KUT Radio
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When Kevin Klose, president and CEO of National Public Radio, is asked to reflect on KUT 90.5 FM Radio, the public radio station that makes its home at The University of Texas at Austin, one word comes to his mind: Vitality. Klose points to KUT's outstanding leadership, its production of the nationally syndicated program Latino USA, and its innovative use of internet technology as signs of KUT's vitality. He is echoing what listeners in Austin have long known: KUT is a terrific radio station. Austin has responded to KUT as a vital force for decades. The station is unquestionably one of the city's favorites. The Austin Chronicle readers ranked it the best radio station in Austin every year from 1980 to 1990 and a number of years since, including 2001. Arbitron, the radio industry's most important collector of audience data, frequently ranks KUT among the best radio stations in Austin, often above the commercial radio stations. In Arbitron's spring 2001 rankings, KUT rated first among 25-54-year-old listeners. It wasn't the first time, and it's unlikely to be the last. The remarkable success of KUT's fund drives is another measure of its success in Austin. Public radio stations rely on listener membership contributions for upwards of 50% of their operating budgets. Listeners, however, tend to mark fund drives as their least favorite aspect of public radio air time. Recognizing this, KUT's fall 2001 membership drive was abbreviated to span only eight days. The drive's goal was $500,000, but KUT raised $645,000, a larger amount than funds raised by public radio affiliates in Houston and Dallas, markets that are significantly larger than Austin's. Clearly, Austin doesn't just listen to KUT, it steps forward to support it as well. While a large local audience is important to KUT as an Austin radio station, it's also an unusual accomplishment for public radio stations nationally. Tom Thomas, Co-CEO of the Station Resource Group, a membership organization of public radio's leading broadcasters, says KUT "enjoys one of the higher levels of listening in its community among public radio stations of its size." From his perspective, two things may explain KUT's ability to achieve such a strong audience. First, the character of the Austin community makes it a good fit for public radio. In addition to the government, the University, and the great music scene, Austin is populated by, in Thomas's words, "a lot of curious, engaged, active people." Second, and just as important, KUT continues to offer programming that appeals to a large range of people, and the station is uniquely in touch with its audience. 
Stewart Vanderwilt, KUT's general manager, agrees. "More than just about any other station," Vanderwilt says, "KUT truly sounds like the community it's in." While many public radio stations rely primarily on standard NPR programming, making a station in California sound basically the same as a station on the east coast, KUT has strived for variety in its program schedule. Vanderwilt thinks that "KUT has done a really good job of integrating the NPR programming that the NPR listeners in our community seek and demand with the sound and soul of Central Texas." A glance at KUT's program schedule shows that the NPR programming is nestled happily amid plenty of local programming. KUT offers listeners popular NPR programs such as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and the newly added Marketplace and The World. It also offers other syndicated shows like A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk. But listeners are treated to distinctly Austin programming as well. John Aielli's Eklektikos, KUT's longest-running program, is a weekday music and talk show that defies categorization. On any given day, Aielli (M.A. '70) may treat his listeners to a symphony, a live performance of a local jazz ensemble, an interview with personalities ranging from Fresh Air's Terry Gross to the folks at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, or excerpts from a play opening that weekend in Austin. Aielli's show is so addictive that Austinites transplanted in other cities have been known to tune in via the web to hear what's happening on Eklektikos. 
KUT is also aware that Austin is considered the Live Music Capital of the World, and the station meets the needs of its music-savvy audience by offering music programming of surprising range. Between them, KUT favorites Paul Ray and Larry Monroe cover jazz, rhythm and blues, Texas music, and a mishmash of other sounds. Horizontes features the music of Latin America. Jeff McCord's Left of the Dial is a "fevered soundtrack" designed to kick off the weekend. McCord recalls how Duke Ellington was known to say "no boxes" when asked to classify his music, and this is the motto that McCord takes to heart each Friday night. How does a great radio station keep its vitality and continue to evolve? When Stewart Vanderwilt took the helm as general manager in February 2000, he had to answer that very question. While KUT had developed a high profile locally, Vanderwilt questioned KUT's national reputation. According to him, public radio stations generally make their name nationally in two ways. First, they produce syndicated programming. In KUT's case, for example, it produces both In Black America and Latino USA. In Black America, hosted by John Hanson, is a weekly half-hour program that examines thought-provoking stories about the African-American experience. The program is heard on 20 stations nationwide. 
Latino USA, a radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective. This weekly half-hour program, launched in 1993, is distributed to 172 stations in 31 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It has a loyal following and has won numerous national awards. The other way that stations build a national reputation is through their own news and public affairs production, which allows them to contribute to a national conversation. NPR, as the leading public radio news and affairs distributor, relies significantly on individual stations throughout the country for regional and local coverage. When a major story breaks in Chicago, they look to the resources of the Chicago affiliate to cover the story. In Central Texas, however, there has never been a station with a local news bureau available to NPR. The need is there. By Vanderwilt's estimation, NPR averages one story a week out of Central Texas. Given that Austin is the capital of the country's second most populous state and home to its largest university, as well as the site of more than 2,000 high tech companies, this isn't surprising. Austin's rapid growth is becoming increasingly recognized as a national case study for 21st century growth. There is news of national interest being made in Central Texas, but without a local news bureau, that news isn't getting out. And when it is, it's because NPR has had to send in its own correspondents or rely on freelancers for the story. KUT is responding to this obvious need by building KUT NEWS, a news service that will focus on the issues and interests of the Austin community with the context, perspective, and production values expected of NPR. Tom Thomas points out that in building a news bureau, KUT is following the lead of stations in the nation's largest cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and that such news bureaus "increase the quality and quantity of news programming" overall. KUT NEWS will give the news of Central Texas greater exposure on a national level, and on a day-to-day basis the service will provide its listeners with the high quality local news they have been missing. 
