Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/250528
News Boom on Fourth Street By Jenni Laidman While traditional news carriers' staff strength erodes and the print forecast grows gloomy, optimistically ambitious Louisville Public Media's cup runneth over. I f WFPL had a clothes closet, it would dress like Gabe Bullard. Bullard, news director for Louisville Public Media's frst-on-the-dial radio station, may be the only guy in the newsroom wearing a tie. It's red knit and knotted into the collar of a blue-striped Oxford. Te shirt is tucked into creased trousers. So far, so good. Ten we reach the socks: exuberantly striped advertisements for his well-scufed anklehigh boots — not quite hiking boots, but certainly shambling past Ferragamo without a glance. Hip. Young. Smart. Maybe a little shabby chic. It's public radio, right? Te WFPL newsroom, in the historic Electric Building at 619 S. Fourth St., is small and crowded. Jonathan Meador, 29, the new statehouse reporter, crouches over a desk that is so close to a doorway that it surely violates some fre code or another. Producer Laura Ellis, 35, who's been with FPL since 2004, remembers when the room was nearly empty. It was just she, Rick Howlett and another reporter. Now, managing editor Howlett, at 52, is the grand old man of this 20- to 30-something tribe of reporters. "It's so much fun to have all these great people around, and everybody's really talented," he says. "I feed of it." 46 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.14 Photos by Chris Witzke It's easy to see why. With a brief break for a recession, the newsroom has grown from four or fve stafers to some nine producing news full time — including Phillip Bailey (30, local politics), Jonathan Bastian (29, news and interviews), Devin Katayama (30, education), Erin Keane (37, arts and humanities), Joseph Lord (33, online), Erica Peterson (30, environment), Meador and Howlett — with another reporter on the way early this year. Ten there are those people down the hall, the (soon-to-be) fve-person staf of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting: a group exclusively dedicated to digging up dirt. While journalists in other media fght major depression, the result of being continually upended by riptides of layofs and foods of escaping colleagues, WFPL reporters appear to be happy. Tey talk about "telling stories that matter" and "providing an important service." Te web isn't a technology disrupting their business model; it's a tool that works for them. No one moans about web click-through rates or a declining news hole (the amount of space left over after ads are put on a page, not slang for an irascible editor). Hell, FPL's news hole is 24 hours a day. Te only way it can decline is if someone messes with the rotation of the earth. OK, not exactly. Te station could shrink its news hole by running more national programming and less local, but it seems to be doing the opposite; for instance, WFPL reports are frequently part of the national midday show from WBUR in Boston, Here & Now. Bullard, 28 (but coming to terms with a rapidly receding hairline), walks to the glass wall of his ofce and takes down a small white rectangle taped there. On the paper is the creed he follows, a set of principals for public radio stations. "Te quality of craft . . . attention to detail. Also humor, idealism, the power of fnding solutions, civility, love of lifelong learning, accuracy, honesty, credibility, respect for the listener, and purpose," Bullard reads. I must be honest here: I've spent most of my adult life writing for newspapers. Tis list made me want to weep. Te spirit of journalism lives! "One thing I found encountering people who work in public radio," he says, "it's a lot like encountering people in the frst few years of journalism school. We're going to do news for the public good, and that's it." Who talks like this anymore? Well, the people at Louisville Public Media. Tings began this optimistic course in August 2007 when the board hired Donovan Reynolds to run all three stations — FPL and music stations FPK and UOL. It wasn't Louisville Public Media then. It was the Public Radio Partnership, a clunky name that Reynolds changed in one of his frst actions, adding the "Media" to signal this wasn't just radio any longer. Still, the new executive director was soul-deep in radio, with more than 30 years in public broadcasting, the last 10 as director of broadcasting for Michigan Public Media, the radio and television network for the University of Michigan. Like many people in this business, Reynolds' obsession with radio started in childhood. Te 63-year-old remembers watching the national political conventions in 1954 and telling his mother that when he grew up, "I was going to be like (iconic NBC