“We believe in the stories that can only be told here.”

Elle Ellis is the vice president of content and programming of WUWM and was a guide at the Doors Open Milwaukee event. She’s been a part of WUWM for four years and manages the newsroom and shows such as the Lake Effect Talk Show. Ellis started her career in public broadcasting as a volunteer DJ in North Carolina and ended up coming to Milwaukee already having a passion for this city.

Jonathan Joseph: What got you into public radio?

Elle Ellis: I started as a volunteer at a music station playing records overnight. I thought it was fun and I thought that would be it, but sometimes opportunities just happen. Eventually, I started to hang out more and more at the station and realized a position would be opening soon; I ended up applying for it and got the job at that station. However, I realized that if I wanted to make this a career, I had to take it seriously, so I went back to school to finish my journalism degree and start working for news stations.

Jonathan Joseph: How did starting with public radio and then studying journalism affect your career?

Elle Ellis: So, when I started to get my degree initially, I thought I was going to write for a newspaper, because my school just didn’t have a program to work in radio. We had a radio station and I worked there, but there was no academic path to launch me into that career, so I stopped. However, one day I was walking down the office at the radio station I was at, and the membership director was listening to This American Life; which is a show that WUWM airs. I asked her, ‘Hey what’s that I’ve never heard that before,’ and she went, ‘Oh your gonna love this.’ I stood in her office and listened to the entire show for 45 minutes. It made me start thinking about the different ways that radio stations work. I really started thinking about how intricate sound is within long form journalism and how important it is. It was really life changing.

Jonathan Joseph: Going back to WUWM, what exactly does this station do differently and better than other stations?

Elle Ellis: That’s really hard, I think a lot of public radio stations are doing it well and I think it’s important to realize just how different each station’s mission is. We have obligations to this city and to our listeners that are different than a radio station somewhere else. However, I’d say that WUWM is a great mid-size station. We understand what Milwaukee is and Milwaukee is important to all of us. Many of us that work here are from here and many of us moved to Milwaukee, because we believe in the stories that can only be told here. It is on our minds every day, how diverse and segregated Milwaukee is. We try really hard to work with the community and let them talk to one another and our journalists; we found that when you ask people what they care about, they tell you one thing. When you ask them what keeps you up at night, they tell you something very different. Our idea is to bridge the gap to the audience and let them tell us what they want and need to know.