How NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe is changing the sound of public radio

Her voice crackles with the warmth and grit of a backyard campfire, both novel and comforting. When Ayesha Rascoe became host of Weekend Edition Sunday two years ago, her accent stood out against the traditional NPR sound while also reminding listeners of people they know.

A relative newcomer to public radio, Rascoe, 38, has made the role her own in a way that stands out from her fellow hosts at the network. Her counterpart on Saturday mornings, Scott Simon, may drop a reference to the Utrecht Treaty in a pre-show behind-the-scenes video he posts on social media. In Rascoe’s pre-show video, she’s likely to mention her fuel for the day, a bag of Doritos and a Coke.

Rascoe brightens the radio dial with a gracious and vivid on-air presence, conveyed in a voice that sounds distinctly Black and Southern. With more than a decade of experience as a reporter, she is well-versed in current affairs but is also interested in topics that NPR otherwise might pay less attention to, such as the strategic petroleum reserve (she covered energy for eight years), or the challenges Black students face when applying for federal student loans.

Consumer-oriented segments are another way Rascoe has changed the role, says Weekend Edition EP Sarah Oliver, citing a recent report about medical recommendations for mammograms. It was Rascoe’s idea to dig into that topic, Oliver says, “because it’s a thing that matters to a lot of listeners. … And she really, I think, wants to connect with listeners that way.”

The desire to make that connection has shaped Rascoe’s signature sound. “How do I bring myself into this?” she says she asks herself when planning the show. “That is where I discovered my voice.”

Rascoe allows herself to be vulnerable behind the microphone, whether that’s through showing curiosity, joy or fear. “I can connect with people on different levels, not just on conveying information, but people can connect to parts of my story, they can connect to some of my humor, they can connect to me laughing about Cardi B,” she says. Or, she adds with a chuckle, “I don’t like birds.”

Rascoe has embraced her genuine personality on air after questioning earlier in her career whether she was even cut out for broadcast journalism. She joined NPR in 2018 as a White House correspondent after 10 years in print. As WESUN host since 2022, she’s influencing the next generation of public media journalists.

With her openness, she’s also helping to restore faith in the news media, says Jonathan Seaborn, GM at Little Rock Public Radio in Arkansas.

“Hiring real people with authentic voices is a net positive,” Seaborn says. “People want to feel like they’re hearing someone that they trust.”

From ‘the print track’ to broadcast

Rascoe’s route into public radio was unique compared to many of her predecessors. While they may have attended an Ivy League school or interned within public media, Rascoe graduated from a historically Black university and admits she wasn’t familiar with the network before joining it.

“I knew it was very highly respected, but I didn’t listen,” Rascoe says. When she shared that with her future bosses during her job interview, it didn’t bother them.

 “They hired me, so it really was fine,” Rascoe says.

Rascoe grew up as the middle of three children, all left-handed (a fact she shared during a WESUN interview). Her family moved back and forth twice between Durham, N.C., and Oxford, a small town a half-hour away.

Describing Oxford, where she spent half of middle school and half of high school, Rascoe says, “It had a Walmart. That was it. … It’s a very small town.” Her home was a double-wide trailer “on a dirt road at first,” she says. “They did pave it, but when we first moved there, it was not paved, so it was extremely country.”

An aptitude test in grade school helped Rascoe determine her career. “It said I would be good at journalism, and I was kind of like, ‘Yeah, that sounds right. I love reading and writing. I could write the first draft of history,’” which also happened to be her favorite subject, she says.

An inspiring teacher likewise helped shape the future journalist. Rascoe was placed in academically gifted classes starting in elementary school, she says, “so I would go to this other class with Ms. Crumbaugh. … It was a lot more free-form because we were the kids who were supposed to be advanced.”

Rascoe was editor-in-chief of her high-school newspaper, then majored in print journalism at Howard University, where she became editor-in-chief of The Hilltop student paper. Her focus had always been on the written word, “totally on the print track,” she says. 

“I had no interest in doing broadcast. I didn’t feel like I was a great speaker,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I was polished enough to do broadcast, so I took no broadcast, had no broadcast training, nothing.”

Howard University helped Rascoe develop in other important ways. “I was able to grow as a human being and wasn’t singled out as the ‘other,’ or the person that’s different, or the person that is representative of your entire race,” she says.

In 2008, Rascoe joined Reuters as an energy reporter, where she covered the 2010 BP oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In 2014, she became an energy and environment legal correspondent.

Not only did Rascoe doubt her worth as a broadcaster early on, she questioned having a role in journalism at all. She became so disillusioned after five years in print that she applied for jobs in the consulting industry.

