NOTES:
VALOR AI IN THE SOUTH REPORT
WABE PINTS AND POLITICS TRIVIA NIGHT
EMAIL TO REACH WABE LEADERSHIP TEAM: WabeExec@WABE.orgHOW TO PROTECT ATLANTA PUBLIC MEDIA
POST ON AI MODEL DECEPTIONS
EFFORTLESS, the book
The new release of the Atlanta Startup podcast this month is a conversation with Jennifer Dorian. She’s the president and CEO of Atlanta’s public broadcasting station WABE. There has never been a more interesting time for public broadcasting, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of this conversation with Jennifer. She has been involved in curating. The public culture and communication for her entire career before becoming president at WABE. She was president of Turner Classic Movies and spent a career in media at a national and global level. Please join me in enjoying what Jennifer has to say about what’s important in Atlanta now.
Lisa Calhoun
Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m Lisa Calhoun, your host, and I’m here with a friend and an incredible leader, Jennifer Dorian, CEO and president of Atlanta’s own WABE. Thanks for joining me, Jennifer.
Jennifer Dorian
Thank you for coming to the station.
Lisa Calhoun
I am so thrilled to be in your space. So, we are here at WABE, which is in central Atlanta, and at a really interesting time. I wanted to have a conversation with Jennifer because she’s been a leader for 30 years when it comes to telling stories, sharing stories, and finding stories that make a difference. So, I’m going to jump right in and ask you—what’s different about now?
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, there’s so many ways to answer that. First off, I think it’s really fun that you’re visiting a 76-year-old organization, and I can honestly say we’re in startup mode all the time. We’re the oldest startup, right? Probably many clients in legacy businesses can say that. But we’ve got, right now here in this building, people going through digital transformation because we want to meet people where they are. And we can’t just broadcast great information through television and radio. We’ve got to reach people through social media, through the website, through apps, through streaming. And so we’ve had to figure out all that audience innovation. But at the same time, we have a revenue problem, and we can get into our long-term revenue problem and our very acute revenue problem with the federal government right now.
But either way, we have to find new ways of making money to sustain our mission. No money, no mission.
Lisa Calhoun
You know, thank you for bringing that up. You know, WABE has been of service to Atlanta and the community for such a long time. I think it’s really thought of as an icon, as a cornerstone. People don’t think it’s going to go away.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
But before we get into the revenue side, can we talk a little bit about the stories that need to be told and are being told by some of the people with us in this building? Because I listen to public radio a lot, and a lot of the shows that I listen to are, of course, the national shows, but then there’s also some outstanding local content.
Jennifer Dorian
Oh, thank you.
Lisa Calhoun
So tell me more about that, because I know some of the Valor community doesn’t listen locally because they’re so focused on—well, let’s be honest—there’s a lot of national news right now.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
But there’s also a lot going on right here in Atlanta.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, and down the ballot. It really matters. You know, getting involved locally is so important. So, public media started in 1967 as an idea of how the airwaves could serve everybody and provide everyone with inclusion, representation, and free and trustworthy information. So, around 1970, NPR and PBS were started, but they all are carried on a federation of local stations under local control. And every one of them is nonprofit. They exist to make sure there’s free access to fact-based, trusted information, emergency information, and arts and culture that knit your community together. I sometimes think—what does it mean to be in Atlanta? There are transplants here. Is it about a sports team that you cheer for? Is it about participating in local elections? Is it knowing the local school board?
Part of it is listening to local public media that makes you a part of a community, because you’ll know what’s going on. At WABE, we do have an amazing arts and culture scene here in Atlanta and lots of educational and arts and culture programming. But we also have the opportunity to do local news. And as you know, across the country and the world, we’re rampant with misinformation. It’s so easy to find untrustworthy narrators.
Lisa Calhoun
You know, it’s interesting that you said that. This week, as we’re sitting down, Valor just launched our fifth consecutive quarterly report on AI in the South.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
And one of the things that comes out in that report is how the latest AI models—like ones that were just released last week—are the most untrustworthy yet. The most deceptive yet.
Jennifer Dorian
Do they hallucinate? Or are they just deceptive?
Lisa Calhoun
Oh, no, they’re deceptive. So hallucination, you could say, is an inaccurate reading of the context, maybe. But deception is when the AI perceives what your goal is, and then, to satisfy you, tells you that it’s met the goal—
Jennifer Dorian
Okay.
Lisa Calhoun
—knowing that it has not, but it will make you happy.
Jennifer Dorian
Oh, wow.
