. The volume, and perhaps the the amount of information is unique, but also, like looking at that and stepping back and going, like, okay, like, hey, it’s not all doom and gloom. And we’re, it’s, it’s not over, because every generation before us has said, Oh my gosh, you know, here we are. How do we deal with this? And, you know, yep, and found a way. So there’s almost a hope in hearing those old stories of, okay, well, they figured it out, we can too.
Luke: I absolutely agree. You know, they every generation has to fight these battles. Yeah, and there have been successful playbooks in the past where regular people were able to speak truth to power and change the country, yeah, and pass legislation like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. So let’s go back and listen and study and understand how they organized what they said, and maybe we’ll learn something. Yeah, I told Absolutely, that’s why we do it. Yeah, that’s one reason why we do it.
David: It’s a great Jeff Tweedy line, Wilco line. Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world, but yeah, I always hear that. And I’m like, yeah, pretty true.
Luke: We play a lot of him, yeah, on WYSO, yeah.
Evelyn: So it really can’t be overstated enough that WYSO is all about the community. You’re independent, supported by members. That’s not something that every media organization can say. It’s unique and special. So why is that relationship with members so important, more important now than ever?
Luke: Well, it’s a source of stability when your audience is your funding mechanism right? Right now we’re seeing that stations who were overly reliant on the federal subsidy are having to turn off their lights and close their doors because the federal subsidy is gone. So it’s an important source of stability for funding. We don’t answer to anyone other than this local community. We answer to our audience. So we can’t be influenced by power and wealth. We’re actually here to tell the truth and serve local people. That powerful source of financial support that is people, 1000s of people, will, I hope, insulate us from those kind of threats that are coming. But it’s a scary moment for us.
David: You think too, back to the story told about Nina, right? You know, the station had sort of gone the way of, hey, we’re gonna do national syndicated stuff, and it’s, you know, well, produced great content, but it’s not of our community, right? And I think when I think of WYSO, I think of just Dayton, right? It’s a touchstone of our community. I think I told you, like, whenever I go on a vacation, I always pack the WYSO shirt, yeah? Because if, if I’m walking around and somebody sees it, and, hey, why? So, like, I know, all right, that’s a cool person, and they’ve at least spent some, some period of time in Dayton, yeah, I’ll have something interesting to talk about. And in an in a day and age when we define ourselves a lot by left and right, or, you know, things like that, like, why? So it’s kind of transcends that you. It’s, it just is Dayton, right? And there’s different voices and different stories, and like you said with the StoryCorps project, like there’s Dayton’s a place where there’s just a lot of shared humanity, and when you run into people, or you’re at the Rotary Club, or you’re at the neighborhood bar, the local restaurant, like people don’t lead with their political views, right? They lead with, Hey, what’s going on? How’s it? How are you doing? Friend, like, Who are you, and how can I help you, and why? So kind of embodies that, like, at a very local level, yeah. And to me, like, that’s yes. Just about every NPR station across the country, or public radio station, I should say, across the country, is member supported, but some more than others, and I don’t know that they the communities feel a sense of ownership. Do you feel like, here? People feel like, why? So is ours right?
Luke: I do. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you are a listener. You don’t, you don’t work for us. So it makes me really proud to hear you describe it that way, because that’s what we aspire to. Is because, of course, if we, if we reduced other people to their an R or a D, that’s we’re done, right? That’s so reductive, and we want you know, I think every public radio station is trying to create connections among people and to be media that connects rather than divides, and I think that we historically have done it well. But the danger is that we become another echo chamber, like so many other pockets of the media, and we’re just trying really hard to not let that happen. Yeah, and you know things like StoryCorps pushes us and stretches our boundaries like we don’t ever pretend or behave as if we’re right. We just suggest that the right thing to do is to listen to other people and to hopefully develop a sense of empathy that is just sorely lacking, especially the way people treat each other on social media. And you know that that’s just one small facet of a person. And we’re trying to suggest that when we talk to each other and when we listen to each other, that sense of shared humanity has to come out. And I you know, we have an old y so t shirt where the tagline says, it reads, sounds like home, yeah. And I hope that that’s how it feels for people. And I, you know, like you people tell us, like, Oh, I was on vacation and streamed why so every day, because it helped me feel connected to home, yeah? So that’s our goal, for sure.
David: So we always end with the same question that for every guest. And so I will ask you, what’s the future that you want to create?
Luke:
Yeah, you know I want to make it, make having an attention span sexy again, right?
David:
That would make me the least sexy person on the planet, which I may already have that title. [Laughs]
Luke: So you should meet some of my colleagues in public radio. No, you know, I want to create content that is so compelling and undeniable that people, you know, they talk about driveway moments in public radio, like, Oh, I couldn’t get out of my car because I had to finish the story. So we want people to sit and engage for longer than 20 or 30 seconds. Because, you know, I see it with my own with my own kids, like the phone is always in the hand and they’re always scrolling, and even if they might accidentally stumble across a story from why. So let’s say they don’t press play and sit with it with that voice of another person. Yeah, they might read the headline, and then they scroll to the next thing. So I think, you know, the governor of Utah last week, I think he’s showing real leadership right now, and one of the many smart things he said was that social media is a cancer on our society, and one of the many you know, negative impacts of it is our attention spans have been destroyed, and it’s a very complicated time right now, and people are complicated, and the only way through this is to acknowledge the nuance and the complications, rather than moving further and further away from each other. So that’s the future that I would like to contribute to, is to be media, to create media that is constructive and positive, rather than more of the same, more the same. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don’t know how else to say it, and that’s a huge aspiration, right? But that’s, you know, public radio attracts true believers. It’s one of the last places where I’m meeting true believers like it’s a cynical age, right? But when you talk to anyone who works at WYSO these are mission driven people. So we actually believe that we can make a difference, and I think our donors do too. So I was, you know, one of our this is not a name dropping thing, but we happen to have a really good relationship with Dave Chappelle, who listens to Public Radio. He listens to why so, and we were talking last week, and he said, this needs to be a movement, like a beacon for the sane or, you know, whatever you’re going to do at WYSO if you’re going to be successful, it can’t be fringe. It can’t be you can’t have 8% name recognition in your market. Yeah, you have to start a movement where people listen to each other again and want to engage in constructive acts of community building together. So that’s what we’re talking about. We don’t make widgets and we don’t make click bait. We actually want to improve the community, which sounds insane, right? But that’s what the nonprofit sector is for and we’re a non we are the nonprofit. We’re the media arm of the nonprofit sector. Yeah, and let’s, let’s build community together. Otherwise we’re whatever. We’re lost. We’re going to just talk about each other from our living rooms and trash each other on social media. And you know that kind of toxic dialog leads to violence, and we’ve seen it like the political rhetoric is has led to actual violence, and maybe, Maybe good media can be part of the solution that will start to emerge right now. Yeah, I, I wholeheartedly embrace that future. So yeah, well, thanks for the opportunity to try to describe it, right, yeah, because that’s how you start a movement, right? We really want to start a movement. I don’t you know, I don’t know. Please join us. I think you have for many decades. It’s just reminding people and inviting them to participate, right, yeah, which I think you’ve just done great, yeah, yeah. I hope that your podcast reaches people who have never heard of why so and that they’ll try it well. Thank you so much for joining us.
David: Yeah, I really appreciate the time.
Luke: Yeah. Thank you for your good work.
