What did you have to “unlearn” from your non-comm experience to become a commercial programmer?
When you go from non-commercial to commercial, you have to stop analyzing things so critically; things are much more black and white.  On the non-commercial side people can actually stop and think and talk and discuss. You’re not on this treadmill of make the bottom line and get results.  It’s a totally different animal as far as how Arbitron runs your life.  What you do is always contributing to the basic tenets of ratings, like TSL and cume.  You have to pay attention to those things a lot more closely in commercial radio than you do in non-commercial radio. It isn’t so much about the members on the commercial side, but about the listening audience and how to get as many of them as possible. 
          There were several things that were a little bit of a shock going from non-comm to comm.  The workload just became so massive that I had to learn to prioritize.  I had to prioritize a lot of discussion out of my life.  You know, you just make decisions and move on, and that’s just the way it goes.  I probably felt bad for the first three or four months that I couldn’t have conversations with people and talk over stuff, but it’s a different reality so you learn to get over it.      

Flesh out what that reality is. 
On the commercial side of things you use research and crunch numbers, and look at what everybody else is doing all the time.  That guides a lot of what commercial radio is about.  There are a few people in commercial Triple A radio that don’t look at other people.  They don’t make decisions based on what so-and-so did, whereas there are an awful lot of them that do.  At The X we looked at some of the standard bearers of our format to see what direction they were moving in, because when they eliminate the marketing budget and they eliminate the research budget, you have to take a pulse, take the temperature, somewhere.  And that’s just reality. 

When the opportunity to become WYMS PD came along, did you have any reservations about going back to public radio?
I’d be lying if I said no.  But it was just time.  It was something I’d identified with a number of levels.  One was that there’s a lot of downsizing that goes on in commercial radio these days, and I had to oversee an awful lot of that at the Wilks cluster in Reno.  I would tell people who were still employed there that attitude was a very important part of their job, that having a positive attitude was a big deal.  I would tell them, “If you find yourself always complaining about your pay, the work, the situation and the people you work with, you’re not in the right place. If you don’t identify that and decide to seek out greener pastures, it’s going to get identified for you and you’ll probably be the next person that gets downsized.” 
          The last six months I was saying the same thing to myself; that maybe I wasn’t really satisfied anymore, and that this really wasn’t what I wanted it to be.  Even though I had the power to change some things, the things that I needed to change for my own personal edification I couldn’t do much about.  I guess I hid it well because no one saw it coming.

How did the commercial experience impact how you look at ratings coming back to non-comm?
It leads me to see very quickly some of the things that can be improved upon. That becomes something that is almost kind of second nature; that you don’t get away with just letting things “happen.”  In commercial radio everything happens for a reason, but in public radio at times you sometimes let little things slide.  So I’m very much aware of how we sound every single moment.

Let’s talk about the difference in the non-comm relationship with its audience as compared to the relationship that a commercial station has with its audience.
I forgot how listeners in the non-comm world stop and want to talk, and I really, really missed that.  The listeners in commercial radio have this preconceived notion that you are nothing more than a puppet of a corporation, and a lot of times that was what they would like to discuss with you. In non-commercial radio it’s almost like, “Oh I’m so glad that you moved into my neighborhood!”  They really feel like they’re part of it.

How do those differences impact music decisions?
In non-comm I’m trying to not only appeal to a large number of people, but I’m also trying to get them to become members.  So how does that inform what I do?  Well, it’s got to have something to do with what audience we’re trying to reach, and how well we’re reaching them.
          The best way to say it is that the real brand of the station is RadioMilwaukee, and you can’t just slice  Milwaukee into a pie and say if we just play elements of that pie, then we’re serving our mission. 

With the very fractal entertainment landscape we have to survive in, do you think non-comm has any kind of an advantage over commercial in its fight to survive?       
Yes.  Look, people in our business have a tendency to get defensive about these kinds of issues and discussions.  But the true bottom line to a lot of this is broadcasting has gotten way too big.  It was like the housing bubble.  So now they’re looking at places where they can trim economically, and a lot of those decisions have not been made for the right reasons.  They’ve gotten rid of a lot of people they felt were disposable; so many companies are getting ride of MD positions and not having part-timers, and people are constantly voice tracking other people’s markets.  When they try to cultivate new talent they have none to cultivate, and they all stand around wondering why that is. 
          In public radio, you go to a zero balance every year, so at a non-commercial radio station you know what kind of budget you have to play with on a yearly basis and you work within your means a little bit better.  You don’t have to answer to anyone but your listening audience, and that leads to having a strong mission and trying to accomplish it on a yearly basis.