To donate to Live Wire Radio go here.
To donate to KMUN go here.
To donate to KWSO go here.
The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. Today is Giving Tuesday a day, where instead of shopping for ourselves, we're encouraged to give to Nonprofits and Charities. For several years now we've brought you stories of local nonprofits on Giving Tuesday as a way to inform you about what they do and the help they need. Well, this year, our call out to such organizations hits very close to home. As most of you are aware, Congress removed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and that's severely impacting stations and programming right here in Oregon. So today, on this Giving Tuesday, you'll hear from several voices, one very familiar, and others you may have never heard, but are all important to informing, educating and entertaining their public audiences, from the coast to Oregon, indigenous populations and more. First up, we talk with a very familiar voice on these airwaves, one that can be heard every Saturday. Luke Burbank, host of Live Wire, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
LUKE BURBANK: Absolutely any chance to be on KLCC.
MICHAEL DUNNE: And you are, but for the six people who are listening who don't know who you are, and what Live Wire is, explain it to us. Explain what your program is all about.
LUKE BURBANK: Well, it's a public radio variety show. Sometimes, if you know, I'm getting my hair cut and I'm trying to just sort of give somebody the shorthand version, I will say, and then maybe this is a little reductive, I'll say it's sort of like the Tonight Show, but on the radio. So if you come out to the live program, you know, there's a house band, and there's a stage we bring out, you know, comedians and writers and performers, and there's an announcer, Elena Passarello , and so it's a really fun kind of in person event that we then figure out how to translate into a really fun radio event. So again, you'll hear from all kinds of different people, different voices, some of them people that are pretty famous, that you may have heard of, and others who might be new to you. But we like to think that, um, we can kind of turn on a lot of listeners to some new voices that they aren't familiar with before, and those people become kind of some of their favorites.
MICHAEL DUNNE: How did you get involved?
LUKE BURBANK: How much time do you have? Michael, it is long and sort of almost improbable, to the point of sounding like I'm making this up. But the real story is many years ago now, like over 10 years ago, I was booked to be a guest on Live Wire because of some of my other radio jobs, I am on a show called Wait, wait, don't tell me which is a news quiz show and some other things. They had booked me as a guest on the program. I had not heard the show myself at that time. It wasn't on in Seattle, where I lived, and I woke up the morning of the interview, was getting ready to drive down to Portland to do the show, and I had a bunch of missed calls from the producer of the show, and I called that producer back, and they said, Our host is sick. Could you actually host the show instead of being a guest? And because I never let logic get in the way of an adventure, I said, Sure. Having never heard the show, I hadn't read any of the books for that particular week. I just said, okay. So, as I was driving down from Seattle to Portland, I had my laptop open, I was trying to find the show online to, like, listen to even kind of what the format was. By the time I got to Portland, I guess I had a vague sense of things. And so I am, I filled in that night. And by the way, this is back in the days where we used to do two entire episodes of the show in one evening. So, it was like eight guests. Wow, that I was supposed to interview without any kind of, without any kind of, you know, research or whatever. So, I just told everyone in the audience. I said, Look, I'm really not supposed to be here as the host. Please try to go easy on me, and just the fact that by the end of the show, I was still sort of standing upright like talking into the microphone, that was considered a win, and the audience was very kind to me, and it went okay. And so it turned out that the actual host, at the time, her name was Courtney Hallmeister, was kind of getting ready to move on and do other things. And so, they said, you know, do you want to come back and host it next week as a fill-in? I said, all right. And I just kept coming back week after week. And eventually, at some point they said, do you just want to be the host of the show? And I said, Okay, and here I am, many years later,
MICHAEL DUNNE: Luke, I have an image of you driving down I-5 on your laptop while still navigating traffic and whatnot.
