WUWM has been serving the Milwaukee area for over 60 years. And for many of those years, Lake Effect has been our flagship local program covering news and other important local topics. The hour show airs four days a week and takes a lot of work to put together.
One of the people behind the scenes of that work is Lake Effect Producer Sam Woods. And for this segment of our Get to Know WUWM series, we sat down with Sam to learn more about his background, his approach to storytelling, and why Lake effect is a dream job.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was it about this opportunity that motivated you to come here and be a part of the team at WWM?
When I first moved to Milwaukee, I got involved in a podcasts that a couple of friends were doing. The podcast was about how to get civically engaged in Milwaukee. And I had just moved to Milwaukee and saw it as a good opportunity to learn about the city. Not only did I learn a lot about the city and the people who make it a fantastic place to live, but I love the storytelling aspect of it, and I particularly love the audio storytelling aspect of it. There's just nothing like the human voice. And this was an opportunity to do that and be surrounded by people who also love those aspects of journalism and storytelling.
Can you describe a bit about your approach and your philosophy as a journalist? How do you frame a story and your approach to telling it?
There’s different types of stories that I'll do at WUWM. There’s the accountability type of story where you're talking to someone who's media trained or has done interviews with media before. In that type of storytelling, you're trying to pull information out of someone, sometimes against their will, in order to serve the public. But then there's also the type of interview where you're talking to someone who either doesn't hold a position of power or isn't used to being interviewed. And that’s more like — you're not trying to extract information from someone, you're trying to extract their humanity. So, the approach depends on what you're trying to do, which one of those lanes of storytelling you're going in, and the aspect of our community that you're trying to shed some light on in a particular story.
How would you describe WUWM representing the city that it resides in and what makes this station and Milwaukee special?
What I appreciate about WUWM is how it represents the community that it serves. If you listen to WUWM programming — whether it be Lake Effect or our reporters when they're featured on Morning Edition or All Things Considered, or if you're just reading the website — it will be very difficult for you to consume the the media that we're producing and not come away better informed about what's going on in southeastern Wisconsin or, sometimes, statewide issues. And also, it is very clear that the people that work here love this place.
