In this episode, we talk to Kira Hoffelmeyer '16, the Assistant News Director at KSL News Radio in Salt Lake City.
Next Generation Leaders celebrates the achievements of young alumni of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. In this episode, we talk to Kira Hoffelmeyer '16, the Assistant News Director at KSL News Radio in Salt Lake City, and a Digital Consultant for Emerald Media Group. Kira tells us about her experiences at the SOJC, her Snowden Internship at KLCC, and what it's like managing a live radio news team.
Find Kira Hoffelmeyer online:
Show Notes:
0:34 Intro & career path post-grad
2:17 Snowden Internship experience
4:01 What methods does KSL use for engaging a variety of audiences?
8:22 How do you approach selecting news stories for coverage, considering your variety of audiences?
15:09 How does KSL give back to its community of listeners?
18:55 As an SOJC alum, what advice do you have for current students?
21:02 Wrap-up and thank yous
Download the transcript for this episode
The music used in this episode is "Intro" by Nangdo, retrieved under a Creative Commons license from Free Music Archive.
Interested in more podcast content from the SOJC? Check out the Hearst Demystifying Media Podcast, where Damian Radcliffe gets the industry scoop from media experts.
Damian Radcliffe 00:06
Hello, and welcome to the Next Generation Leaders podcast. In this series, we talk to young alumni from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Many of these conversations took place in the classroom. So don't worry if you hear the occasional door closing, or questions, a slightly off mic, the insights from my young alumni more than make up for it. In this episode, we hear from Kira Hoffelmeyer, the assistant news director for KSL News Radio in Salt Lake City.
Kira Hoffelmeyer 00:35
Yeah, so I graduated from U of O in 2016. I did an internship as a Snowden Intern for KLCC. And then I came back to Salt Lake, I'm from here, originally, my family's here — and I came did the whole like don't have a job thing need to find a job thing applied for a job, it wasn't qualified for a KSL and got hired as a on call. Producer on call means you work like 1000 hours or less than a year. And I was scheduled working like eight hours a day, Monday through Friday. So that's why I say on call, I got moved to part time within a couple months, and then did that with some other part time jobs as just on the side freelancing, whatever. So as a top part time top producer, I ended up accepting a full time job offer doing digital work for a smaller newspaper up in Park City, which is just about 30 minutes away from Salt Lake. But I still worked at KSL. But I transitioned to the news department. So it was a news anchor and reporter while I was doing this digital engagement work, and then about nine months after doing starting the digital engagement work KSL offered me a full time producing position as an associate producer for their afternoon drive show. I was there for about six months, I was promoted to the executive producer position for the same show that I was working on did that for two years was promoted to something that they made up pretty much was called the daytime editor. It was like a managing editor position alongside still producing the show that I had been producing. And two ish years now, I think we'll say two, I was promoted to assistant news director. And that's what I do now I oversee our digital team, as well as just still running a day-to-day radio operation and alongside my boss.
Student 02:17
Hi, I'm Michael, you mentioned you were an intern. What was your experience like? And how's it similar or different to the work you do now?
Kira Hoffelmeyer 02:26
Oh, boy, my experience with Snowden was great. So I was the first Snowden to do KLCC. So that was really fun. I really haven't had a job in my career where I've done something that was you know, just like a job that existed. So it was a really good opportunity for me to be able to kind of continue along this path of making up my own job. I got to work with some amazing people, Brian Bull, who I understand is now teaching at U of O started there, the same time I started there. So that was kind of fun. Trip Summers was wonderful KLCC. And I would just say generally public radio is slower than commercial radio. And so that's good and bad, right? If you like the adrenaline rush of breaking news and creating your own format, you know, commercial radio is probably more for you. I like the pace of and I mean, I love NPR, I listen to it all the time, just the pacing was different that would that would be that would be the biggest thing. And I think KLCC gave me a really good foundation to be a reporter. And it also taught me that between my experience at KLCC, and then I had also interned at KSL, the summer before so that KSL and then KLCC. And then I went back to work for KSL. And it taught me that I liked the faster pace. And I actually wanted to be a producer, having those two contrasting positions really solidified that like, I'm not somebody who should be a field reporter, I can do it. It's fun to do it for breaking news. But that's just not something I wanted to do. And that helped those two experiences comparing and contrasting really helped me learn that.