Lisa Calhoun
And so, the latest third-party reviews of some of the major LLMs and models show that the smarter AI is getting—the larger the model and the more cohesive—the more it’s likely to intentionally deceive.
Jennifer Dorian
That’s frightening.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah, it can be.
Jennifer Dorian
Well, it sounds like an extreme version of what we already have out in the wild, which is people with profit motives. So whether you’re a commercial outlet and you’re actually doing honest coverage, but you’re doing it for clicks, you’re going to be more incentivized to use sensational headlines.
Lisa Calhoun
Or “If it bleeds…”
Jennifer Dorian
Have you ever clicked on a story and there’s nothing in the story? It was a nothing sandwich. Right? Like, good headline—
Lisa Calhoun
I do it every—
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, good headline—zero information. So, that would be like the most benign version of troublesome reporting. But at WABE, we don’t have a click motive. We don’t have a profit motive. We have a “serve the public” motive. And so, our journalism is in service to accountability—holding elected officials accountable, which—I’ve got to tell you about some of the effects it has on finances and municipal bond rates. Don’t let me forget.
Lisa Calhoun
I want to hear!
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. And second, of course, it can stoke civic participation, hold people accountable, etc. But also, it helps people decide what’s important in their community—that they’re informed on how they want to take action or vote. And so that’s incredibly important. And it’s not necessarily sexy sometimes, or clickable. For example, right now there’s a big Public Service Commissioner election in Georgia this year—that’s really important across the state, we have stories on all kinds of local education, housing, and environment issues, and we really fill in the gaps that commercial media is not able to—adding local context and depth. So, a lot of the national headlines also have to be interpreted for how they impact our community locally. With different cuts that are happening in the federal government right now—how is that going to impact Georgia and the Atlanta region? Teachers, health, research, arts, and culture?
Lisa Calhoun
What are some of the things going on right now—as we record this, it’s spring of 2025—
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
—that are really getting a lot of interest?
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
Some of the most popular?
Jennifer Dorian
Well, the national and federal governments are pushing a lot of things back to states. So one of the things that’s getting huge traffic on our website right now is our Georgia Bill Tracker and legislative session summary. And so you can go to WABE.org/billtracker—or just, you know, search “Bill Tracker”—and you’ll see two full-time local politics reporters who are extremely well respected for being nonpartisan and really covering the story fairly, explaining to us what were all the bills that went through, what legislation is taking place. Today, Governor Kemp—we have a front-page story about the bill that he’s signing about tort reform. So people are very interested in that. And a lot of national subjects and policies are getting pushed to the state level.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
So that would be one area. We have a lot of environment stories. Trying to think what was on there recently. You know, we’re always covering the Chattahoochee, we’re always covering the Okefenokee Swamp—we’re always… These are enduring stories. Air quality, heat index—
Lisa Calhoun
So things that matter right here.
Jennifer Dorian
Water quality. That’s one thing I’ve learned: local journalists are far more trusted in the country than national journalists. And part of the reason is—one, they’re our neighbors. They drink the same water, they breathe the same air, they get to know people in communities, and also, they have a maturation in their role. Like, they’re there for a while.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
You hope they have context—and they do have context.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
And that’s another thing AI cannot replace, I don’t think. You know, AI is mostly using information that’s already published.
Lisa Calhoun
Yes. And some of it’s really stale too. A lot of AI is using 18-month-old information.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. So if it’s literally, by definition, an investigation or breaking news or a new thing, you’re going to need a human being to figure out the context, the contacts, and the urgency of what in that story matters. So I think it’s very important not only to have local newsrooms, but to have ones that are stable, where people can have careers covering a beat and become experts on it. And that’s what we’re striving to do here. We have a newsroom that’s gone from 13 people to 22 people.
Lisa Calhoun
Wow.
Jennifer Dorian
And 13 of those people are reporters, and the other 9 are people who help make the stories go—have photography with them, social media, videos, get published in text form, etc.
Lisa Calhoun
So in my world—in the startup world—a lot of times teams are shrinking because they’re using AI: AI for software development, AI for marketing, AI for lead generation. And you’re growing.
Jennifer Dorian
Well, because there are always so many beats to cover, and the whole world is underreported. So, the newspaper model is economically infeasible anymore—or print. And the number of newspapers that have shuttered in the last 20 years is 25%. But 50% of newsroom jobs have disappeared. So, I’d love to use AI to make people more efficient and to do certain production and backroom tasks. But we need more reporters in our community to cover all the stories. Some ways we’re using AI for efficiency are—it can add… Because we’re on audio here, and so is WABE radio—we can improve audio, like audio that has background sounds.