LUKE BURBANK: I want to be clear Michael, so that the KLCC listeners do not think that the host of Live Wire would endanger other I five drivers. My at the time, wife, now, not because of the Live Wire thing, ex-wife, for a whole host of other reasons that we could talk about in a different episode of the show. I was not driving. I was in the passenger seat. Oh, yes. Basically, everything else you were picturing.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, okay, that's good. I just want to make sure that we're all it wasn't a dangerous situation, and obviously it worked, which is wonderful. And you've also come down to our wonderful city, Eugene, and I wanted to ask, you know, maybe there were some, some, some shows you did in Eugene, you'd like to kind of highlight what were some favorite, you know, guests or occurrences that happened when you were down here in our fair city.
LUKE BURBANK: I want to be really careful with how I set this up, Michael, because I know you're in Eugene. It's duck country Indian I, I hail from Seattle, Washington, where I went to the University of Washington, the natural rivals of the ducks. And when I heard we were going to go to the Hult Center, I worried that we would be slightly behind enemy lines. But in fact, the crowd could not have been more welcoming. And in fact, it really kind of turned me around a little bit on Eugene, on the U of O of the whole thing, because it was like such a fun night. The crowd was so amazing. That's the Hult Center. Is such a cool spot that I am now, like, I have gone from being a sort of, you know, feeling there was a rivalry, to feeling like, anytime we're invited down to Eugene to do Live Wire, we're there because it was such a fun time. So, I now hold Eugene very fondly in my heart, in a way I didn't previously, if I'm being honest.
MICHAEL DUNNE: So Live Wire can bridge cultural divides as well and historic sports rivalries, which is great. So, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is people may think that you know your show and not necessarily understand the minutia about funding. And let's talk about that, because your show Live Wire has been upended a bit by what's happened to us and other stations with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and rescission. Talk about that. Talk about how it's impacting your show.
LUKE BURBANK: Yeah, you know, you know this. Michael, public radio has never been like, financially, the most sort of flush environment, and that was in like the good times, sure. But then you take away the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes a significant amount of money into the public radio system, and if you take that out of the system, it doesn't get to the stations, and then the stations have less money to, you know, pay the fees for airing Live Wire. We call those carriage fees. And the same thing has been happening in the worlds of a lot of like the grant funding that goes on. You know, our show also gets a lot from state and federal grants to keep this whole thing going. And so, you've had, you know, you've had this reduction in a lot of the different funding mechanisms that have kept Live Wire going over the years. And again, it's always been scrappy, even the best of years. So, we, you know, we looked at the last year and we saw a reduction of about $150,000 in the money that was coming in to support Live Wire, which I don't know, you know, if you're talking about some of the really big shows. Maybe that's not a lot. That's a lot for Live Wire. And so, in order to sort of try to fix that, we launched this thing this year called The fully charged campaign. And what we're trying to do is make up that $150,000 between now and January 31, of 2026 and we feel like if we're able to do that, we're going to be able to stabilize things for Live Wire so that going forward, our show is not as subjected to the kind of winds of politics and funding priorities and things like that. Because, you know, that's a precarious place to be. We want to actually really kind of put together a new model of how to do a public radio show like ours. We've got this thing called The League of Extraordinary listeners, and that just is basically a fancy name for people who donate to the show on a monthly basis, you know, $5 or $10 whatever they want to do. And for that, they get early access to tickets. They get all kinds of cool perks. And they also, they'll get to know that they're helping make this now very unique thing that is Live Wire possible. Because when I started out doing this, like 20 years ago, I just mean, in the public radio world, there were multiple shows like Live Wire on the weekends. In Public Radio, you know, there were lots of variety shows and live programs and things, and it's down to just a pretty small number of them now, because it's just really difficult to navigate the finances of it, so we are encouraging people, humbly to go to Livewire radio.org there's a big, believe me, a huge, big banner at the top of the page, fully charged. If you click on that, you can kind of read about what we're doing. And then if KLCC listeners wanted to help us keep this going, we would be. Very appreciative. I'm happy to say it has been going very well so far, like we are, I think probably slightly ahead of where we were hoping to be towards this number of $150,000 so far. So that's really encouraging. But as you know, with public radio fundraising, there's kind of this initial excitement, and then there's kind of like the doldrums, sure, before maybe a little burst of final energy. And we'd like to keep the doldrums as minimal as possible. So, anybody who's hearing this who wants to help keep Live Wire, you know, operating, we would be very, very appreciative of that.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I certainly feel one of the gems of Public Radio is Live Wire, and it's an Oregon gem as well…