Student 04:01
Ki Kira. My name is [unclear], thank you so much for being here with us and joining our class. On that note with KLCC we actually got to visit them a couple of weeks ago, we learned that a radio is actually having a difficult time reaching younger audiences. And I wanted to ask if there's any methods at KSL News Radio that are helping you find success there.
Kira Hoffelmeyer 04:22
So that's something we're all grappling with. Right? I think it's interesting because a lot of people my age, I really love NPR. I think you find a lot of people who really dive into it and enjoy it. Like I'm 30 years old for perspective. So, you know, people my age, kind of, I think grew up with parents that liked listening to NPR. I will tell you that the format that KSL exists in definitely doesn't like lend itself to Sometimes people even my age or younger, the target demo, as we would say would be 35 to 45 year olds, so we're talking like mom and dad's in their car, driving to and from work or driving the kids around after school. So it's, you know, a little bit of a different target demo. But some of the ways that we're doing that is a lot of the ways that my team is trying to handle the news. Because we're a commercial radio station, we don't have the same to KLCC. I don't know if they talked about this. But generally, with NPR stations, and member stations, you have a clock and so does, KSL. But when you're a member station, you have a certain amount of time, and you have to have that hard out. So if your hard out is 6:10:30, like that is your hard out or you get fined for going over. KSL doesn't really have that we have obligations to meet spots, ads people pay for, but we have a lot more flexibility in moving those around. And so we like to use that to our advantage to be able to surprise audiences break the format, go a little bit longer. We have talk shows and new shows. So they're not the same, like long segment things. But we've been going live on YouTube every single day. We're live for like 17 hours Monday through Friday. And then Saturday and Sunday, things get a little bit more scattered. Just because it's weekends. You know, we have live for shows on Saturday, Sunday is it's Utah. That's how I'll say it. So Sunday's just not very open. So there's not a whole lot of live happening on Sundays. But we do YouTube Live for every show that is live. And we found a lot of success in the like 18 to 25 audience there. We also have built the digital team has built individual social media plans for hosts and reporters primarily we're working on kind of expanding it but sort of a left to do hosts and reporters as is because there's like 14 of them individualized social media plans to purposely promote on on streaming listening as the way that I'll put it. So not necessarily like pulling out the radio and dialing into one 102.7 FM but rather saying, hey, Amazon device that I won't say because I'll set mine off play case on his radio, and teaching our audience that like, Hey, you can tell your Amazon device to play case on his radio, you can have us right in your home, being able to stream it on our web straight streaming on YouTube, stream it on an app texts with KSL. So we're doing all of the places that aren't necessarily, you know, just a terrestrial radio station. But I was reading an article the other day, that was saying that radio is now America's number one mass reach medium. So radio actually outpaced TV for like the first time ever, it's actually really interesting to read that and it shows that radio is more resilient than we think. And that there is opportunities to engage and re engage people. I think radio is a format that you age into more than others. But I think that radio as we think about it on a little box or in your car is a very different way of thinking about it that people older than me, don't... people older than me kind of associate a little bit more radio with radio, radio and people my age and younger, I think do the the apps and the streaming and the YouTube, I think you're gonna see a lot more play in that space, especially from stations that are owned by Bonneville, who owns KSL.
Student 08:22
You mentioned reaching the 18 to 25 year old demographic considering the diverse interests and preferences of your audience. How do you approach the process of selecting and prioritizing the news stories for coverage?