Lisa Calhoun
Right.
Jennifer Dorian
AI can filter and edit very well. It can edit out all the “ums” and “uhs” if you need it to, or the white spaces, if needed. We’re also really excited to use it for translation, so that we can be serving a multilingual population. One in ten people in Atlanta is an immigrant, and not everybody has English as their first language. So we are excited in the coming year to figure out how to translate and push out vital stories in multiple languages. And it’s so cool—it can not only do text-based translation, it can take the sound and timbre of our voice and have different languages coming out of our mouths. Now that is boundary-pushing.
Lisa Calhoun
It’s amazing.
Jennifer Dorian
And for journalists, they’re not necessarily comfortable with it yet. So we’re just going to have to baby-step in, prototype, and innovate our way toward figuring out what maintains credibility and humanity—but also helps people get access.
Lisa Calhoun
Right.
Jennifer Dorian
So I did want to mention how local journalism is really related to the financial markets. In municipalities, the incentives for good governance and financial planning, budgeting, and asking for money from the federal or state government are all incented by journalists covering elected officials’ behavior. So you can, you know, reduce corruption and fraud—but you can also ramp up good fiscal management. They’ve proven an empirical relationship between bond rates—
Lisa Calhoun
Fascinating.
Jennifer Dorian
—and there’s more about that.
Lisa Calhoun
Let’s put that in the show notes.
Jennifer Dorian
That’s really because, regardless of political beliefs, you want your community to have good, trusted info—but you also want, we all want, our elected officials to be doing their jobs.
Lisa Calhoun
There’s a lot of accountability issues coming up in politics—for everyone on any side of the spectrum. And so when it comes to business too—it is good business.
Lisa Calhoun
And we’re just talking about the excitement of meeting your break-even revenue challenge, because every year WABE strives to break even, but you’re also growing a lot and have added a lot of local reporters.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. A lot of local content. We’re amplifying Atlanta with local journalists as well as local original shows.
Lisa Calhoun
And it couldn’t be more important than now when we need a lot of local accountability and… and context.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. Thank you. We feel like at this moment we’re more valuable than ever before and we’re more vulnerable than ever before. And we can unpack that.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
First off, you know, we have this whole challenge to go from being mostly broadcast to being digital. So that takes investment, takes new skills, takes new jobs, like having a CTO, having a product manager, learning how to use AI, et cetera. So that takes investment. And then we have our basic operations, and then we’re ramping up original content. But we have been on a journey almost like a startup to find lines of business that we can make sustainable and add to our ability to keep bringing you the local newsroom basically. And some of those examples are the e-newsletter business, the event business, workshop businesses, podcasts, original video syndication, national radio syndication. We’re really trying to put the Atlanta station on the map, amplifying Atlanta.
Jennifer Dorian
And while all that has had to be very entrepreneurial, at the same time, we do get 10 to 15% of our budget from the federal government, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Every year, the government puts $535 million into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and that’s distributed across about 1,000 stations.
Lisa Calhoun
Okay, so it’s not a lot per station.
Jennifer Dorian
Oh, no, it’s not. I mean, our—
Lisa Calhoun
But it is 10–15% of your budget.
Jennifer Dorian
Right. So we’re… you guys get ready for around… you know, we’re a rounding error in most of the budgets that you… We’re an $18 million operation, which is stunning—that we do TV, radio, digital—all for $18 million a year. It’s a good value for the community, especially the hours that we pump out. But it’s hard to keep our staff full enough that we can all carry the weight and sustain the work. So the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s $1.9 million that we get at WABE is very impactful. And when that money is threatened, it can really create a detriment of: okay, are we going to have to do cuts, layoffs? Are we going to have to stop certain programming? Are we going to have to shrink the newsroom. So we’re trying really hard to figure out ways to stay sustainable and bring in revenue in new ways.
Lisa Calhoun
What are some of the things that are looking really interesting for 2025? Where is some of your attention going this year?
Jennifer Dorian
That’s great. So this year we’ll have 1.3 million downloads of our podcasts, including one that’s an Apple Top 10 science podcast called Health Wanted, and I’m really proud of it. It’s a partnership with the Emory Rollins School of Public Health, so that they want to get the word out about public health research issues, behaviors we could all be adopting. It could be environmental or very human-habit specific. They have incredible information. And they have a great staffer there named Laurel Bristow, who is a great science communicator. She has 400,000 followers on Instagram, right? Because she knows how to talk about public health in a fun, interesting way. She grew her following during the pandemic, so she does the show for us once a week on Fridays. It’s a radio show, it’s a podcast—a very successful one. And we’ve had events, et cetera. So I think that’s a great example of a new way to go about the business. And it has sponsorship and it’s going national. We’re on the cusp of taking it national with PRX.
