Weekend Edition; Jenn White

It's weekend edition Sunday on 89-9KRPS. Good morning. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro. Tomorrow, KRPS is going to be a part of an exciting new chapter in one of the station's newest shows. 1A. Her weekday morning's attend has a new permanent host. Her name is Jen White. She comes to 1A from WBEZ in Chicago, where she most recently hosted the station's mid-day live talk show Reset. During her time at BEEZ, she also hosted the popular podcasts, Making Obama and Making Oprah. I spoke with Jen last Thursday and first asked her to introduce herself to listeners in the four states. Oh, wow. That's a long, that's a long story. So my name is Jen White. I was born and raised in Detroit and I was introduced to public radio when I was a teenager. I was 16 years old and my older sister turned on this show. She said, you've got to hear this show, she's two crazy guys. They talk about cars, they're hilarious, but they're really smart. And she introduced me to car talk and that was my gateway public radio show.

So I started listening then and found a position was opening at the public radio station in Michigan, Michigan, radio and got my foot in the door starting off as a fundraiser. That's how I got started at the station. And over the course of the last 20 plus years, I've done almost every job you can do in public radio, I've also worked on the public television side, including managing a public television station, but it was always my goal to move into on air work and I was able to learn side by side with some incredible journalists, reporters and producers and a little earlier than mid-career, I was able to make a switch and turn into the on air side of work and we moved to Chicago about five years ago and I worked at WBEZ for several years and then made the transition to 1A.

During the time that KRPS is aired 1A, we've only known the show with a rotation of guest toasts, including Todd Zwillich, Sasha Ann Simon, Silas Headley and Sarah McCammon. But for those 1A listeners who've come to know and love those hosts, Jen says, in a lot of ways, you're going to hear the same show that you're a custom hearing. You know, the show is going to be the show that's very familiar to people. It's just got a new host. We are going to continue the same conversations, acting as a convener for some of the really important and sometimes difficult national conversations we need to have with one another and we are going to continue to bring listener voices, your voices into the show through text and the voice messages and Twitter and Facebook so we can continue to talk to one another. During our time in public radio, Jen is held nearly every job that you can in an MPR member station from hosting Michigan Radio's All Things Considered to numerous podcasts and now a live national show, heard on 375 stations across the country.

I made me curious to ask the differences between hosting podcasts in a live radio show. Yeah, so I describe live radio as walking a tightrope that someone occasionally skips over and lights on fire. That's live radio for you. That's what it is. You just got to try to make it across to the other side unscathed. When you talk about podcasts, the wonderful thing about podcasts is the fact that you can be so creative and you can spend so much time creating something that is just sound rich and beautiful and evokes emotion, but you also have to let it go at some point and that's probably the hardest part. With live radio, once it's said and done, it's just out there, it's in the world. And you got to move on to the next thing.

With podcasts, it's like the challenge of taking your hands off of it and actually calling it finished. That is the voice of Jen White, the new host of 1A, her first show as 1A host takes place on Monday at 10 here on KRPS. To hear this interview again or to learn more about Jen and 1A, visit the links at our Facebook page. You can find that at 89.9 FM KRPS.