After nearly eight years with the Good Karma Brands news/talk station, Michael Spaulding was elevated to Director of Content at 620 WTMJ last week.
The ascension for Spaulding was a long time coming since joining the station as a news anchor/reporter in 2016. He later held roles like assignment editor, managing editor, and assistant program director before officially taking the reins as the overall leader of the station.
When the opportunity knocked, Spaulding was more than happy to answer the door.
“It’s really exciting. It’s a great opportunity to be able to lead the station through 2024 and beyond,” Spaulding said.”It’s been quite a journey. It has been awesome for me to be able to be in Milwaukee, to be with the station, and to be able to really grow here and have more and more opportunities. I said I wanted to be challenged and learn something new every day and I certainly do get to do that now.”
When he originally decided to join WTMJ in 2016, he said the station’s commitment to news was a deciding factor.
“You just don’t get a lot of radio stations that do that, even in major markets. So coming here, coming to a station that put news first always and understood the importance of that … understands the value of not only saying ‘We cover news’ but then putting those resources to actually do it in place is really important.”
That commitment to news has remained a steadfast priority of the Milwaukee news/talk outlet. In fact, earlier this year, Spaulding was part of a coalition that put an expanded focus on news, rather than conservative talk, at the station’s forefront.
“To be able to come up through that has been extremely helpful, because as we move TMJ into a new direction earlier this year with a launch of the new lineup, it was to move us in more of a news direction. Not only in our news breaks, but also in our content all day,” the new leader shared. “So having an understanding of what it takes to cover a community like Milwaukee and actually have the experience to be able to do it just made it all that more rewarding to be able to lead the station.”
Few stations around the cultural impact that 620 WTMJ has in not just Milwaukee but in the entire state of Wisconsin. Michael Spaulding joked it wasn’t long into his tenure when he was confronted with that fact.
“The tagline of ‘Wisconsin’s Radio Station’ to us isn’t just a line of words. They actually hold some weight and some value. That was made extremely clear to me when I started my career here, both by our management team, but as well as the people in the newsroom and the talent that was on the air at the time.
“One day, I think it was early on in my time here, prior to the primaries rolling around in 2016 and that was when Ted Cruz was in the race. Charlie Sykes was our midday host at the time and he was able to get Donald Trump on the phone. He was able to get Ted Cruz on the phone and to get Scott Walker in studio. He got Paul Ryan at the time in studio. When you see people like that walking through the halls, it doesn’t take a long time to recognize what the station means.”
Earlier this year, WTMJ raised eyebrows when it launched five new shows as part of a daily lineup revamp. Michael Spaulding was quick to give credit to Good Karma Brands for believing in the mission of a more news-focused presentation.
“Look, you don’t get an ownership group that is willing to take risks in this industry very often and is willing to follow the belief that doing something right is better than doing something for ratings,” he shared. “We had a couple of things we really wanted to do. We wanted an opportunity to emphasize more voices on the station, and we wanted an opportunity for the station to look and sound more like the coverage area that we have.”
He noted that in the station’s previous lineup, two WTMJ hosts — Steve Scaffidi and Jeff Wagner — held six hours of station programming each day. Now, the station is broken up into one and two-hour show blocks to better focus on news and allow more voices to opine and report on the daily happenings in the Milwaukee metro and the state.
“The idea behind the whole thing was to put action behind our words of ‘Wisconsin’s Radio Station’ and make it look and sound more like the state is the payoff. I think we’re seeing it this week with the Republican National Convention in town. We have more people on the street now gathering news information, gathering intel, doing interviews, contributing to the news product than we would have had a year ago. So the payoff is really being able to look around at what content’s being put out on our airwaves, our social media channels, and also our website and go ‘Yeah, ok, this is kind of the culmination of what we wanted to be able to do.'”
Milwaukee is currently the center of the political universe as the Republican National Convention takes place in the city. The event will culminate with the appointment of former President Donald Trump as the party’s official presidential nominee. And while the media and political worlds parachute into the Wisconsin city, Michael Spaulding told Barrett News Media that preparations have been ongoing at 620 WTMJ for months.
“Several, several months,” Spaulding said of when the first discussions began of how the station would cover the event, noting that the station had previous experience after the city hosted the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “We spent a lot of time with our leadership team going over some of the logistical things: What does a hard security perimeter mean? How are people going to get to and from the convention? So we had some of that stuff in place.
“Members of our leadership team started talking about the RNC — a year ago maybe is a little bit far away, but I’d say at least six, seven months. And a lot of it was working with the Secret Service to make sure that we were in as much as we could be in and get that information, and working with the RNC and seeing that kind of come out of all the hard work that we put in at the very beginning. It has been super great for us.”
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