Lisa Calhoun
So your team here perhaps pulls the sponsorships together?
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, and we look at national distribution partners. So, you know, instead of just grinding out here in Atlanta, there are stories like Health Wanted that would be relevant to the whole nation. Another one is 1912: Forsyth County, the expulsion of people in 1912—Black people in 1912—from Forsyth County. We made that in combination with the Atlanta History Center. And it’s been a great podcast. It’s been in the Top 10 of Apple. I just keep quoting Apple because we have the stats. But we’re on every platform for podcasting for history. Buried Truths is a podcast that we have that does very well because it’s true crime meets history. So these are all podcast-driven content and storytelling with partners of expertise in our market, and it amplifies Atlanta, it serves Atlanta, but it also helps us try to raise new money.
So the podcast business has been a real startup, emergent thing for us. E-newsletters are so important. I mean, I don’t know how your inbox looks, but there are a lot of really great, credible voices in e-publishing of news and acute, urgent breaking stories. We also are into making original video and trying to license some of that to streamers as well as to PBS , as well as have sponsors locally and nationally. So we have a financial empowerment show called My Money Mentors, and it’s fresh. It’s a 30-minute show that’s made like a reality TV show. Yeah. We hired a reality TV leader to come and run our… We’re so proud of it because we don’t want it to be boring. Right. We want it to be like: you meet this person, they have a problem— You meet the mentors, they give them all the advice. You see them go through a learning curve—the protagonist of each show—and it’s all non-fiction, and it’s very aspirational. It’s not like financial literacy. It’s very like real-world universal access of like: oh, how am I going to pay for my kid’s college? I’m getting married. Should I put a joint account together with my intended? I just got my first job offer in New York City. How am I going to live there?
Lisa Calhoun
Right. So it’s a real question. Yeah. So it sounds like there’s a lot of really exciting new and super popular things happening.
Jennifer Dorian
So I keep avoiding the big disruption, which is—we may lose that money. So we’re wondering how much the local community wants to step up and support this. So today we’ve been 90% community funded, and I’m kind of excited to see: will WABE be 100% Atlanta-funded?
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
100% local community funded, 100% curated for the community. I hope NPR and PBS can survive if federal funding goes away.
Lisa Calhoun
Right.
Jennifer Dorian
I think there’ll be a moment of, you know—and that’s this year. Yeah, no, that’s right. So it’s actually getting more and more urgent in that the president was going to send an executive order to Congress April 28 to defund—immediately—to rescind and claw back— congressionally approved funds for public media. And now he’s doing it allegedly this week. And they all have 45 days to debate and vote on it.
Lisa Calhoun
Wow.
Jennifer Dorian
And so it’ll be an act of Congress to defund something that’s been going on since 1967 to bring our communities free, universal, fact-based information.
Lisa Calhoun
This story is just not big enough.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
I just haven’t heard enough about this.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. And it is, of course—it’s all very fast. Right. I mean, it’s… by the way. And, you know, there are so many other stories that—well, that is a big story. There’s so much need and there’s so much disruption and so much volatility right now. So…
NOTES:
VALOR AI IN THE SOUTH REPORT
WABE PINTS AND POLITICS TRIVIA NIGHT
EMAIL TO REACH WABE LEADERSHIP TEAM: WabeExec@WABE.orgHOW TO PROTECT ATLANTA PUBLIC MEDIA
POST ON AI MODEL DECEPTIONS
EFFORTLESS, the book
Lisa Calhoun
So if someone is listening to this and they’re also maybe in their car and they’re mobile, how would they be able to either suggest something WABE could do for them that they could fund? You know, so—partnership. Because a lot of my listeners with Atlanta Startup Podcast, they’re in the Valor community of courage. They might be a post-exit founder or they’re a founder going for their first exit. Maybe they’re an investor faster, but they definitely think about platform solutions. And so I’m sure someone right now is out there thinking, well, I could do a show with them. I’ve got 400,000 followers or something like that. And if that were the case, how would they reach out? Or if they’re just simply—listen, I want to do good. I’m in Atlanta. I want to amplify Atlanta too. I want the accountability of 22 local journalists on my side!
