What: SPJ DC interview with WAMU 88.5 General Manager Erika Pulley-Hayes
Where: Virtual on Zoom
When: Nov. 16, 2021, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. (EST)
REGISTER using this link.
Sixty years after its first broadcast, Washington’s NPR station, WAMU 88.5, is moving to expand its news coverage and reset its relationship with its staff.
Join the Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter of SPJ on Zoom Nov. 16 for a discussion with the person who is spearheading those changes: Erika Pulley-Hayes, a 15-year veteran of public media, and the American University radio station’s new general manager. She is returning to D.C. from Orlando, Florida, where she was president and CEO of WMFE and 89.5 WMFV.
WAMU announced this spring that it would refocus its coverage to provide more in-depth, local news for its more than 1 million listeners. To that end, the station and its digital publication DCist plans to add eight new full-time news positions to support “an even more robust and collaborative news division,” WAMU said in an April 9 statement.
Pulley-Hayes worked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., from 2005 to 2020. She was tapped from a field of 130 candidates to replace former WAMU General Manager J. J. Yore. Yore’s resignation in August 2020 and broader changes at the station followed “months of unusually public-facing criticism of the station from its own employees, including allegations of workplace toxicity that led to the recent departure of several staffers of color,” according to a DCist news story.
Join SPJ-DC Nov. 16 for a discussion with Pulley-Hayes about the changes she is now implementing to address those concerns and what she sees down the road for WAMU’s coverage of the Washington area — the nation’s seventh-largest media market.