Kira Hoffelmeyer 08:37
It's a good question. We meet every morning, at least twice, if not three times in the morning, and then once again in the afternoon to discuss how we're going to do story selection. And I think the most important part of any story selection process is making sure that you have voices to actually represent those areas, right, me as a white female is going to think about things very differently than my Hispanic coworker will just by the way, I mean, even if we take, you know, race out of it, which is a very important thing. You know, even if we just take the fact that I live in Murray and my counterpart lives in West Valley, which I know has like no context to you guys. So we'll just say like, we're talking about somebody who lives in Eugene, we'll just make it simple Eugene versus Springfield, like, even though they are literally right next to each other, they are vastly different. And having the ability to have people from different communities, regardless of their gender identity, or their race or religious background or insert something here is really important to just have those differing opinions being involved in your community. I love local news, because when you're working on a hyperlocal level, there's no way that you're not also involved in your community doing things. You have to be ethically responsible about excusing yourself from those responsibilities, right? But it's a fight sometimes I don't know how to like, there's no better way to describe it than that. Our afternoon team in particular, like likes to fight about news, there's a perfect example that came up yesterday of there is a cider company that is banning, they, they say that they will not serve people who are Zionists. So it then sparks a conversation of like, well, how do you, you know, do we talk to the Jewish community? How does this company, you know, actually ban Zionist? Like, are we, you know, putting stars on people's arms? Like, what's the deal? And so having those conversations, having people with the Jewish perspective with, you know, the perspective of this person who doesn't want to serve people who they say, are Zionist, and only wants to, you know, serve people who are rational about whatever's going on in the Middle East? Do we talk to somebody from a Palestinian perspective? So it's thinking about all of those things, and also weighing whether or not that's the story at its core, right? People can, to a degree, do what they want with their business. So, you know, then the DABS gets involved the Department of Alcoholic beverages, and says, like, hey, State of Utah investigate this. So you have a conversation, me full disclosure, I am Jewish, I come from a Jewish family, I have a different perspective on it, then, you know, the the guy who owns the bar that doesn't want to serve Zionists, I have a different perspective than someone who would say that they're a Zionist, you know, somebody talked to a rabbi who isn't a Zionist. And so it's considering, like, what do I not see about this story? And how do I, how do I tell what is missing? How do I, my feeling has no place in the story, but it's also you take a moment to say, hey, how do I feel? And what other perspective do I need to introduce my audience to? I'm going to be really blunt, Utah is like pretty naive, for the most part. A couple of years ago, we had an incident where somebody was waving a flag in front of the governor's offices that had a swastika made out of vaccine syringes. It was like a protest saying that COVID vaccine mandates are part of the Nazi regime, which anyway, and one of my co-workers was just like, "What's a swastika?" And it was just sort of one of those moments where it's like, um, did we miss this part of history class, you know, so but you have to like, think about those perspectives, you have to think about how maybe our education system doesn't fulfill all of the background requirements of history. There are so many examples of that, right. But it's just deeply considering all of the questions that you have, even if they're silly. So super, like stupid example would be we got I don't, this has made national headlines, which is really just funny to me. We got inundated with tumbleweeds a couple of days ago, with a really bad windstorm. And so my team thought I was crazy, because I was just like, gosh, this is a news story. This is like, this is a big deal. This. And by the way, I'm right, because apparently it's just gone viral. But I was like, We need to talk about like why tumbleweeds are viewed in Utah and and how tumbleweeds come to existence and how this person is going. It was like literally stacked against this entire person's house. And so we're like, what is the city going to do about it? How is this person going to get out of their home? And just asking like, this is a very simplistic question. But thinking about it kind of like a map and having that centralized idea and thinking of all of the ideas that can offshoot off of that. So you know, you're not going to tell every single story on the radio, you know, most of my reporters have a minute or less to tell a story. If they have a minute, that's probably a really long time. With the website, social media, there are so many different ways to tell stories. And honestly, it serves you better to do it on social media, where you have a chance of algorithm thanks, thanks or not, to algorithms to reach people who are intrinsically interested in that content that you don't normally serve. We covered recently, a story about a teacher who is teaching a dance class catered towards black students to be able to teach them about cultural dancing and heritage dancing, and it's reached this whole different audience on Instagram. Looking at the analytics today, it had reached like 10,000 people in the last day or so. And 90% of those people are people that aren't following our account. So that just shows you that like diversifying your content really does reach other audiences and telling human interest stories are alongside like we're breaking news like traffic weather breaking news is like the bread and butter of KSL. And so it's like a big thing like always being on top of the you know, latest and greatest and the traffic and weather which sounds crazy, but it actually brings in quite a decent number of people but just branching out from your normal thing. Having those conversations about people who are impacted on any level, whether it's tumbleweeds or not allowing however they deem Zionists and into a bar.
15:08
I'm interested to know a little bit more about how KSL works, or gives back to the community and their listeners.