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
How do they get money to you in the shortest way?
You’ve got it covered.
Jennifer Dorian
I tell you, get involved. If you care about community and you care about democracy—democracy—we’re a great instrument to help protect free press, freedom of speech, people coming together, being a connector. You know, one thing I—one of the reasons I took this job was to be more involved in the nonprofit community in Atlanta. And I’ve met so many movers and shakers in the nonprofit space, people who are doing collective action and having impact through this job because we’re a microphone for a lot of great work that happens and a lot of need. We love when we can focus on a need and a solution at the same time in our storytelling.
But so if you are out there and you want to be more connected, not only to the business community, but to your neighborhood, your larger region, public media is a great place to get involved in a committee, a board, a project. Help us with technology. If you want to donate, WABE.org/donate is the place to go. So it’d be a great place to give yourself a streaming budget. You know, if we’re a part of your life, that could be $5 a month that you feel—or $15—you know, that you feel like this is the kind of media I want to support.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah. And it’s also supporting your own community, but also it’s storyteller community.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. Like, one of our shows highlights 200 artists a year. It’s called City Lights, and they cover the local performers, exhibits, galleries, performances, artists. And so if you support public media, you’re supporting the community of arts and culture. If you support public media now, you’re supporting a health and public health platform, you’re supporting local news and democracy. So it’s very important stuff—vital stuff—for a healthy community.
Lisa Calhoun
You know, I want to interject. I was writing an email to Valor’s venture partner group this morning, and that’s a group of about 15 individuals that not only invest in the fund, but also help us do due diligence on the fund and usually have a lot of expertise in a sector. And so one of the things I was sharing with them was this quote that really struck me recently. There was a philosopher that sort of presided over and wrote about the fall of democracy in Athens. And I’m going to butcher the name, but it’s Thucydides. Sorry, everyone who actually knows Greek—I don’t. But the quote goes like this: The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage.
Jennifer Dorian
Nice.
Lisa Calhoun
And that really resonated with me today. And so it’s something I wanted to bring into the conversation with you. When we met—I’m not even going to say how many years ago, but quite a few—I was struck by your courage as a leader when you were leading Turner Classic Movies. I got to see Jennifer up on stage before I met her in real life, and she was delivering the truth to a large audience in a way that still strikes me today. And so, oh, you’re just amazing at it. And you have a lot of courage.
Jennifer Dorian
This will be the job that tests it.
Lisa Calhoun
What do you use your courage for these days, exactly?
Jennifer Dorian
I feel like courage, as you’re growing up and as a leader, is the courage to admit you don’t know everything. The courage to make mistakes and start over. The courage to speak the truth to power. And you get lots of practice at all of those things in the corporate world and the nonprofit world. But boy, being in this public media space at this time—I do feel sort of like this is going to be a galvanizing time when I have to step out and be a public figure for believing in the importance of facts. Facts are real. Public media is doing its best service to the community. It’s not partisan, it’s not biased. It’s actually very American and very patriotic to care about free press and freedom of speech and people getting together and having civil kinds of conversations.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
So all of that seems pretty reasonable, but it’s become polarized and politicized and it can be scary—even for some of the people that work with me. You know, they could be targets. Honestly, I’m saying these fairly basic parts of our culture as Americans.
Lisa Calhoun
I was struck by that coming into the offices here at WABE… I’ve never been here.
Yeah. And for those who haven’t been here, there’s a large iron gate at first. And so you get past that gate, there’s a second iron gate before you get to the locked door. It felt like coming into a bunker.
Jennifer Dorian
It’s really important. The FCC—I don’t even know if this is true—but I think they demand you have a certain amount of security.
Lisa Calhoun
And you do.
Jennifer Dorian
I know we want to have it anyway. So, yeah, these are the public airwaves. And so we take on the responsibility very seriously to be fact-based, to be non-commercial, to be representative of our community, to be inclusive. We have a source tracker on our website. We pay attention to what voices are on our guests and on our air as expert sources—not witnesses, but expert sources. And we really pay attention to: Are we making sure that lots of people’s voices get heard? So it is an important undertaking, and it is being questioned how valuable it is to the whole United States. Should it be in our federal government? And I think people need to listen and use public media as an act of being a civic member of society. So, you know—vote, listen to public media, and participate. Be a good neighbor. Like, know your—know the people in your community.
