YOU CAN WORK IN “FLYOVER COUNTRY” WHERE PUBLIC RADIO REALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE

Kerri Miller (image courtesy of the Star Tribune)

You may have heard about the new weekly program hosted by Minnesota Public Radio’s (MPR) Kerri Miller called Flyover Country.

It immediately attracted my attention because (a) I love to listen to Kerri and (b) I grew up in Flyover Country and I know this part of America very well from first-hand experience.

Miller’s new show is being billed as a limited series of 12 weekly one-hour programs debuting on Sunday, September 10^th at 3:00pm on MPR’s News stations. Flyover Country will focus on issues and people from America’s heartland. On Flyover Country listeners will hear the voices of local journalists, call-ins from folks who live there and social media messages live from far-flung places.

Though MPR's Press Release doesn’t discuss wider distribution, I am assuming they will make it available to other stations. I wish Miller and everyone at MPR well with Flyover Country. I will be listening. However, I wonder if the show will be of interest to programmers in large urban areas. You see, Flyover Country has an image problem.

Flyover Country is generically defined as the part of America outside the coastal media bubbles. But Flyover Country is also a pejorative term used to describe the people who live in the Midwest and mid-south from the Dakotas and Minnesota south to Texas.  A friend of mine used to dis these places “the large rectangular states.”

A friend of mine from Sioux Falls, Chris Harper, learned about the disdain for flyover country when he published a book of the same name several years. 

Harper has a lot of credibility – he is a Journalism Professor at Temple University who honed his reporting chops at Newsweek and ABC-TV as a foreign correspondent.  

 But he found that publishers didn’t want to touch literature set in flyover country, unless it involves Garrison Keillor.

You can buy Harper’s book Flyover Country from amazon [link]. 

It is a fun read and it has details of my rock n roll management career when I was a teenager. 

NOW YOU CAN LIVE AND WORK IN FLYOVER COUNTRY

I saw a posting on the PRADO list from Julie Brin at KMUW, Wichita, with news about two open news jobs at the station. This is place where an up-and-coming journalist can make a difference.

KMUW [link] is looking for two News Reporters who love enterprise and investigative reporting.  One beat is education and the other beat covers energy and the environment. 

If you are not familiar with Wichita or KMUW, and most people aren’t, GM Debra Fraser describes it this way:

KMUW is a friendly cross between Google and W-K-R-P (... without the bean bags or Les Nessman). It's a great place to work, live and play!

Serious national news comes from Wichita.  The city of more than 400,000 people is the home of Koch Industries, owned and operated by big political donors Charles and David Koch. It is also the place where abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down and where the infamous BTK killer lived.

For more information about the jobs, go to kmuw.org/employment or contact Wichita State University HR at 316-978-3065.

Debra Fraser

KMUW looks like a good place to work. They have streamlined their schedule and focused on news and information programming. KMUW's programming choices are better than what is offered in some major markets.

We published a story about KMUW in January 2016 [link] that told about KMUW’s new HQ in Wichita’s Old Town district and GM Debra Fraser is one of the best in the system.

Plus, KMUW is doing well in the ratings. Below is a chart showing their Spring 2017 Nielsen Audio ratings compared with Spring 2016. Also in the chart below are six other stations from flyover country.