WUWM has been serving the community for over 60 years. To celebrate the work that we do we're talking to the people who do it.
Everything that appears on our website or social media accounts has to pass through WUWM's digital editor, Valeria Navarro Villegas. Since her start at the station four years ago, she has been a key player in leveling up WUWM's digital appearance.
For this segment of Get to know WUWM, we sat down with Valeria to learn more about what it takes to run WUWM online.
Do you have any specific head-spaces or mentalities or approaches that you like to take when thinking about posting digitally or when it comes to a digital story? How do you approach that?
Our approach is to tell the story that we hear on air in a visual way on social media platforms, specifically Instagram, where obviously we won't have the four and a half minutes that we will have for news to air. And it's a little hard to concisely turn those four and a half minutes into a 30 second or 1 minute long Instagram reel or mini video. So our approach is to find the nuggets, the most important pieces of those stories, and also deliver some of that content in the captions. [We want] our audience to read the caption to get a little more information and as always ... visit our website to get the full story, whether it's copy or the audio version. So our approach is to throw it out there, get people's attention. Some stories are very visually pleasing, so it all just depends on the story itself.
How does the station represent Milwaukee as a city compared to other news stations or other places that you've worked for?
I think we try to tell the stories that are important for our audience to stay informed, but I also see our purpose as preserving history, because I see our storytelling, whether it's on-air or on the website or Instagram, as an archive of like, what is Milwaukee. So, I've said it before at previous meetings that I think it's also important to keep that in our minds — that we're not just informing, we're also preserving for future generations who are probably, [like] my son and his college years, he may be doing a research paper and it might come up, you know, our old archival. I don't know how it'll look like 20 years from now when he's in college, but I see our information being valuable, not just now, but for many, many years to come.
What is a fun fact about yourself, or if you didn't have to worry about like money or bills or anything like that, what would you be doing other than being WWM's digital editor?
I'm gonna pick the fun fact because I can tie it back to my job. So, Audrey Nowakowski from Lake Effect, produced a piece on Sally Ride — there was a documentary in this past year's Milwaukee Film Festival — and once the edit came to me and I finished it, I slacked her and I said, did you know I actually met Sally Ride?
I met Sally Ride when I was 9 years old. I didn't fully speak English fluently, but I had heard my science teacher invite a student to go to this weekend event at the Milwaukee Public Museum where Sally Ride was going to be speaking at and giving autographs, and I semi understood. This other student declined because she was too cool, and I was just in for a good weekend adventure. So, Mrs. Bush picked me up from my house. she didn't speak Spanish, I hardly spoke English and she still took me ... Mrs. Bush has the picture. She never gave it to me, so there's a picture out there with me and Sally Ride, and I lost the little pamphlet, in one of my moves where Sally Ride had signed, so I have no proof but I know I met her.