So yeah, I think it’s really important. I mean, America is going through a bit of a change in how we see ourselves and our identity. And we’ve all heard, read, or listened to stories about how our identity on a global level is being reevaluated as we evaluate our identity internally. So where is the public media discourse in that? It’s something I think for everyone to also take this opportunity and reevaluate, and yeah, community matters. Now’s a great time.
Jennifer Dorian
Well, and what kind of community do we want? So online, the news, fake news, influencers, and the fake bots—news bots—are two of the concerning things I would bring up about community that we’re joining, circling, sharing out. Right? Like we really have to pay attention to our media diets and our media amplification. So media literacy—you know, who am I following? Who am I believing? Who am I sharing? What are their credentials? Who’s following them? You know, and what kind of commentary is it? Thoughtful commentary in there, or is it just more, I don’t know, yelling at each other?
Lisa Calhoun
Something like that. Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
So I’ve been really surprised on TikTok and YouTube how many fake and inaccurate stories I see that you could tell a bad AI made it. Like celebrity fame, yes, exactly. And it’ll have the wrong name for a celebrity. And you’re like, whole world knows that’s JLo and not Jennifer Lawrence, you know, but the computer somehow messed it up. Right. So we have to be really more discerning on the things we believe. And by watching and following and listening to public media—and by following, I mean on the socials—you can again be a part of a really good community and see what people are thinking about and what the discourse is.
Lisa Calhoun
So does WABE get involved in events in the near future?
Jennifer Dorian
So glad you asked.
Lisa Calhoun
Some of us could come and be a part of it in real life.
Jennifer Dorian
We have about five times a year really serious intellectual panels on important things: environment, politics, housing, art. Then we also have Pints and Politics, which is trivia night. And that’s coming up. I’ll have to get you the date, but it’s very—it’s like, no worries.
Lisa Calhoun
I’ll put the link in the notes.
Jennifer Dorian
Okay, great.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah.
Jennifer Dorian
It’s the Spring Pints and Politics with Rahul Bali and Sam Gringlass, our politics reporters. It’s so much fun. It’s so young trip. Young people love trivia. So it is a really fun trivia night. And let’s see, we have screenings. We have at the Plaza—we do City Lights Cinema. We—so we have, I’d say, a wide array of the types of gatherings. We’ve recently helped sponsor and put on the screening of John Lewis: Good Trouble documentary from CNN. We have screenings here. We have screenings of many different issue-oriented documentaries that would be great for your audience. And we can even—let’s just put one on together about whatever you want with—you know, a show that, by the way, your group might really love is Marketplace. So Marketplace is on the air every day, every morning, every evening. It’s also a podcast from NPR.
Lisa Calhoun
Marketplace is fabulous.
Jennifer Dorian
And Marketplace Tech., yeah, right, is another little Marketplace Tech. So I mean, we could put it—that’s the fun thing about this job. So you can meet people, hear what the community wants, and then curate the right event with the right trusted content provide.
Lisa Calhoun
I think not enough of the Valley community understands that with public broadcasting here locally, it is also a content partner potential. So be informed by but also informed. And that’s part of the nature of public journalism that isn’t, you know, as well, I think, understood—and something that is an opportunity here in Atlanta.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, that’s a good point. And something I’ll point out is the newsroom has a managing editor for news, and they follow the journalistic process.. They decide. I’m completely divorced from their editorial decisions, and I like it that way. But when it comes to podcast storytelling development, video storytelling development, I am involved, and I am a content creator/producer in that we can together decide what the community would appreciate and want to know about and what the storytellers that exist are. So more open
Lisa Calhoun
Do you think that the art of story, how has it changed?
Jennifer Dorian
Oh yeah.
Lisa Calhoun
In the decades you’ve been developing stories?
Jennifer Dorian
Phenomenally. One, our attention spans are radically different. We have been making our documentaries about history 27 minutes long.
Lisa Calhoun
Got it.
Jennifer Dorian
And that’s long.
Attention spans are huge. We know that from the cinema business as well. We also—I don’t know if y’all heard about how music producers are changing all their music for the Spotify algorithm.
Lisa Calhoun
No, I didn’t know that.
Jennifer Dorian
Oh yeah. This is cool. So like the first four seconds of a song is how long people will give it. So you gotta have an incredible opening hook for the first four seconds. Similarly, we’re making WABE News shorts. So we’re making 27-minute documentaries and we’re making WABE News shorts for social media. Yeah. But here’s what we know: in the first 10 seconds, you’ve got to tell people what it’s about and why they should care.
Lisa Calhoun
Wow.
