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This is Sound School. From PRX and Transom. I’m Rob Rosenthal. 

Back in 2007, Steve Junker was working odd jobs. He re-shingled old houses. He also worked as a bridge tender, raising and lowering a bridge so boats could get in and out of one of the harbors here in Woods Hole. 

He’d never worked in radio but that didn’t stop WCAI, the local public radio station, from asking if he’d like to try it out. They thought he had a good voice and they needed someone to replace an on air host. 

In fact, funny story. This host that needed to be replaced, he was finishing up his shift on Morning Edition, the daily news show, and he made some sort of mistake on air. It wasn’t the first time. He’d made lots of mistakes. But, this time, he turned off his mic. Stood up. And yelled “I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE!” Then left the building. For good. He slammed the door so hard on his way out the cover to the thermostat popped-off. 

Anyway, Steve said “yes.” He’d give it a shot. He got trained-up and started hosting one of the mid-day shows from NPR. Steve recently told me that from then on he just kept saying yes. 

Do you want to host All Things Considered? Yes.

Do you want to host Morning Edition? Yes. 

The governor is visiting Cape Cod tomorrow, do you want to interview him? Yes. 

There’s a big snow storm. No one can make it in. Since you live in walking distance to the station, can you keep us on the air? Yes. 

Steve started reporting. He hosted the weekly news round-up with newspaper reporters from around the region. He launched a weekly program called “The Fishing News.” (This is Cape Cod, after all.)

He took over managing the station’s web site. He started an e-newsletter. 

In 2017, he was asked to be the station’s Managing Editor for news. He said yes. The station’s coverage expanded. He wrote grants to hire young reporters including someone to work the climate change and environment beat. 

That’s an overly-simplified accounting of Steve’s 18 years at the station. For instance, I left out all the awards the station earned under Steve’s leadership. They cover the walls. But, in short, Steve’s fingerprint could be heard in a lot of the programming at WCAI. 

Now, Steve can no longer say “yes.” A couple of weeks ago he was laid off. 

WCAI is owned by WGBH, the public radio and TV giant. ‘GBH has been hurting financially. Last year they laid off over 30 staffers. In May of this year, another nine were let go. Then, in June, just a couple of weeks ago, forty-five more people were laid off – six percent of the overall staff. Steve was part of that round of lay-offs. The only one at WCAI to be let go. 

This is disappointing, to say the least. Steve’s a friend, of course, so I have, you know, a personal connection here. But, I also feel sad for listeners here; the station has lost an essential staffer with a unique ear.  He liked to think of a radio station as a musical instrument.

Steve - Think about one of those old organs with all the different little stops on it and layers of keys. And then there's these strange pedals down below that you step on while you're playing, and it can make almost any sound imaginable. It can make like choir sounds and woodwind sounds and brass sounds and even percussion.

And I think that a radio station is a little bit like that, but that we are often playing like the same couple of keys over and over and they can be really good keys, like our, you know, dedication to bringing timely news to our community is so important. 

But, it's this cool instrument with all these things that we hardly ever think about trying to use or am like, what can't it do is almost the question you want to be asking What can't our radio station do? And the only way you find that is by trying different things.

I spoke to Steve in 2023 for Sound School because he was producing a series of curious shows that exemplified his way of thinking. The idea for this series came to him two years earlier during a cold and quiet Cape Cod winter with covid still in full swing. Steve was feeling cooped up and restless. 

Steve - Sometimes there's this hunger for the world… And so I started thinking about like how we can bring the world to us in a very kind-of local way, because our mission is to be as local as possible as a radio station. You know, we carry NPR programming, we carry BBC broadcast programming. But our mission here at the station with the reporters and all the people, the it's a small staff, but everybody is dedicated to local programming. How do we make the station feel like it really belongs to the listeners who are here in this region? So we're thinking about like, how can we make an international program that feels local? That was… the big challenge to tackle.

Steve thought some more. And he remembered there are a lot of towns in England that have the same names as towns here on Cape Cod. 

Steve - We serve a town called Truro, There's a Truro, England. 

There’s a Barnstable in England. There’s a Barnstable on Cape Cod. 

Steve - We're in the town of Falmouth. There is a Falmouth, England.  

And it just so happens that many of these towns are located in Cornwall, a county in England that juts out into the Atlantic like Cape Cod does. In fact, the two peninsulas practically point toward each other across the ocean. 

And, there’s this fun fact: Marconi, back in 1903, the early days of his radio transmission experiments, he sent the very first two-way transatlantic signals from cape cod to Cornwall.

With so many commonalities, it made sense to Steve to find radio stations in these towns and email them. Out of the blue. And Steve didn’t have anything more to share than this nascent idea of co-producing something with a radio station in another country. What would they make? He had no idea. 

So he wrote to a bunch of stations and got a positive response from source fm. Only, get this!... Steve hadn’t written to that station. Someone at another station forwarded the email to source fm. 

And where is source FM located? Falmouth, England. 

