WUWM has been serving the community for over 60 years. To help celebrate the work that we do, we're talking with some of the people who do it. WUWM currently employs 35 people.
One of them is Michelle Maternowski, who currently serves as our digital manager. After 18 years at the station, she shares more about her experience, notable projects that she's worked on and what she's now looking forward to at this point in her career.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you expound on the opportunity that motivated you to end up here at the station?
Yeah, I would say 18 years ago, Michelle, fresh out of college, was looking for an opportunity that took my two majors from college and put them into practice, those being marketing and political science. But I also very much wanted to market something that I believed in. I would say my reasons for staying for 18 years have definitely, like, evolved with me and the job. Public radio is so important and just in having fact-based information accessible to all, I'm really proud to be part of that whole system that makes it so that people can have the information they need to make decisions.
What are you most looking forward to in the immediate future and following that?
Well, digital is always changing, so it's never been static. So, we very much need to keep up with how people are changing their practices and how they access information and how we can be in spaces that are helpful to people. So, that's never going to go away. As to what I'm looking forward to, I feel like the station is moving into a space of being more strategic about the decisions we make and that will hopefully make my job a little bit easier, because I know what are the big goals that we're trying to reach. Then, I can see how digital slots into that. So, I think it's an exciting time at the station.
What I'd like to ask is either a fun fact about yourself, a fun fact about the station or just something unique that someone that doesn't work inside this building probably wouldn't understand or realize it would be fascinating to or entertaining to hear.
I would say that years ago, someone who used to work at the station but doesn't anymore, Mitch Teich, we hosted the Pretzel Podcast. And the podcast was just all about pretzels, and it remains one of my most favorite things that I've done because it was just us laughing in the studio, talking to pretzel makers and pretzel historians and tasting pretzels. And I think I try to take some of that fun and joy into the other aspects of my work. So, I'd say that's a little fun thing about myself.