LUKE BURBANK: That's right, yeah, that's, I was so glad when, when you reached out to talk about this, because I feel like, you know, this is a very unique program just in the public radio landscape now, because of the things we were talking about earlier, but also unique to Oregon. So many of our guests are from right here in the Portland area, but also out throughout the state. It is really this kind of cool thing that highlights particularly in this moment of time when there are certain people really maligning, you know, places like Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and that just doesn't line up with my experience living here. It's so cool to get to do a show that presents what's great about the Pacific Northwest and what's great about the state of Oregon, and send it out to like, you know, over a million listeners every month. Like, that's a lot of people getting to hear the real narrative of what's happening out in this part of the world. And so I am, I'm honored to get to be a part of that.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Luke Burbank, host of Live Wire, proud Husky, but also proud Duck adjacent, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
LUKE BURBANK: Thank you for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Let's now chat with a station that's an important voice on the Oregon coast. Jack Harris, the program director and Mari Bergeron, the station manager for KMUN, thank you both so much for coming on and talking with us.
BOTH: It's great to be here, delighted.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Mari, why don't you just start with this, just for our listeners who may not be familiar with KMUN talk about your station, talk about the area, area that you broadcast in, that sort of thing.
MARI BERGERON: Sure. KMUN is a community radio station, so we're a little bit different in flavor from a public radio station. We are very much of and by and for the community here in the lower Columbia area, which is from a little south of Tillamook, Oregon, up to the northern part of Willapa Bay, Washington. Okay, we've been here for 43 years. We're a very small station. We have six and a half employees, and we are largely volunteer powered. And we have a mission to serve this region, to eliminate the rule, illuminate the role of the arts, promote cultural growth, bring focus to local news and issues and provide a forum for the diverse voices of our region.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, Jack, maybe give us an example of something like a programming day. What are some of the things that you broadcast?
JACK HARRIS: Well, we start off the day, almost every day, with classical music. And then often we allow dogs into our station. Absolutely we do. So, we do the dog barking thing, and then we are busy. We have folk. We have, oh, my goodness, I should have just brought a calendar along with me. In the afternoons, it's usually pretty eclectic. We have a Scandinavian hour on the weekends. We do Celtic music. We do back porch music. We have a Grateful Dead show, of course, every Friday afternoon or evening, right after two hours of reggae, okay? And then when it gets it, the later it gets, the weirder it gets!
MICHAEL DUNNE: Nice, nice. So, Mari maybe tells us what's traditionally sort of been your, you know, funding mix between money that you might have gotten before or from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and sort of the funding that you raise locally?
MARI BERGERON: Sure, before the cutbacks, federal funding was just about 30% of our budget. That is less than for some. Recommendations, but it was very important. So that's about a third of our budget, or around $175,000 which tells you what a small budget we in fact, have. The rest is raised locally, a little bit through grants, but most of it through the generosity of listeners in our area right here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, okay, so since rescission and since the cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, how have you worked to try and compensate for a pretty big hit, right?
MARI BERGERON: It is, you know, that was money that was already in our budget. We already had plans for it, and suddenly it was clawed back. As that was happening, we had our fall fundraiser. We set a really audaciously high number for that, and our community exceeded it. It was really, really magical that they were able to do that. Having said that, you know, that was kind of a one-time thing. We are also seeing many of our donors saying, Look, you know, we want to continue to do this, but you know, due to their own conditions, their employment, whatever, they are not able to continue, we're going to have to search for additional grants beyond what we have done in the past, and we're also doing a lot more outreach to businesses in our community, and they're helping us out by advertising in our print publication, also with on air underwriting and other kinds of support.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, Jack, are there things you've had to do, programming wise, to kind of compensate for the loss of the federal dollars?
