When Craig Kopp first started as the All Things Considered host at WUSF in 2011, he sounded like an old-school newsman, more button-down and just-the-facts than rock ‘n’ roll.
Yet, like many on-air personalities, he doesn’t look much like he sounds, aside from the head of grey hair his authoritative
voice suggests.
Kopp is now two months into his tenure as head honcho at WMNF, the community radio station that largely competes with WUSF. In honor of Tropical Heatwave — the first Kopp will attend as the station’s manager — CL sat down with him to chat about the transition and what he hopes to accomplish for the independent radio station. (Note: This reporter is a former employee of WMNF.)
At the station’s digs on the outskirts of Seminole Heights, Kopp greets us looking anything but button-down, in jeans and an aloha shirt printed all over with palm trees.
The walls of his office are green and purple, and among the unframed pictures is an image macro of Keith Richards with a funny caption about all the wholesome pop stars Richards has managed to outlive. In the corner there is an acoustic guitar in a hardshell case.
Kopp is elated to be where he is.
“I’m an old fart. I’m 63 years old. But I’m not,” he says — because, with this, his first news director job in a major market, he feels like he’s 27 again. “There was a time when radio wasn’t just a job, it was a movement. And I’m back there, in this seat, in this radio station.”
On the air, WMNF and WUSF sound pretty different. The latter features mostly national news programming throughout the day, save for shows like Florida Matters and the hosts who deliver local news and weather highlights during breaks. Overnight the station plays jazz.
WMNF, meanwhile, is mostly local, aside from NPR news headlines at the top of most hours and the program Democracy Now! The station is staffed by a small crew on a shoestring, with on-air talent mostly comprised of volunteers who compile weekly news forums as well as music shows from nearly every genre imaginable. Heading up the news and music departments, respectively, are veteran staffers Rob Lorei and Randy Wind.
But the two stations have some similarities. Both are nonprofit and require donations from listeners to function. At their core, both seek to serve the public, not advertisers. And both take to the airwaves once in a while to ask listeners for donations.
Kopp, who started in rock radio in Ohio in 1974 and subsequently moved over to public radio news, says it was tough for him to leave WUSF, but he saw the ’MNF job as the culmination of his experience — something that was meant to be.
“For one thing I can walk in and cool my fevered brow over the record library here, which is stunning,” he says. “And there are rock ‘n’ roll posters over the urinal. I’m home.”
The station’s board of directors hired Kopp after a national search largely due to his passion for both news and music, two elements that can at times be at odds as WMNF’s programmers compete for premium time slots.
“Craig Kopp loves radio and has spent decades creating and recreating ways of weaving together the delivery of news and music,” said board chair Michale “KTUF” Bagby and board member Laura Keane in a joint emailed statement. “His on-air presence reflects this and we trust he will maintain WMNF’s history of quality broadcasting of local news with great music.”
It’s the switching of roles, not stations, that’s challenging, Kopp says.
“The big transition is sitting in this chair instead of sitting in a broadcasting booth in front of a microphone.”
A lot goes into managing a radio station, even one as small as WMNF. There’s a staff of barely a dozen, many of whom have been there for
decades, a few since the station’s inception 35 years ago. There are about 70 on-air volunteer programmers and many more volunteers who help out behind the scenes. Kopp’s also got a budget of $1.7 million to manage, which isn’t easy when you rely for the most part on listener donations — approximately 60 percent — as well as on event tickets, underwriting, state money and grants.
“Not a day goes by where I don’t have to figure out whether we have money in the budget to trim the trees before rainy season, get rid of the termites in the shed, fill the generator up with diesel fuel,” Kopp says. “That kind of stuff. Where does this all work, how does it all fit in?”
Another challenge he faces, and seems to take in stride, is the vastly diverse array of personalities at the station. Many disagree intensely about how it should be run. The station lost two managers in the span of a little more than five years. Former station manager Jim Bennett, who was hired in January of 2009, abruptly left the station in 2011 amid harsh criticism of the job he was doing. His successor, Sydney
White, was fired less than three years later.
At the heart of the disagreement is the station’s constant struggle to attract new listeners at a time when each potential ’MNFer has an overwhelming number of options for consuming media.
“Our biggest challenge is revenue and continued relevance,” Bagby and Keane said. “Craig Kopp understands that.”
Kopp said he knew about WMNF before he moved to the area to work for WUSF, and knew the eclectic station was up his alley.
“The radio station, in my mind, is a gem,” he says. “It’s got an incredible core audience and it needs to get exposed to younger people. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge. I’m an incredible believer in radio. I don’t think it’s by any means, way, shape or form, dead.”
He believes the station has the potential to have a bigger impact than it currently has.
“I think this sort of radio station is really on the verge of being way bigger and more influential than it is now. I think it has to have more focus… on getting people’s ears to it,” he says. “We need to go out, say hi, say who we are.”
To Kopp, it’s kind of mind-boggling that WMNF isn’t the lifeblood of hipster enclaves like downtown St. Pete and Seminole Heights; the station already plays the bands millenials have dialed up on Spotify and then some.
“I swear to God, we’re really hipster radio, but the hipsters don’t know we’re there,” he says. “Certainly everything that I’ve observed in popular culture indicates that we have everything they love.”
He’s sought to implement small changes, like having programmers announce the time and weather to reinforce the notion that the station is (unlike satellite radio) local and (unlike Pandora) run by humans.
“We have a really solid core of listeners,” he says. “One thing about this radio station, its ratings have not gone up in two years. The other thing about this radio station is its ratings have not gone down in two years. In a media world that’s just being blown apart, newspapers are dying, websites everywhere, they’re all being funded by angel investors who think they’re going to be the next big thing
— we are stable.”
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2015.