Jennifer Dorian
And another thing: influencers. So I love this piece of advice that we got from somebody who worked in the news business with digital, and she said everybody’s following influencers. It’s like the Walter Cronkite of today is these influencers on different verticals. So we’re like, we need to come up with an influencer who—you can see their face, recognize them, feel familiar. So we have a person from our newsroom who’s like the innovator for us of the WABE News shorts. His name is Julian Virgin. I’ll show you some of them. If you go to the WABE.org Instagram—sorry, WABE News Instagram—you’ll see 17 different video shorts from Julian. They’re fantastic. Like the Egg Crisis. He’s out at Waffle House talking to people about the price of eggs. And he’s at a bakery talking about the price of eggs. And they weave into it parts about the national statistics of egg prices and what’s driving this—it’s the bird flu. And like, it’s a nice bite-sized experience of WABE. And that’s content creation. It has to be shorter, more visual. We have a full-time—we’re a radio station with a full-time photographer.
Lisa Calhoun
Got it.
Jennifer Dorian
Award-winning journalism photographer because you’ve got to have visuals. Let’s see, what else. Storytelling—I think everybody’s interested in people that sound like themselves. That’s really awesome. You don’t have to sound like.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah, authenticity is definitely—it matters.
You don’t have to sound like a cliché of an NPR, right? Whispering and sounding the same and sounding like you went to Harvard or the Mid-Atlantic—the fake Mid-Atlantic accent.
Lisa Calhoun
Or you went to University of Texas like we did.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah. And I’m wearing orange.
Lisa Calhoun
Yes, you are.
I think—so let’s see. Short attention spans, authenticity. I happen to believe that storytelling can be a lot more niche than it used to
Jennifer Dorian
There’s a long tail, too.
Jennifer Dorian
All of our technologies—you can find your audience.
Lisa Calhoun
People want to be immersed in the world that they are enjoying right now.
Jennifer Dorian
And you can follow your passions. My husband has a lot of hobbies, and he doesn’t like—he didn’t like podcasts. So I was like, okay, I’m gonna search wild turkey hunting podcasts. Guess what? There are a bunch. And I got him interested. Right. So the niche—you can niche out, I’ll say.
Lisa Calhoun
Crawford County, where I grew up, was home to the famous Wild Turkey Jamboree. Which is the largest wild turkey shoot in the country at the time.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, yeah, that’s incredible.
Lisa Calhoun
Crawford County, if you’d like.
Jennifer Dorian
So let’s do it.
Lisa Calhoun
It’s almost—you can’t give it away.
Jennifer Dorian
But—so, I mean, don’t you think storytelling can serve more specific interests? And then there are always universal stories—that’s good too.
Lisa Calhoun
Some of the universal stories I’m always interested in telling—and I know you’ve only got so much time leading this, so maybe as a final thing to touch on—to move the lens back a little bit from WABE and just to you personally—you’re a leader leading through very challenging times, and I would love to invite you to share with our listeners how you’re managing, how you’re coping, how you’re not letting it kill you—because that’s very real, too. And a lot of our founders, they know what it’s like to be in a tough place. And I think we’re always, including myself, wondering and curious about how others are doing it.
Jennifer Dorian
Well, sure. So first off, let’s start with the last four years. It’s always been a hard job, and everybody here is so mission-driven. And they’re not here because it’s, you know, incredible compensation. They’re here because it’s so rewarding to work with the public. So we really have to stay positive and upbeat, and we’re going through so much change—and also some risk, quite a bit of risk—where we’re trying to change our business model. So I’m a big fan of having a mantra and a theme and telling it to everybody all the time. And mine is “Believe.” W-A-Believe. And I did rip it off from Ted Lasso. I think Ted Lasso is great. And our letters are W-A-B-E. So we WA-Believe in our future.
We believe that we can bring in the amount of money that we have to each quarter. We believe that we can try new things and fail and learn and that we can do it together. We definitely—a big part, I think, of the courage to lead in hard times is—you’ve got to build trust and psychological safety before the s*** hits the fan. You’ve got to be comfortable with each other beforehand. That way when things get rough there’s at least a baseline of respect and trust. So we do put ourselves in situations of tension around—well, let’s spar about this, let’s debate it out. And those might have been things like how are we going to do our fundraising or what new business—how are we going to grow our podcasting? And then now let’s talk about the more acute call for courage. So in this time, I’m over-communicating and I’m telling everyone—we’re having town halls with Q&As. I’m sending out notes about what’s the latest that I know. I’m practicing radical transparency. That might not be good for everybody, but it’s the way I have to work.
