KS95’s Tricia “TJ” Jenkins is a full-grown woman of 46 years, with more than two decades’ worth of professional radio airchecks to highlight her hard work. She’s also got a closet full of VHS tapes of her much younger self singing and dancing to New Kids on the Block and Paula Abdul.
Those VHS gems were recorded in Omaha, Nebraska, where she was born, raised, and went to college.
“I went to school to become a principal and a teacher,” she says, “and my friend who did a radio show asked me to join her. I did, and I was like, you can go to college for it? I changed my major the next day to Communications. I knew that’s what I wanted to do forever.” She graduated from Wayne State with a B.A. in Media Studies and Broadcast Journalism in 2001.
“Radio,” she says, “is a way to be in music even though I have no musical talent.” That college show, “T & T Club Cuts,” (her co-host’s name was Tricia, too) led the way to TJ’s crisscrossing the country for radio jobs in San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Modesto, California, and currently, Minneapolis/St. Paul.
TJ loves all kinds of music. Her “walk up” song? “Good As Hell” by Lizzo. Shaboozey and Teddy Swims are current favorites, but her first love is country. She was raised on it.
She’s hosted two country music radio shows, including a morning show in the country music capital of the world. The tough part about that gig was not just waking up early, she says, but also being an early bird where there’s the best in live music pretty much 24/7. “When you have to wake up at 3:00 in the morning in Nashville, either you don’t sleep or you have FOMO,” she says.
Losing sleep and/or missing out was worth it. “The time I spent in Nashville was a big deal. I was on a nationally syndicated morning show, and we had an international audience with ‘Afternoons in the UK,’ which ran on Country Hits Radio UK.” What’s more, it was her very first morning show, with heavy hitting co-hosts: country music recording artist Chuck Wicks, and radio great Ty Bentli. It was Bentli who asked TJ to join “The Ty Bentli Show,” then on Westwood One, saying she’s “hilariously honest, strategically focused and innately curious about others.”
That lasted for a year and a half. “Ty went over to Apple Music,” she says, and “COVID changed everything.”
But she ended up where she wanted to be. That’s back in the Minneapolis market, where she’d worked from 2012 to 2018 as Midday Music Director at KMNB.
Now, she’s Assistant Brand and Content Director, Music Director, and Midday Host from 9:30 to 2:00 p.m. on Hubbard Radio’s flagship brand, KS95.
“We’re really lucky. Minneapolis is such a special market, and KS95 listeners are really loyal.” She and Brand Manager Mat Mitchell choose the station’s music together. TJ says the listeners trust their taste so they can include country crossovers and other interesting picks to their Hot Adult Contemporary format. Their tag line “Today’s Variety, from 2k to Today.”
She met her husband, Ricky Stark, who’s fourteen years younger than TJ after he replied to her somewhat snarky social media post. “You, too, can find love on Twitter. You don’t need a dating app,” she quips.
“I had tweeted something sarcastic that I was eating organic Cheetos, so I’m healthy now.” Stark, then a personal trainer, tweeted that it was good to see someone with her visibility on her platform promoting healthy eating.
“I was like, who is this jokester? Healthy eating? It’s still Cheetos! But I saw his picture, and he was really cute,” she recalls, “and we became friends. And then he slid into the DMs, as the kids say.”
Speaking of kids, they have one. TJ got pregnant very unexpectedly about a year after they started dating. Their beloved Ambrielle is now seven years old. Their little “Nilly” is a blessing, indeed, as doctors told TJ it would be almost impossible for her to have a child due to an immune deficiency disease.
She had also suffered from a recurring nightmare that she would die during childbirth. It could be because of a Tim Burton video she remembers watching when she was twelve, where a mother dies during delivery, and the child grows up motherless.
These factors combined to terrify TJ during her challenging pregnancy, and the birth was difficult, too. TJ’s mother, there to help, fainted in the delivery room. Then, she says, “Ambrielle was born with the cord wrapped around herself twice.” Then, TJ got really sick.
“The doctor said she was on a tightrope between life and death,” says her husband, as TJ had an ovarian clot, which could have been fatal.
“Our morning show hosts at KMNB were sharing a countdown on the air of how the birth was going, and when I had the complications,” TJ recalls, “everything started going south very quickly. I used Facebook to mention what was going on and I got bombarded with people messaging me and sending me flowers.
“One listener wrote: ‘I don’t know you, but I have my whole church praying for you, and we listen every day.’ I’m not that religious, but in those days, I could feel it.” She says the collective prayers and healing thoughts of the community cured her.
She and her husband shared the very personal and very dicey details of their medical experience on a podcast called “Birth Confidential.”
“That was really important to me. That was an idea of a friend of mine who had eight miscarriages who said she wished more people talked about this and that it was more in the open. She was right, so I shared my traumatic birth story. Lots of women were more than willing to share, and it brought comfort.”
She even told listeners that she both vomited on and wet herself when she was pregnant. “That’s just real life,” she says. “I’ve always been an over-sharer, and I always say way too much. I sometimes wish I could take it back, but then I say, there has to be someone out there representing the pee-ers and pukers on themselves, and I am that person.”
She says social media and podcasts are critical to communicating your brand.
“I’m always trying to think of something new. There are 1000 podcasts for every single topic. What can we do that’s different?
“My daughter is a character, so we thought we could get her to answer some funny questions or have her tell stories or read a book. There aren’t a lot of podcasts for kids. We keep them short so it’s listenable and I thought it would be good for parents and kids to listen to a podcast together, so that if she was scared of going to kindergarten then another kindergartener can hear about that and about a lot of different things that happen at that age.”
The listener response to “Six Minutes with My Six-Year-Old” was robust. Nilly, however, “got bored and wanted to go outside.”
The household is hectic, with a precocious seven-year-old and plenty of pets. “At this moment, we have one cat and two dogs, but there was a moment in time where we had three dogs (including a beloved dog ironically named ‘Kitty’) and two cats,” she says.
TJ’s a beer drinker and carb-lover who goes overboard on holidays, having as many as eight Christmas trees and a llama at her daughter’s birthday party. In addition to family time, she takes girls trips to Disney and solo road trips, and says while she dreams of palm trees, “I’ve lived all over and experienced so much and I’m really content and love Minneapolis.”
She’s involved in vetting new hires for KS95 and advises aspiring radio pros to learn as much as possible and to post on social media to showcase their personality. In TJ’s trajectory, timing was everything. She knew the right person at the right time.
“Find someone who’s willing to aircheck you,” she says. “First, believe in yourself and then find one other person who believes in you, too. It can make all the difference.”
Amy Snider is a music features reporter for Barrett Media specializing on stories involving radio professionals working in Adult Contemporary/CHR/Top 40 formats. She brings over twenty-five years of media experience to the outlet. Based in St. Petersburg, FL, Amy works for iHeartMedia and the Total Traffic and Weather Network as an on-air reporter, appearing on dozens of radio stations including 98 Rock, Mix 100.7, 95.3 WDAE, and Newsradio WFLA. She has also reported and anchored in the Tampa market at Fox 13, News Channel 8, WMNF Community Radio and WUSF-FM, the NPR affiliate.
Amy is a music fanatic. She hosted a drive-time rock and roll radio show for 20 years on WMNF-FM and is known as a tastemaker in the music and arts community. She booked, hosted, emceed and promoted a wildly popular weekly live music event in Tampa’s Ybor City featuring original music with performers from all over the world. Her free time is often spent at concerts and music festivals. To get in touch, find her on X @AmySnider4.