Building a news bureau is a formidable task, according to Stewart Vanderwilt. It requires a major infrastructure within the station to produce local news, as well as increased funding and personnel. KUT brought Emily Donahue, a veteran journalist, on board as its new manager of news and information. Previously a producer at the Minnesota Public Radio program Marketplace, Donahue will be responsible for organizing a newsroom, which will require developing new productions and a facilities redesign. With major funding from Mattsson-McHale Foundation, the William and Salomé Scanlan Foundation, as well as the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, KUT hopes to launch its news bureau in the spring of 2002. KUT has already produced award-winning news documentaries, and while documentaries will not be the focus of the news bureau, they may very well be a component. In 2001, KUT partnered with NPR to produce a one-hour documentary on stories about the oil century, from the discovery of oil at Spindletop, Texas, to the status of domestic oil production today. The piece aired first as a three-part series on All Things Considered and was expanded into a one-hour documentary that aired on KUT and then broadcast on dozens of stations nationwide. Other documentaries on Lady Bird Johnson and the Kerrville Folk Festival also received national coverage and brought stories from Central Texas to listeners all over the country. 
Building a local news bureau is a wise investment because, as Vanderwilt says, "KUT is in it for the long haul." And already it's been quite a haul. KUT's history stretches back almost to the beginning of radio itself. In 1912, a group of faculty and students in the University of Texas physics department was anxious to try out the new technology and created a tiny AM radio station. By 1922, the station had become WCM, a predominately classical music station that the University hoped to use as an educational tool. Funding difficulties led the station to turn to the state Department of Markets and Warehouses (Department of Agriculture), which agreed to maintain the equipment in exchange for a daily hour-long broadcast about weather conditions. That partnership was short-lived, however, and by 1925 the station was back under the control of the UT physics department and renamed KUT. The station disbanded in 1929, when funding and faculty workloads became too heavy a burden. It remained off the air until 1958, when another generation of UT students felt the need for their own radio station and re-launched a new KUT. In those first years of its new life, KUT was far from the professional radio station it is today. It was a de facto amateur radio station utilizing unpaid student volunteers, shutting down over the holidays and summers, and not giving much concern to programming schedules and ratings shares. At the time, few people had FM radios -- Congress had yet to pass the "all-channel" legislation that would require radio manufacturers to make radios with the ability to receive both AM and FM frequencies. 
When that legislation was passed, KUT was set to be a player on the Austin radio scene. But when station KMFA was launched in 1967, KUT had to reconsider its mission. KMFA designated itself the "arts" station and played mostly classical music, like KUT. So KUT, already becoming professionalized at this time, with paid employees and a non-student director, decided to focus on playing the kind of music listeners couldn't find elsewhere. It kept much of its classical music base, but added jazz, folk, and rock. A morning program evolved into Eklektikos, currently KUT's most listened-to original show. And then in 1971, the station began carrying the newly created NPR broadcasts, marking itself as a full-fledged professional radio station serving the Austin listening public. By 1982, when KUT upgraded its radio signal to 100,000 watts, with a radius of 97 miles, it had clearly hit the big time. Long-time staffer Betsy Pilkington identifies this as the single most important event in her 20-year tenure at the station. Since then, KUT has been growing and evolving into the station that Austinites can't get enough of. In 1996, it expanded to become the radio station that listeners in San Angelo can't get enough of, either, when it added its first repeater station, KUTX San Angelo, bringing public radio to that stretch of West Texas for the first time. Another unique aspect of KUT is that the station has one of only eight satellite uplink posts in the country. All NPR stations can receive programming from the satellite, but few can send programming up to the satellite, which requires much larger equipment and technology. As a satellite uplink station, KUT studios are frequently used by other stations, by NPR, and by independent producers. During the presidential election in 2000, for example, the studios were in constant use throughout the day, and the BBC even used them overnight. On any given day, KUT may be hosting Ira Glass of This American Life, who might conduct an interview from Chicago with someone sitting in one of KUT's studios. Terry Gross recently interviewed National Book Award-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen from Philadelphia while he sat in Austin. 
Stewart Vanderwilt maintains that the success of KUT cannot be separated from the community it serves. He says that KUT is fortunate to operate in a community that has the three pillars that produce a good public radio community, plus one more. It has a major university base. It's a state capital. And it's a technology center. In addition, Austin is a renowned music and cultural community. The true genius of KUT is that the station has capitalized on these assets, becoming a strong, varied, and important voice locally and, increasingly, on a national level. This is clear to every Austinite who adjusts his or her radio dial to 90.5 FM. And to NPR's president and CEO, Kevin Klose, as well, who says, "NPR looks to KUT to help us define the future of public radio in America." By VivŽ Griffith, with historical research from John Wheat and Moira Muldoon |
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