JACK HARRIS: Yes, we took a look at the budget and the biggest ticket item that wasn't a staff member such as myself was the NPR affiliation. And NPR is available through OPB in our area, and so in one sense, it was sort of a redundant service. But we decided to move away from that. That was about half of the, not quite half of the money that we lost we spent on NPR. So we've had to completely revamp our entire news department because we really leaned on the NPR headline news and an hour in the morning in the afternoon, we're kind of doing that all ourselves now.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Mari, my, my last question for you both is, is really just, you know, for our listeners, if they wanted to help, what could they do?
MARI BERGERON: Sure, they can absolutely give to their local public radio station? If they're in our area, I hope they will think of us. You know, every dollar helps. So small donations are super important. We also need help with programming. If somebody would like to be a programmer, they can give Jack a call and talk about maybe some ideas that they have. We have a regular training program for people who would like to be on air, volunteers that Jack teaches.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Well, Jack Harris and Mari Bergeron with KMUN, really appreciate you guys coming on and talking about your station.
BOTH: Thank you, Michael. We appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Michael.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Now let's hear from a station that's a vital link for the Warm Springs. Reservation Sue matters, the station manager for KWSO, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
SUE MATTERS: Thanks for inviting me. Michael.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Our listeners who may not know about KWSO, tell us where you are, where you broadcast it, and just give us a general snapshot of what you do there at the station for the community.
SUE MATTERS: KWSO is a public radio station owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. So, we're located on the Warm Springs Indian reservation here in Oregon. We're in North Central Oregon, kind of a couple hours east of Portland and about an hour north of Ben. Okay, so people travel through quite a bit.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Maybe you can explain to our audience what's been traditionally, your funding mix.
SUE MATTERS: Historically, the Warm Springs tribes, 100% funded the operation of the radio station, okay, in 2003 we got into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Community Service grant program, and then we started to grow, like our underwriting program, and started a, you know, sustaining membership program. We sell merch, you know, anything to hustle for some money. Yeah. And in the end, it was sort of a three-way split of tribal dollars, CPB, community service grant money. And then we've had some success with co-locators on our radio tower, that brings in some significant revenue, plus do some other odd things in addition to underwriting and sustaining membership. So, about a third of our annual operations budget is now being replaced by other things since CPB has been eliminated.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Well, and that's what I was going to ask you about. You know, since rescission, since it's been removed, how have you been able to cope?
SUE MATTERS: You know, I think we've been really fortunate in that some more mainstream media than KWSO, has picked up our story. You know, we've gotten way more attention than both stations, and that has been a benefit in that people have been sending donations.
MICHAEL DUNNE: If our listeners wanted to help you out, what could they do?
SUE MATTERS: I mean, there's, you know, there's one-time donations, there's sustaining memberships, which is, like, you can just sign up to give 10 bucks a month. Sure, that's, honestly, that's what I do. It's the cumulative effect of a lot of people doing a little bit. I mean, it's less than Netflix, you know, so it's not too impacting, but that all adds up. And what's great about that is that it's a monthly thing, so we can budget for that, and then that money comes in, and we budget, we estimate how much money we're going to be making next year, and then that offsets our costs, and so that covers, you know, some of our expenses.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Well, we're, we're all in this together. Sue Matters, the station manager for KWSO on the Warm Springs reservation. Best of luck to you, and thanks so much for jumping on and talking with us.
SUE MATTERS: Appreciate it, Michael.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That’s the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, we check in on plans and efforts for the Egan Warming Centers as they gear up for winter. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon On The Record, thanks for listening.