Kira Hoffelmeyer 15:17
KSL News Radio is owned by a company called Bonneville International, which has a nonprofit arm. This is a complicated answer. So we have a nonprofit arm that we work with. I'll dive into more specifics there. KSL News Radio is also the we call it a pep station, which is the primary entry station. So we are if the president only want to give an example, if a president has to send a really important message for whatever reason or another. KSL is one of the stations in the United States that you will hear it on first, we are also the Emergency Alert station for the whole state of Utah. So anytime an EIS, an emergency alert comes through or an Amber Alert comes through, it comes to KSL first, so that means we have obligations and so do other radio stations. In this regard. We have obligations to run public service announcements, we have obligations to inform the community to be a first responder in that way. And we have an obligation. It's not really an obligation. It's a very willing commitment to the nonprofit arm of our ownership. So annually we do something we call Give-a-thon, which is we spend all day raising money for Primary Children's Hospital, which is a world renowned Children's Hospital, and they provide hospital services to children mostly in the intermountain west but like we serve kids from Oregon, actually we get them all the time. But if some if someone's child is severely sick, they come to Primary Children's Hospital. So annually we raise money for them. We just did one in December we're actually doing one in like June again or something. We did a radio THON for which is like again all day long radio broadcast to raise money. We did a radio THON for raising money for Maui recently, Bonneville owns many radio stations. So when we raised for Maui, it was a Bonneville wide effort to our sister stations in Phoenix and Seattle in Sacramento and a bunch of other places also raised money for that our I don't remember all of them, but each of our subsidiaries have their own, like Primary Children's, like KTAR in Phoenix has something similar. I just don't even really remember what it is. It's another Children's Hospital. But I couldn't tell you the name. We also serve as a partner with FEMA. They gave us grant money to help us build so we supplied money and they also supplied us money to build emergency broadcast shelters. This is like a brand new thing. So you're some of the first people to that I'm telling outside of station, we literally just got training on it last week. So we get to go out in basically the West desert of Utah. And there's these little like, they're honestly sort of like freight containers that can house a radio station signal should something happen with the radio station signal. It's if the radio station for some reason can't transmit any longer, can go out there and provide our emergency broadcast still. And we do all sorts of stuff like that we do emergency prep, coverage, we partner with the state to do that. I'm trying to think of other things we do recently, we do broadcasts from like blood centers a lot, and different legislative things, which I think ultimately covering legislative sessions is like the greatest service that we do, because lawmakers in Utah are kind of sneaky. We do a lot vulnerables like really invested in giving back to the community. It's something that I really actually love about. Bonneville is its desire to connection uplift communities. It's one of the many mission statements I love. And so it's it. That's a really good question. I liked that question a lot!
Student 18:55
My last question is, as an alum of the University what insights or advice do you have for students who are currently studying journalism or other related fields, particularly in terms of like preparing for future careers or just maybe other people like wrapping up or going into their senior year?
Kira Hoffelmeyer 19:13
Don't... ahh how do I say this... there's not a cookie cutter career path? What you want to do, right, this very second is not always what you end up doing. And more importantly, what you think that you should be doing? Is not what you should do. If you have a calling if you're super passionate. That's great. I say this because all of my dearest friends and I'm like almost not exaggerating. All of my dearest friends that I graduated with our reporters and they're killing it and I'm so proud of them. And that is not who I am. I am not a reporter. I am just I have so much admiration for it. I love to like moonlight report on okay. Asian I love investigative reporting. But that's like the producer and me talking. I like you know, maybe investigative reporting can just be it's an in its own category, but I'm not a daily reporter. And it took me a long time to get out of the trap of thinking that wasn't okay. And I'm just gonna say this or realize that I'm a really badass producer. And my brain just works better in that way, honestly. So there's no cookie cutter career path be open to the fact that what you think you want to do is not what you end up doing. And I say that as somebody who wanted to be a copy editor, and now does digital product for a radio station, if you guys have questions about commercial radio, because we've just like barely skimmed the surface, like it's a fascinating, interesting growing world and, and I love public radio, so I'm not going to do they like and or comparison. It's just it's very different. But if you are like a breaking news junkie, who, you know, maybe doesn't has experience with news, there's so many things that I didn't know about commercial radio that are possible that I've been introduced to just by, you know, not only working at KSL. But, you know, Bonneville is a nationwide company. Don't get yourself trapped in a cookie cutter career path.
Student 21:21
Great advice. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Kira, for joining us today.
Kira Hoffelmeyer 21:24
Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Damian Radcliffe 21:29
If you've enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe so the future episodes will automatically be downloaded to wherever you get your podcasts. You might also enjoy the Demystifying Media podcast, which features studio interviews and guest lectures with leading media and communication professionals spanning both academia and industry. Just search for demystifying media on all major podcast platforms.