Matt Shafer Powell puts local news in your ear

by Paige M. Travis

Forty looks good on Matt Shafer Powell. The father of three, fit and conservatively dressed, fits right in with the other urban lunchtime diners in Market Square. He came to at least one Sundown in the City here—to see British pop band Keane with his kids. They’re no Coldplay, but the Powell family had a great time. This is his first time at the square’s newest installation, Oodles Noodle Bar, where he tries the lasagna. Speaking in a pleasant voice tinged with a slight Midwestern twang, the news director of WUOT settles down to a conversation about his career in—and his love for—public radio.

The hip dad may typify the modern NPR listener, but public radio existed mostly in the background of Powell’s life until the early ‘90s when he was about 28 years old. He remembers the exact moment he became a “public-radio junkie.”

“I was listening to a story that was about a 99 or 100 car pileup on I-17 near Charleston. NPR did a story about six months afterward, and it was a long feature. They talked to some of the people who were in it. It was a really well-done story.”

The news director of WUOT 91.9 FM was having what is known in public-radio lingo as a “driveway moment.” Such experiences are evoked by radio hosts during fund drives to remind listeners of how their lives are improved by the kinds of stories produced by National Public Radio and their affiliates. Powell’s eyes widen as he recalls the moment 12 years ago.

“I was coming home from work, and I wasn’t going anywhere until I heard the end of that story. And when I did come in the house, my eyes were puffy and red; I’d been weeping in the car. At that point I though, my God, what an incredible powerful medium. And I was hooked from then on.”

Although the news team of Powell, Ann Lloyd and Chrissy Keuper has been gelling for the past two years, longtime listeners will note some small attempts at news coverage in the past which took the form of local headlines or the occasional short feature. Powell explains that general manager Regina Dean “had an idea all along how she wanted to do local news, but was never able to line up all the elements.” In Powell she found an experienced news reporter who also understood a public radio station like WUOT and how the two might work together. As a testament to how professional Powell’s first stories sounded—and how seamlessly they fit into regular programming— more than a few listeners thought his story about the Fifth Avenue Motel on Dec. 20, 2002, was being broadcast nationwide on “Morning Edition” rather than just locally.

The format of Michigan Radio, the station Powell came from, was all-news; WUOT is a dual format, which means it broadcasts a combination of public-radio programs alongside its homegrown shows, which in 91.9’s case are mostly classical, opera and jazz. Powell acknowledges the murmur of suggestion from some local listeners that the station ditch its classical format and become all-news in order to program more National Public Radio shows like “Talk of the Nation” or “The Diane Rehm Show”—or more diverse music programs like “World Café” or “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime in the near future,” Powell says. “Because we have a very local listening base, and if we were to do a format change like that, yeah, we’d add some news listeners, but we’d also be abandoning a large section of the community that have absolutely no other options.”

Powell’s father is a prime example of what WUOT’s listeners could do: When Michigan Radio changed its format from classical to all-news, he stopped listening—even when his own son was on the air.

The issues of listener loyalty and dual format can butt heads during times of extremely newsworthy events.

“If there is an event that’s of critical importance, we’ll break into programming. It’s a no-brainer,” he says. “Something like 9/11—that’s an extreme example, but you break into programming.”

Concerning other significant but less-catastrophic events—like the recent presidential debates—Powell asks the question: “Is it important enough to break into the music programming? If you break into programming, you’re going to make a lot of people mad who are listening to the music saying, ‘Hey, I can find this somewhere else if I want.’ If you don’t, you make people mad who say, ‘Hey, why can’t I hear the president’s press conference?’”

Powell says he and Program Director (and morning concert host) Daniel Berry discussed at length whether to broadcast the presidential debates, ultimately deciding to direct listeners to the online broadcast on NPR’s website.

Powell’s relationship with radio started at an early age. By the time he was a senior in high school in his native state of Michigan, Powell was a self-proclaimed “radio nut.” He knew the names of all the local on-air disc jockeys, and the summer after graduation he visited every station in his enthusiasm and willingness to learn. He told station managers, “I’ll do anything you want. I’ll empty the garbage; I’ll sweep the floors. I just want to be around radio, I want to be involved.”