Steve - You're always looking for signs. And so this was a sign, right? I'm always looking for signs. Maybe it's just me. (laughs)

Source FM is a volunteer station. Like a community station here in the states. After getting the email, Steve looked at their website. Saw how dedicated they were to the local community – like WCAI – and he thought “yeah. This is a good fit.” Which was further reinforced when he spoke to Simon Nield. He hosts a couple of music shows at the station and he’s on the board of directors. 

Steve – And once I talked to Simon, and his energy was so upbeat and non-proscriptive. He was much more interested in exploring the idea than rushing into a formalized idea of what it could be, then I felt “Once it’s a conversation between people, something can grow out of it.”

But the question remained, what? What would they produce? Steve talked to his staff. They initially thought “maybe we can co-report something.” But Steve was wary of that. CAI’s a small station. He only has a couple of reporters on his staff. He didn’t think he could take them off their beats to co-report stories. They needed and idea that was less of a lift.

Both stations got on a video call. Four staffers from each station. And they started listing issues each community faced. They found a lot of common ground. 

Steve - Climate change. As these peninsulas sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean, we are on the kind of on the forefront of impacts of climate change, whether that means increased intensity of storms or storm erosion, coastal change and they too have that. 

We’re both seasonal tourist destinations, which means there's, you know, correspondence in economy. But there's also a lot of correspondence in pressures on housing. Affordable housing is vanishing in both communities and that means for like you know, the the core workers of those communities. And then short term rentals have changed the way the whole housing market looks for both areas and everybody's scratching their head trying to figure out how to get a handle on that. 

The list kind of went on and on. I think there must have been 12 items on there that we both like put a tick mark against. And once we had that, that we thought, “Well, how do we connect those ideas? 

As they batted ideas around they eventually agreed on one fundamental: connect people. 

Steve -  What we were interested in is hearing the people from Cape Cod and the people from Cornwall, England. And if we have this list of topics and issues that we can start working off of, we can find people at the center of those stories and connect them in direct conversation so that they are talking to each other and we're just recording it and producing the program out of that. And and once we made that leap as an idea, it became fairly straightforward in that, you know, that's kind of like what we do already.

Rob - Was there ever a test run or did you guys just like, “let's go!” 

Steve - Well, the test run was supposed to be this conversation between two grocers, a small town grocer in in Cornwall and Falmouth, England, and a small time grocer in Martha's Vineyard. Small time. He runs one of the biggest grocery stores, but he's an independent grocer on the island of Martha's Vineyard. And put them together and talk about this pandemic experience and almost as soon as like we started the tape running and we were done all our “check, check, check, “and we got to use the signal. Okay, can you hear us? And there's a bit of fussing because everybody's in there, you know, and we're in the grocers office and maybe the Wi-Fi isn't really that great, the Internet connection. But we finally get it up and running. And as soon as they started talking like, “Hi. Hi.” the rest of us just kind of fell silent. 

Clip – Grocers introducing each other and their shops. (fades under)

Steve -  It really felt like, oh my gosh, this is going to work. These people have something to say to each other. And the test was that was supposed to be a test, we just thought, this is great… We don't have to go any further than this to see if this is going to work.

Clip – (fades up) Grocers talking about their initial response to Covid. (fades under)

Steve – The other thing that we learned from that first conversation, completely I did not anticipate is the sound of the accents of the voices could carry a lot for listeners just off the bat.

Clip – (fades up) Grocers talking about their initial response to Covid) 

Rob - I love the idea of strangers talking to one another. 

Steve - Well, that's a great idea if it works, right? (laughs) And I do think it worked. But… each time we set up one of these conversations, there's a question about how well it's going to work because you're introducing two people who don't necessarily well, two people who don't know each other, and then you're not quite sure where it's going to go. 

Turns out for us, it's worked…brilliantly and in part because and it took somebody else to point this out to me, which is… the two people are engaging each other as peers around a common experience or a set of information… or just work life correspondence and they know what to talk about. So as long as we find two people that that have this overlap, they're almost there ready for us to get it out of the way so that they can start asking each other questions and compare notes. You know, if we've got two police officers, they are so ready to talk about what it means to police in their communities.... And the same with two oyster farmers. They want to know, like, what do you do over there and why don't you do that? And what's happening with your young oyster farmers? They have so many things to talk about that really the job for us is to make sure that they state their name clearly at the beginning… and then, you know, just stay out of the way and edit it all up at the end so it's something fun to listen to. 

Clip – Oysterman talk about how many people fish and how young people are involved. 

WCAI and source FN have now produced two shows. They’re called “Falmouth to Falmouth.” Both are an hour long. A third is in the works. The shows included the grocers and oystermen, as we heard. But also young people talking about climate change. A couple of artists. People involved with housing issues. 

One intriguing conversation was between two police officers. There are profound questions about policing to discuss. Responding to people with addiction or mental illness… the use of firearms by police… I felt the conversation about those topics only skimmed the surface.  Of course, the two officers had only just met each other and want to be polite, i suppose. But even though Steve said it was important for the reporters to press record and step back, from time to time they asked questions in an effort to cover ground that was being missed or to dig deeper.  Here’s reporter Eve Zuckoff asking the two officers about race and policing. 

