KCRW's builder
Seymour decides: She’ll try something different
Ruth Seymour, who built a successful but insistently idiosyncratic Los Angeles station and Internet music source with go-it-alone intuition, announced this week she’ll retire at the end of February. She’s 74 and will have managed Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM for 32 years. Before that, she headed Pacifica’s L.A. station, KPFK.
"Nothing is harder than to announce that you're leaving and then try to manage for the next few months. So I hope you'll make it easy for me," she wrote in a memo to her staff, posted on the blog LAObserved.
Though Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media Group has developed the city’s biggest NPR News audience with a more focused news service at offshoot KPCC-FM in Pasadena, Seymour values eclecticism and disdains risk-averse managers and their dependence on ratings data for decision-making.
Though KCRW's estimated audience fell sharply when Arbitron changed its audience estimation technology recently, the station retains a big audience, with a cume approaching 500,000 for its mix of up-to-the-minute contemporary music on Morning Becomes Eclectic and other programs, prize-winning news/talk staples anchored by Warren Olney and local phenomena such as Good Food, the foodie show parodied memorably years ago by Saturday Night Live. The station’s members have continued to grow to 52,000 and their contributions are up, too, she told Sharon Waxman on TheWrap.com.
Outspoken and seemingly fearless, Seymour has long been a national figure in public radio. She raised money for NPR when the network drove into a fiscal ditch in the 1980s and when its news budget was drained in the 1990s, but she has also knocked the network for competing with stations’ web services by starting the NPR Music site.
KCRW’s pledge drives, two a year, passed the $100,000 mark in 1984 and now raise $2 million each, the Los Angeles Times reported in its profile of Seymour.
The manager claims she doesn’t have plans. “I once had a period when I didn’t work. I lived on an island in Greece. It was a pivotal time. You discover all kinds of things about yourself.”
More in later issues of Current.
Web page posted Nov. 20, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
