Helen Barrington has been KAZU’s General Manager for less than a month. She took over for Mik Benedek, who retired after more than fifteen years at the station.
She became involved with radio as a student at Oberlin College in Ohio. After graduation, she worked at a newly licensed public radio station in California’s Mendocino County. KZYX is licensed to the small community of Philo, CA. There, in 1989, Barrington hosted an environmental program with a local farmer and played reggae music on an overnight show.
After Philo, she worked at several stations in the U.S. and overseas. She began her career in broadcast journalism in the Netherlands. Recently, she worked at CapRadio in Sacramento as interim managing editor for news. Like KAZU, CapRadio is licensed to a California State University campus, Sacramento State.
Speaking in KAZU’s Studio B, Barrington shared her first impressions of KAZU, the future of journalism and her thoughts on how the station can better serve our community.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You left Capital Public Radio [CapRadio] to come here. What was it about KAZU that made you interested in the job?
Helen Barrington (HB): So there are a number of very specific things. One is that this is a relatively small staff, which I do hope will grow, and that felt manageable to me. This is an unbelievably beautiful place. It's also a very diverse place and, in a lot of ways, I think it is an under-covered place. The big cities, like San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento, get a lot of attention. This area doesn't get as much attention and it's very vibrant and people love being here. I love living somewhere where there is a sense of place.
You've only been here a couple of weeks, but have you begun to form goals that you want to reach with this station?
HB: I think it would not surprise anyone to learn that journalism is in a crisis at the moment. I'm very concerned about this because I think journalism and democracy go hand in hand. The accountability of being at the school board, at the city council, at the board of supervisors is very important for people to make decisions about their lives. What I really hope is that we can forge collaborations with other local media so that we all are enhancing each other's work. I would say that's a very big goal.
There's been a lot of angst about the future of journalism. Is it a matter of finding new revenue streams, or is it changing the whole dynamic of what we do?
HB: I think one of the things that hasn't really been clear to people, especially with free sites, is that it actually costs money to make this stuff. It is part of our job to make clear that, while in public broadcasting our websites are free, because that is our mandate, it isn't free to construct and maintain them. How do we communicate that our service should be thought of as a subscription, like a streaming service or a newspaper? We need to communicate why it's important to give money.
What makes a good reporter?
HB: It takes a voracious curiosity in a lot of different areas. Interestingly, a lot of reporters are actually introverts. So, it can be intimidating to make a cold call to someone to ask them to talk or to walk up to them on the street and say, “Could I talk to you about something?” It is the curiosity, the willingness to go outside your comfort zone and the understanding that it's not necessarily something that you might think about as a career, but it is vitally important. That is what makes a good reporter.
For the first time in my lifetime, we don’t just have disagreements. We have people with different realities. We have different truths. How should a reporter address that change when they do their jobs?
HB: The news media has a role in presenting facts by way of how we know something. This is the source we went to and because this is what we do, we went to another source. We had a minimum of two that said the same thing. So we can corroborate. This is one of the areas where, as journalists, we need to get out into the community.
I'd love to do a series of events about how we do our work. Things don't just end up on the air. They are reported. They are researched. They are fact checked. They are edited. They go back for a second edit and sometimes a third edit. So I think it's also incumbent upon us to explain the work.
It's like long division. Show your work.