“I got to a point where I was just like ‘Am I cut out for this?’” she says. “It’s so competitive. I’m not really a competitive person. … I didn’t feel like I was some scoop machine, although I could get scoops.”

Meanwhile, a path into broadcast opened for her. In 2016, Rascoe was named White House correspondent at Reuters, where she followed the last year of the Obama administration and the early days of the Trump administration.

Rascoe began appearing on Here & Now and WYPR in Baltimore for roundtable discussions, often recorded in NPR’s studios. Beth Donovan, then NPR’s chief Washington editor, encouraged Rascoe to apply for the role of White House correspondent at the network. She started the job in April 2018.

Weekend Edition Editor Ed McNulty says he knew Rascoe was special after working with her on the NPR podcast Up First. At the time, she was traveling overseas with the president and was tired, “just out-of-her-mind exhausted,” he says. But that didn’t faze the budding radio journalist, according to McNulty.

“She took every edit,” he says. “If we asked her to retake something, she did it, and then, as she reported later, she fell immediately unconscious as soon as the line dropped. But she was a pro early on.”

Oliver says she recognized Rascoe’s talent on the NPR show It’s Been a Minute. “I just happened to hear her on the air guest-hosting, and that’s when I thought, ‘Wow,’” Oliver says.

‘She sounds Black’

Though Rascoe was a seasoned reporter before joining NPR, opening the network microphones to a so-called real-world voice risked losing listeners who might resist change.

Broadcast listeners tend to be older than podcast listeners, who are younger and more open to new or different voices, says Lori Kaplan, NPR’s VP of audience insights. The segment of broadcast listeners ages 55 to 65 is growing, Kaplan says, and recent research shows that “people want to hear themselves reflected.”

Rascoe “sounds Black,” McNulty says. “There’s no other way to put it.”

Rascoe also has a regional accent, which has not always been a welcome trait for public radio hosts. McNulty says that Bob Edwards, a Kentuckian and longtime host of NPR’s Morning Edition, “used to talk about how he let his Louisville slip through every now and then and they would try to get him to retrack stuff. It enraged him.”

Based on email feedback, Oliver says, “people who were not initially a fan have settled in and come to find the joy, and there are others who have not. But we get a steady stream of positive feedback about Ayesha.”

Linguist John McWhorter dedicated an episode of his podcast Lexicon Valley to discussing Rascoe’s voice after he received comments from listeners about her hosting. One person asked McWhorter whether they were racist for disliking her voice. In online comments, McWhorter said, people have referred to Rascoe’s voice as “‘loud’ or ‘high-pitched’ or ‘grating.’”

“It’s not that she’s loud,” McWhorter said. “She’s no louder than anybody else. High-pitched? Maybe, but no higher-pitched than many voices that you hear on NPR and beyond. And grating? I think that that’s subjective.”

McWhorter highlighted elements of Rascoe’s pronunciation that stand out as distinctly African American. There’s the “ah” sound in the words “progress” or “not” — “It’s not nasal, it’s back in the throat,” McWhorter said. He also pointed out how Rascoe pronounces “with” as “wit.”

Therefore, he said, Rascoe “sounds Black-er than Jenn White or Melissa Harris-Perry generally do,” referring to the 1A host and the former host of The Takeaway.

McWhorter ended the episode by urging, “I think we need to get used to her voice and other voices like it as being official ones,” adding, “And we can also learn to hear the beauty in them as well.”

‘Is the show better? Hell yes’

Little Rock Public Radio’s Seaborn connects Rascoe’s sound to public radio’s values. “NPR is known for injecting humanity into the story, so why not have that represented in our hosts?” he says, before clarifying, “It’s nice to have diversity whether it’s accent, whether it’s perspective, all of it within the host. I enjoy listening to her on Sundays because … she’s adjacent to my generation, so some of the dialect and verbiage sounds very familiar.”

Rascoe’s enjoyment for exploring a range of subjects also caught Seaborn’s attention. “She sounds fun,” he says. “She is really good with the light stuff, but at the same time, I’ve heard her do some really good reporting.” He remembers that in a contentious interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rascoe “did a good job standing her ground and explaining why the questions were relevant.”

Israel Smith, director of live listening at WBUR in Boston, says Rascoe has been a draw for the station’s audience. “Is the show better?” he asks. “Hell yes.”

Listeners want to hear true human voices, Smith says. “Ayesha embodies that doing the news as well as the puzzle,” he says, referring to the weekly segment with New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz.

