Leaving on a sound note
After leading Colorado Public Radio for nearly 40 years, Max Wycisk announced recently that it was about time he signed off as the broadcaster’s president.
Wycisk’s résumé is long. He took the organization from a single station to three and grew its coverage to nearly the entire state, building the organization’s broadcast audience to 600,000 listeners in the process. Now there is a staff of 122 employees, 30 of whom were added in the past five years.
Though he’s been CPR’s president since 1978, Wycisk isn’t worried about his departure. Rather than being driven by a single person, CPR is driven by the staff’s commitment to being responsible to the community, he said.
Wycisk started as a volunteer at CPR because he was interested in music. He described his taste as eclectic, fitting CPR’s range from classical to OpenAir’s new and independent music coverage.
He began his career in the era of Walter Cronkite journalism. With his last day scheduled for June 30, 2018, he’s now retiring in a different era.
Last week, Wycisk sat down with The Denver Post to talk about the changes he’s seen over the years in the media, the impact of fake news and the future of CPR.
Editor’s note: Wycisk’s responses have been edited for brevity.
Q : So, the question everyone’s expecting: Why retire?
A: The organization is in fantastic shape. Everybody retires at some point, so the question is, what’s the appropriate time. One, the state of the organization should be sound and doing good work so it’s not at crisis. Two, no matter what were to happen, there’s no way I can be here for another five or 10 years, so let’s find the next person who can lead the organization long-term and support the wonderful staff that’s here.
Q : What attracted you to radio? Why did you want to get into it?
A: I’m an educator. It’s as simple as that. I went to CU Boulder, came out with a Ph.D. in philosophy and literature, began working here out of my interest in music. And then it just grew from there. I always say, CPR is really an education organization — it’s not a media organization.
Q : When you f irst were volunteering here, what was the radio world like? How was it different from today?
A: Well, just an example, there was a commercial classical station. And a very good one. Journalism, this was Walter Cronkite. This was an era of more limited sources but I think in some ways more public service oriented. Newspapers were still …
Q : There were two in Denver at that time.
A: Exactly. There were two robust metro papers.
I think what’s changed is all those years ago, there were so many fewer content outlets. I think as they have multiplied, they’ve come to be focused — many of them — on entertainment and opinion. And when I’m talking about CPR’s OpenAir and classical music, that’s way beyond entertainment. That’s genuine art. This is not Disney entertainment. And that’s not to say that entertainment doesn’t have a place. But that’s not Colorado Public Radio’s territory.
Q : Times are tough for many media companies, but you added more than 30 people in the past f ive
years. Your revenue was up 8 percent in 2016 from 2015. How are you pulling that off ?
A: The simple answer would be, what we’re doing is important to people. The business model is voluntary contributions and business underwriting. And, increasingly, bequests. People leaving us substantial money in their estate plans. And that all comes back to value. If you’re not giving people in the community value, then it doesn’t matter. That’s not going to change. It’s just not going to change. So the future of the organization is greater responsibility. It’ll require more and more of everything we do. In journalism, we need to be doing much more enterprise journalism. It’s a requirement. This is what I mean by responsibility.
Q : Speaking of that, since we are in the era of “fake news,” how is CPR adapting to the changing media environment?
A: One fundamental aspect is we don’t editorialize. As soon as you editorialize, whether you’re The Denver Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, people think you’re coloring your reporting. We go to every length possible to say, “No, we don’t have a point of view. Our job is to give you information and for you to make decisions based on that information.”
Newspapers have always said, “But our editorials are on the opinion page and our content’s over here.” I think increasingly people don’t distinguish between those two. We’ve had to start calling our journalism fact-based journalism because of the environment you’re referencing. That’s our part of the work. If we lose that, we lose people’s trust and we lost our reason for being.
Same with music. We need to be presenting music that matters that we think of as genuine art that’s going to have a life beyond today.
A: I’ll just use the term “more.” Internally, we know we have to have a newsroom double or triple the size of the current newsroom. We know that our music sides need to be able to do more and more with Colorado musicians, to produce the wide range of music we’re already doing today, to do original performances out of the performance studio. We just did last month our 500th OpenAir performance studio session. How do we expose people to good music? It’ll be all of that.
On the journalism side, we don’t have the resources to do as comprehensive a job as we need to do, as in-depth a job as we need to do, cross the content areas that matter long term. So we’re never going to be doing sports scores. It is what matters to the state. What’s the history of an issue? What are the implications? It really is that hidden depth kind of work that you need greater resources to do, as you know very well.
Q : Now the very important question: How does a person develop a radio voice?
A: The great answer to that is, there’s no such thing. What matters is, are you honest? Is it an honest presentation? You look way back in broadcast 50 years ago, there was a conventional radio, television voice. It happened to exclude females because at that point it was thought that the female voice did not communicate well in those forms. Public radio has had a number of breakthroughs, but one of them was that early on in the history of public radio in the ’70s, a large number of females were part of the workforce.
This is part of how do you express something genuinely, not in an announcer-from-on-high way. That’s just disappeared. I think it’s disappeared in most places now. It is like we’re having a conversation.
Part of the strength of public radio always has been it’s conversational intimacy. So when you’re listening to us on whatever platform, there is that sense that we’re right across the table.