Mary is the Project and Communications Coordinator at WTJU 91.1FM, a variety formatted broadcast radio station in Charlottesville, VA. Although Mary has an “all hands on deck” role, her main responsibilities are producing a weekly news podcast called Soundboard as well as assisting with sound engineering and general audio production for live, in-studio guests and performances.
Transcript
I'm Mary Garner McGee and I am the project and communications coordinator for WTJU 91.1 FM right here in Charlottesville. So production is a really big part of my job; recording and then editing it, and putting it out on the air in podcasts. And then I also have been training up to do sound engineering for them, which has been really cool and interesting, too. So when bands come in for live events, or we have people come in for interviews, I'm hooking up all the wires and making sure everything sounds good, doing the EQ, that kinda stuff. Most weeks we have live music, almost every single day. There've been a bunch of times where I'm chatting with the person before they play and asking them to tell me what they made for breakfast this morning. And then I hear them play and I'm like, whoa, that was such a great song, like I'm gonna look them up, I've never heard of them before. And then I'll be like, oh they're, you know, one of the most famous banjo players in the country. Like, glad I didn't mess anything up! So that part's really fun. We also just have a lot of really interesting people come through the station all the time. We have some DJs that have been there for 50 years and then we have student DJs who rotate in and out every couple years. So there's just a lot of good energy and a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. So every week I put out a podcast called Soundboard which is local news and arts and culture with a little bit of an equity focus. For instance, there's a really cool exhibition coming up at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative downtown in a couple of weeks. That's being spearheaded by UVA faculty members. So about a week ago, my boss forwarded that to me and was like, soundboard? And so I reached out to that faculty member and they're gonna come in next week and so once we pick something like that, then I do as much research as I can on the book they've written, or the miniseries they're developing, or the non-profit that they work for. And I come up with a set of questions and they come in and we do the interview and then I take usually much more tape than I will be able to air and take out all the "likes" and "ums" and cut it down to a nice cohesive story that pertains whatever theme we were chatting about.
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