Clip – Both officers talking about race. They also say good-bye to each other. 

Clip – Hosting. Source FM host and CAI host recording themselves on beaches. (fades under)

It’s worth noting for a moment how the hour-long shows were put together. When the conversations were edited down, they typically left in the hellos and goodbyes like we heard with the police officers.  Steve says that’s usually something they’d cut out but in this case it made sense to leave those in to help the chat feel more conversational.

Clip – (fades up) More hosting from the beach. (fades under)

As for hosting, Steve said they wanted to get the hosts out of the studio and on location so it felt like they were talking to each other across the ocean. 

Rob - How do you feel this benefits your audience, 
 
Steve - Well, I think it does it in a number of ways. And one way, which we should not dismiss entirely is just it's like it makes for an entertaining hour of radio, right?... And it's homemade. It's produced right here. It's produced in England. We're doing it together. So that's good. 

But in another way… when you talk about the place that you live to someone else and you hear yourself describing the place you live to somebody who doesn't live there and you hear yourself sometimes describing the problems of the place you live or you hear yourself describing some of the great things about the place you live, too…
like you're… (sighs and pauses to find the right word) you learn something about yourself and about what values you have and when you hear it reflected back to you from somebody who isn't familiar with it, it really does create a wider understanding and a wider conversation. And I feel like that is one of our missions that sort of sneaks in there is to, you know, when you start talking about what it is to live on Cape Cod and the challenges for people to find housing, or you start talking about what it is to live on Cape Cod as a young person who's exposed to kind of these scary ideas of climate change, not as a vast idea, but as something that's transforming the land where you live right now and where your family has lived. And then you hear that this is happening elsewhere. So not only do you have the reflective voice of hearing yourself describing this, but you hear how other people are understanding these very same issues and taking them on as a challenge… it's about connection, right? I wish I had something better to say than that. But to me, the connection is part of what it's about.

Clip – Touching conversation between two teens talking about climate change. 

Steve says this sort of program experimentation is baked into WCAI’s mission. Try new things. In fact – side note – WCAI was started by Atlantic public media, the non-profit Transom is a part of which, as you know, is all about pushing the envelope.  

Several years ago, Steve experimented in another way– an on-air host exchange with the public radio station in Marfa, Texas. Steve and his family moved there for a while and a reporter from Marfa moved to the cape. From time to time, they’d chat with each other on air about life in the two regions and what it looked like to a stranger. 

And while the desert and culture of Marfa is certainly very different than ocean bound, waspy cape cod, there are, maybe surprisingly, a lot of similarities. Same with Cornwall, England. There’s plenty of overlap. Steve wonders if the next time they do something like this if they should reach for a partner even further afield culturally and politically. 

Steve - I think that it would be a much bigger challenge and might be much more dynamic to listen to. And I think about our own country, right? So we're in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, we're in a very sort of, you know, liberal, progressive, you know, by self-definition place. But so much of this country is thinking in different ways. And to have conversations across that gap… I don't know what that looks like, but does that look like, you know, one of our community police officers talking to a community police officer from a state that has a whole different idea of law enforcement?... It would be much more of an exciting challenge and more of a tightrope walk. 

That’s Steve Junker. The former Managing Editor at WCAI. I chatted with Steve in 2023. 

A few months ago, Steve asked me to listen to a story he was thinking of airing. WCAI’s environment reporter interviewed a real estate broker at a water front property she was selling. Land that is likely to be swallowed up by rising seas in the not too distant future. 

It was an unusual piece of reporting because there were no experts. No additional voices. Just the reporter narrating and the real estate broker ruminating on the challenge of selling land right next to the ocean, the waves crashing in the background. It was simple and unadorned. A clever way to incapsulate a region-wide challenge with one character and one scene. 

Is that radical? No. But it is out of the ordinary. And that’s what I most admired about Steve’s work as managing editor. He heard the musical potential of a radio station. 

Thank you, Steve. Radio on, brother. 

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Steve says the hardest part of the “Falmouth to Falmouth” project was all the behind-the-scenes coordinating of schedules and figuring out how to record. Hear what Steve had to say about how they wrangled it all at the post for this episode at Transom dot org.  

To massage your radio brain, subscribe to Over the Transom. A newsletter chock full of articles, technical tips, links to some of Transom’s fav articles over the 25 years website’s been around. And, there's even a Q + A section where Jeff Towne and I answer your questions about gear...recording techniques...script writing...you name it. Check out "@transom" on Substack or subscribe from the homepage at transom dot org.

This is Sound School, the backstory to great audio storytelling. From PRX and Transom. Genevieve Sponsler and Jay Allison give my scripts the once over. Thanks to Jennifer Jerrett and to WCAI for allowing me to access to their studios. 

I’m Rob Rosenthal. Thanks for listening.

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