COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO “PAYS IT FORWARD” WITH WYCISK FELLOWSHIPS

Max Wycisk, retired CEO of Colorado Public Radio

Any professional person, regardless of their field, can pinpoint a person, place and time when they got their first break in the biz. Now Colorado Public Radio (CPR) is making first breaks an annual affair with the Max Wycisk Fellowships, a program that offers yearlong, paid opportunities for young professionals to learn and develop their public media skills.

The Wycisk Fellowships are named for Max Wycisk who retired last month after leading CPR for 40 years. Since the Fellowship program began in 2015. In just the last year, CPR raised $1.19 million to support the project.The Fellowships typically are awarded to folks who are in their final years of college or have recently graduated.

Choosing each class of Wycisk Fellows is a competitive process. The Fellowships are promoted on-air and on CPR’s social media pages. Applicants are then vetted and matched with the internal needs at CPR. The Wycisk Fellows work in various departments at CPR and receive $30,000, plus benefits, in compensation.  Thank of it as a paid internship.

So far, most of the Wycisk Fellows have been placed in CPR’s newsroom. They can specialize in one of four tracks: Reporting and editing, Program hosting, Digital media or CPR’s signature talk and interview Colorado Matters.

The 2018 the Max Wycisk Fellows are:

Joella Baumann

Joella Baumann is a CPR News fellow who recently graduated from Metropolitan State. 

Prior to coming to CPR, she was an intern at The Denver Post and has written for Denver Urban Spectrum. 

Hayley Sanchez

Hayley Sanchez is also a CPR News fellow who graduated from CU Boulder a year ago. 

She worked as an intern at The Denver Post, as well as at The Witness in DC and The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon. She was also a Dow Jones News Fellow at The Arizona Republic. 

After the one-year fellowship is concluded, participants are free to take their skills anywhere they choose.  Half of the graduates have remained employed at CPR.

READER TIP: Westword, a weekly newspaper in Denver, recently published an excellent story about CPR’s new CEO Stewart Vanderwilt. You can see it here.  

The June Nielsen Audio PPM ratings brought good news to Colorado Public Radio: All three of their channels (noted with CPR on the chart) increased their estimated weekly listeners compared to June 2016.

Meanwhile, Denver’s K-Love repeater lost ground.  Nationally K-Love stations are losing weekly listeners.

Yikes! No good news for WAMU. Theey continue to trail commercial news/talk WTOP in both cume and AQH share. In the June book WTOP had an estimated 1,108,100 weekly listeners and a 9.5% AQH share. WAMU had 8.3% AQH share.

Another month of Nielsen Audio PPM data, and another month of devolution at Classical/Jazz combo WRTI.   

We are planning to do a investigative story about WRTI. Perhaps they will be our next Weakest Link – the most awful performing public radio stations in the nation.

There is an interesting backstory about KXNG 91.7 FM.  For many years it was KTRU, a highly regarded college station licensed to Rice University. 

In 2011 Rice sold the license to the university of Houston, who also owns NPR News/Talk KUHF. It had a Classical music format until 2016 with the call letters KUHA. June 2016 was the last time KUHA was measured by Nielsen Audio.

KUHA couldn’t raise enough money to pay the mortgage and the license was sold in 2016 to KSBJ, one of the nation’s most successful Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) broadcasters. The call letters were changed to KXNG.

KXNG [link] is now known as NGEN Radio – short for “next generation” radio – that airs hardcore Christian Rock, hip-hop and Christian rap. Apparently that format has found believers. In 2016, before the sale closed, KXNG operated on less powerful frequency.