Archive: Around Town

The voice of the WHCU Morning News Watch host is like an old friend you look forward to hearing every morning.  The show has been on the air for 25 years.  Before popular host Dave Vieser left in January there had been only five permanent hosts since the show began.  At the end of April Lee Rayburn took the microphone as the new Morning News Watch host.

"To walk into a venerable institution like the Morning News Watch on WHCU, which has been around in a radio station that's almost 100 years old, and a show that's had five hosts over that time... to walk into that is terrifying," Rayburn says.  "I've called people by their wrong names.  The beautiful thing is that even though I am sitting in an institution of a radio show people have been willing to bend over backwards to forgive me."

Rayburn is still in the 'getting to know you' period with his audience.  He says he is not politically partison, but very opinionated about what it takes to make a community better.  His challenge right now is to get to know his audience as they get to know him.

"The only thing I can do is be myself," he says.  "Anything else is disingenuous.  They can hear it if you are a phony.  I can only be what I am, which is this ADHD immature grownup who is still concerned about what's happening in my back yard, still wants to play a part in how to make it better and leave it better than how we found it, and is interested in finding like-minded members of the community who will seek out opportunities to create a future that is better than we endure."

The format of the show includes interacting with Program/News Director Geoff Dunn, who provides the news and banters with the host on local and sports topics.  When Vieser left after nearly six years at the microphone Dunn and Chris Allenger filled in while the station searched for just the right replacement.  Rayburn follows Jack Deal, Rudy Paolangeli, Gerry Angel, Casey Stevens, and Dave Vieser. 

“We are absolutely thrilled to bring Lee to Ithaca to head up Newswatch,” says Cayuga Radio Group President/General Manager Chet Osadchey. “He is an incredibly gifted broadcaster who will help elevate WHCU to historical heights. To have Lee here, working alongside our talented News and Program Director Geoff Dunn and with reporters Brendan Callahan and Katie Husband… it will make for an amazing team.”

Morning News Watch airs from 5:30 to 9 in the morning, featuring local and national guests covering a variety of topics.  Opinionated as he might be, Rayburn's interview style already clearly focusses on the people he talks to and what they have to say.

"I would say that 90% of my job is listening," he says.  "I generally try to stay as silent as possible and hear what other people are saying and soak it in.  My job isn't to talk.  My job is to take a chaotic world inundated with information, extrapolate what's inside it and try to make sense of it in a way that people can put to good use in their own lives."

Growing up in a mixed cultural neighborhood in a suburb of Chicago, Rayburn's father interviewed him on a reel to reel tape recorder from the time he began talking.  Later he and a cousin created mock radio shows, using a duel tape deck to dub music in with the spoken sections.  While in junior high school he took it upon himself to explain to a local station why their adult contemporary format was not as interesting as an alternative music format.  He did a brief stint in college radio and spent nine years in and out of college before graduating with a communications degree.  Part of that time was spent following the Grateful Dead tour in the mid '90s.

The day after the last 'Dead' concert he moved to Northern California, but eventually ended up in Madison, Wisconsin.  In his last year as an undergraduate he interned at both an ad agency and at a talk radio station.  He stayed with what he loved.

"It was fun every day," he says.  It wasn't until September 11, 2001 that I realized how important what we did having fun every day actually was to everybody else.  That was the day for me that etched into stone that this is what I would do."

He has been doing it for twelve years.  He worked at that first Madison radio station for four years, then moved across town for another four years at the Madison Air America affiliate where his show came on before the Stephanie Miller Show.  In 2010 he moved to a  Coachella Valley conservative talk station, airing after the Glen Beck Show.

"The funny thing is, it worked both ways," he says.  "I'm not a Democrat.  I'm not a Republican.  I don't fit within any sort of categorization of what is traditionally considered talk radio.  I don't fit in the public radio sphere.  I have something unique because all I can ever do every day is bring myself to the table."

As many talk shows do, his show centered on him as a personality.  But he says the Morning News Watch offers him an opportunity to branch into another kind of program that spotlights the community.

"This is the first time I've had to participate in a news show where you have the disparate elements that you have to bring together into one cohesive program, from news to traffic, sports, weather, guests, and other features," he says.  "Up until this point it's just been all me.  It's a lot of pressure and a lot of work.  Now it's about making sure that it's not all about me.  It's all about Ithaca and out area here and why it matters today."

Rayburn says that a typical radio career means working at a station for a few years and being used up and spit out to another station.  But he yearned for something more permanent that would involve him in an engaged community.  He was attracted to the Morning News Watch in part because it has had only a few long-lasting hosts. 

"One of the reasons I'm here is Saga Communications has a reputation for being exceptional as a radio company," he says.  "On top of that is the history and legacy of News Talk WHCU and the select few hosts for the Morning News Watch program.  That spoke volumes to me because it was about a long term investment that I was looking for which commercial radio, more and more often, is uninterested in."


Off-air Rayburn works on production and promotion, but for now he is concentrating on learning the area and the community.  Being thrust into the heart of the community as a newcomer has been the greatest challenge.  Rayburn's first day at WHCU was the day of the big April snow storm.  He was observing in the studio as Dunn helmed the show,  fielding an avalanche of school and events closures, wondering why he had ever left southern California.  But he says he hasn't thought of leaving since that day.

"I look at other local talk show hosts like Dave Ross in Seattle, John and Ken in Los Angeles, Jim Phillips in Orlando -- those are the guys I look up to because they have created and continued to build on community," he says.  "My hope is to spend the next decade, the next generation being part of a community that's working to make it better than how we found it."

Right now Rayburn is happy at the station, and delighting in exploring the area.  He seems amazed at the history of families that have been here for generations and how welcoming they are to newcomers.  He says in addition to the collective engagement of the community as a whole he is enjoying meeting each individual.

"I took a look at the falls and they're beautiful, and the gorges and they're gorgeous -- no doubt.  But there is something about the people here," he says.  "The kindness of strangers in this community is unlike any place I have ever been, and I'm somebody who has been a lot of different places by the nature of my work.  This is a place where people are so nice you begin to wonder if there's an angle they are playing on you.  I know they're not -- it just takes some getting used to.  It's not a glossy politeness.  It's a genuine kindness.  I relish that."

Rayburn says he spent his first week pressing all the wrong buttons on the console in his studio, and making all kinds of mistakes.  He has already interviewed scores of local people from government officials to people from not for profits, school organizations, Chamber of Commerce, and a local film critic.

"It's about getting out to Taughannock Falls.  It's about learning how to say 'Taughannock', he laughs.  "I came to town so confident that I told somebody it's pronounced 'Skan-a-tillies'.  Obviously!"

The only thing missing is his cat, whom he calls his 'significant other'.  She is staying with his parents in Wisconsin while he gets settled, but he is looking forward to bringing her to their new home.  Meanwhile it looks like the job is what he has been looking for, and the first month will turn into months and then years of providing a voice for the Ithaca community. 

"While I have continued to grow over the last dozen years in radio, I aspire to do what I am doing right now," he says.  "When the opportunity arose to come to Ithaca and I had a chance to visit and meet with people I'd be working with and learn the history of News Talk WHCU it was the opportunity that I've been seeking for the last twelve years.  It's an opportunity to be on a local station that cares about the community, that is invested in it in a way that I could see myself, over the next ten or twenty years, becoming a part of that community.  That excites me."

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