He got the brush-off from most stations, but the news director at a country-western format commercial station gave him an internship.

“That summer I worked at that station like 10, 11 hours a day. I loved it. Didn’t get paid a penny.”

During his college tenure at Central Michigan University, Powell worked at the student station, where the early hits of U2, REM and Red Ryder were on rotation. In retrospect, not all of the discs he spun were life-changing gems. “Some of it was pretty exciting. Some of it was pretty awful,” he says. As a senior, he worked weekends as an overnight deejay at an adult contemporary station, and after college he worked as a news reporter at the country-western station where his teenage dreams of radio had been piqued. There, he was one of eight reporters on staff in the 24-hour newsroom, and he was also a production director at an album-rock station.

Powell’s experience with audio equipment led him into what he calls a “cushy corporate job” as an audio engineer for about 10 years. Perhaps because the position wasn’t as touchy-feely as non-profit radio, he speaks of it with what seems like a measure of guilt—or maybe a bit of longing.

The cushiness didn’t last. He and the rest of the 250-employee division got pink slips. Powell’s returned to radio when a friend at Michigan Radio tipped him off to a job opening as a news reporter at that station’s Western Michigan satellite station. Powell was pretty sure he didn’t want to go back into commercial radio, he says. “But public radio—that’s something else. I’m something of a studio rat; I love to produce audio; I love turning the knobs and pushing the buttons. And I also like to write. So I thought public radio is the opportunity to use all of these tools to create things that I like to listen to.”

Since Powell’s early experiences in radio, the technology that governed the medium—the reel-to-reel tapes, the splicing, the soundboards—had been pretty much the same. Here in the 21st century, all things digital dominate most radio newsrooms, but Powell is sentimental about some things, particularly the hands-on activity of editing—marking the right spots with a grease pencil, cutting the tape, and taping it back together.

“The one thing that’s missing is the aesthetic: you could kind of hold the grease pencil out of your mouth”—he demonstrates, talking around the imaginary pencil—“like a cigarette, you know. And you sit in a dark room by yourself with this grease pencil hanging. That’s missing. But other than that I’d never want to go back to those days.”

What digital editing lacks in romanticism, it makes up for in speed.

“It is still amazing to me some of the things I can do digitally—and so fast!” he says. And that time differential means more time for in-depth reporting and research, not to mention more creative storytelling.

“When you’re producing you can be a little bit more adventurous,” says Powell, “because if you make a mistake all you have to do is hit the undo button.”

In the next year, WUOT will continue to produce local news features that are spliced into “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered,” responding to events like the Farragut train derailment or covering human-interest stories like last month’s Prom of the Stars, a dance for mentally handicapped adults. Powell says that story exemplifies how radio journalism, through sounds and words, can supercede the visual bites of television news.

“You could’ve done a cool TV story about it, but I think it would’ve lacked a little bit of the emotion that’s generated when people are using their imaginations to fill in the blanks.”

And the Prom of the Stars story included plenty of emotion; Powell (and this reporter) is moved all over again while recollecting the segment of the piece in which Paula gets dressed up for the event. The woman, simple and sweet, agreed to let Powell follow her around with a microphone, but he says she was very aware of its presence. Until he suggested she look in a mirror after her makeover was complete.

One of the women helping the prom attendees found a compact. “She opened up the compact, and at that moment Paula lost all sense that I was there,” says Powell. “I was still standing there with the microphone, but it was like all that other stuff went away, and all she could see was the image of herself in the mirror.... It was an amazing kind of moment.”

Without any description from the reporter, listeners could hear in Paula’s voice how overwhelmed she was, how the tears were welling up, how beautiful she felt at that moment. Anyone listening in a parked car was likely temporarily unable to leave the vehicle.

“I think you are able bring the listener to a certain place and give them enough information that they get a sense of where they are. But unlike video or film, you don’t fill in all the blanks. A listener can hear someone’s voice and—just like when you’re reading a book or a newspaper or anything like that—you can come to some of your own conclusions about what that person might look like or what they’re wearing. That’s one of the things I love about radio.”

December 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 50 © 2004 Metro Pulse