Since Rascoe became host of WESUN, the show’s cume at WBUR has gone up 44%, according to Radio Research Consortium/Nielsen data. (The station’s overall audience has grown over the past 12 to 15 months, according to Smith, making it an outlier from the wider industry.) Since 2022, the show’s average–quarter-hour listening has increased 73%. Smith considers that a “world-class performance.”

NPR doesn’t track weekly national data for its weekend newsmagazines, according to Kaplan. Listening to both public and commercial news radio is “all kind of in decline,” she says, particularly on weekends. But she points out that WESUN has held steady carriage on 799 stations since 2022.

GBH News Executive Editor Lee Hill says he’s “thrilled” with the Sunday program. A graduate of Howard University, Hill says naming Rascoe host was “one of the best decisions that NPR could make for that show.”

Hill says he’s particularly impressed with Rascoe’s agility in handling a broad range of topics. She’s equally comfortable discussing “the latest about the war in Gaza to the ongoing feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar to interviewing [the drummer and keyboardist for] Kool and the Gang.”

“I would hope that our profession, and public media in particular, would continue to be open and welcoming to people of different backgrounds, to people who speak differently, to people who show up as their authentic selves,” Hill says.

Instantly, he stopped himself. “‘Speak differently’ — I kind of want to take that back,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything abnormal or novel about how Ayesha sounds. That’s a point I can’t stress enough. There’s nothing foreign or unfamiliar. To me, she represents people who are a part of my life, and to me that’s normal.”

At Boise State Public Radio, News Director Sáša Woodruff says Rascoe’s presence has caused her to ponder her own biases. “Black voices are one of the blind spots we have regarding the way people sound on the radio,” she says. Public media has hired white people with accents, whether British or Australian, but has been less likely to hire Black, Latino or Asian people with diverse-sounding accents, she explains.

Omitting people who speak with racial dialects on-air is a form of discrimination, Woodruff says. “If that type of voice is not heard in a public setting, then people with that voice can appear to lack legitimacy,” she says. “Including diverse-sounding voices creates that legitimacy.”

WESUN’s AQH on Boise State grew 15% from fall 2021 to fall 2022 and held steady into fall 2023. Erik Jones, Boise State’s program manager, recalls that a husband and wife at a recent member event complimented Rascoe for being “genuine” and said they thought she had brought Shortz “out of his shell.”

During a visit to Shortz’s home last fall, Rascoe and the puzzle master played table tennis and discussed Shortz’s love life — making for a segment that got more personal than his weekly appearances.

The importance of nurturing talent

NPR’s hiring of Rascoe is “a notable, audible, and welcome shift,” says Laura Garbes, associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Garbes, who has been studying the racialization of sound and voice in public media, recently interviewed 75 people of color in public radio to analyze what influences their voices on air. Her paper “Sonic double consciousness: public radio voices of color” describes how the arrival of journalists such as Rascoe and Shankar Vedantam, host of The Hidden Brain, has inspired other public media journalists of color.

One Black reporter told Garbes that she initially tried to match the public radio sound but recently let her accent “shine through.”

“It was partial[ly] just confidence in myself and also hearing Ayesha Rascoe on air,” the reporter said. “She sounds very distinct in her voice. She felt like somebody I would just meet hanging out with friends.”

Rascoe’s presence “signals to other broadcasters that they have the ability to be a public radio professional without having to compromise their own voice,” Garbes says.

Rascoe says more could be done to advance diversity throughout the system. “I think too often we have great talent come in, but we let it wither on the vine,” she says.

That pool of talent isn’t limited to on-air staff, she says. “There are so many talented producers who could probably go into reporting — producers of color — and a lot of them are not the highest-ranking producers, they’re not the highest-ranking editors,” she says. “But they could make those transitions.”

Rascoe also suggests recruiting journalists of color from “print land,” the tactic that helped her, a journalist who wasn’t already influenced by NPR’s traditional sound.

Cultivating journalists with diverse backgrounds should continue, Rascoe suggests. “There are attempts to be mindful,” she says, “but I do think that we really have to keep our eye on the ball and really make it a priority.”

NPR’s Kaplan also underscores the importance of diverse voices on the network. “If your goal is to represent the nation on National Public Radio, then having voices and lenses from across the nation is in everyone’s interest,” she says.

For Lee Hill at GBH, Rascoe’s presence is essential to fulfilling that goal. “To me, that’s what the ‘P’ in NPR is for: ‘public,’” he says.

NPR “is to be where a broad range of people can hear and locate themselves in the stories that are being reported, and with Ayesha, that’s happening,” Hill says. “I think NPR is better for it, I think journalism is better for it, I think the radio dial is better for it.”