Lisa Calhoun
I like it and everybody more in— That direction myself.
Jennifer Dorian
And I do—it’s probably—I probably make the mistakes to the extent of oversharing and then having to, you know, explain, oh, well, that didn’t happen at all.
Lisa Calhoun
That’s only for this month. I didn’t get it forever.
Jennifer Dorian
Yeah, but people—I’ve heard people appreciate transparency. And then the other thing is—we talk—I try to practice and talk about resiliency. And so I’m trying to be a bit of a person in their corner—like, you know, are we getting enough sleep? What can we blow off? What can we not do? Because we have less people. We just had two rounds of layoffs in the last six months. It’s been hard. So we’re going to have fewer people, so we have to do less work. So what are we going to kill and cut?.
Lisa Calhoun
Just reading a book called Effortless, and one of the fun things that the author brings out is the success lies in all the steps you avoid taking.
Jennifer Dorian
That’s awesome.
Lisa Calhoun
Just like—what if you didn’t have to do any of that and you could just cut to this? It might be a different type of success, but if you can avoid all these routes—and yeah—and what you’re saying, you know.
Jennifer Dorian
And one thing I’ve learned—I think this is the last thing and the most important thing I’ve learned the hardest way—is other people will not kill stuff. The leader has to kill it. Because even if people bring it up like, “Well, we don’t have to do custom breaks on our WABE Classical,” they’re still going to feel bad if they don’t. They’ll feel like they didn’t do enough, care enough. They’ll feel like they’re the one. And I’m like, oh, that’s an excellent idea. We must kill that. When I worked at Turner Classic Movies, I was in a different headspace. And I would ask people, “What can we kill?” And they would share a few ideas, but they never wanted to kill it. I didn’t realize that I was the one who— You have to be the killer because nobody wants to kill stuff.
Lisa Calhoun
You have to be the killer. I love that. That’s definitely a takeaway.
Jennifer Dorian
And that’s been a hard one for me to grow into. Probably real-time. Even hard to pull back on different functions.
Lisa Calhoun
Stop doing.
Jennifer Dorian
Yes, stop doing.
Lisa Calhoun
You know, recently, this year—for a monthly newsletter. And of course, as people do, every time I would send it out, I would get different people saying, thank you for this, thank you for that. And it was very validating. But at this current point in Valor’s history, a monthly newsletter doesn’t make sense. I do a quarterly newsletter. And the killing of it was like, oh—and yet such a small thing, such an easy thing to do. And people do have shorter timeframes. And I can pack it into a quarter. It’s not light. And so, kind of looking at what’s the right cycle as you go through different things—even that is so—
Jennifer Dorian
And as we know, the more we can create space—
Lisa Calhoun
Right.
Jennifer Dorian
Killing some smaller things to create space is where breakthrough things can come up.
Lisa Calhoun
Let the better things rise up. So to close, and please correct me if I get this wrong, we are sitting here on a week recording this when we believe we’re about to find out this week if the federal government is going to fund the Public Broadcasting Corporation, which will—if they don’t—result in an almost $2 million cut from your budget.
Jennifer Dorian
That’s right. And it’ll be 15% of our budget at this time.
Lisa Calhoun
And so here we are, speaking truth and courage to our listeners. There’s very likely a $2 million shortfall right here at WABE that we can be a part of the solution for—just putting that out there, because it does matter. This is our community and—
Jennifer Dorian
Well, thank you. And if you’re on a journey—maybe public media hasn’t been part of your life—I would just implore you to check it out, whether it’s the—
Lisa Calhoun
While you still can.
Jennifer Dorian
Well, we’ll be here. But it’s just—what form will we be taking? We might really shrink back and not—I’m all for understanding efficiencies and never afraid to reorganize, restructure—but you know, you hate to see vital services disappear. And I would just say people, if you’re not as familiar with it, just check it out on WABE Instagram. You can see those shorts. Check out WABE.org—we have 2,000 stories a year about your local community, covering politics, health, business, education, housing, environment, immigration, criminal justice. It’s really extraordinarily unique coverage. At WABE.org, we have an app—the WABE app. You can stream us from anywhere when you’re walking your dog, or you can do video—sorry, audio on demand.So maybe people need to just try us out and get a taste, and then I know they’re going to want to help.
Lisa Calhoun
Sounds great. Thank you for your time.
Jennifer Dorian
Thank you. Thank you for having us—from an old startup, 76-year-old startup.
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