With 50 years in the industry, Caryn Mathes, President and General Manager of KUOW, has seen it all but she never thought her career would bring her to radio.
“Electronic media was never my intention,” Mathes told Barrett News Media over a Zoom call. “I always thought I was going to be a print journalist.”
Growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, Mathes began her career as a reporter in middle school, “My town had two daily newspapers, and one of them, The Tribune, dedicated a whole section of the Sunday paper to Youth News. So every school in the Vigo County school system could have a reporter if they wanted one.”
She added, “I volunteered for that and so here these pre-teens were being assigned and edited by professional journalists at the local daily paper. I did that from seventh or eighth grade all the way through my senior year of high school.” Born to lead, Caryn Mathes was the Bureau Chief during her senior year of high school. “I came out of high school with this portfolio of clips, with my byline and professionally edited stories.”
Working several jobs in college, Caryn Mathes took her clips to the local papers but no one was hiring. An editor at one local paper suggested she take a look at radio because of her wonderful voice. She applied for a job at WTHI-TV where she received a camera test and got a part-time job as “Wire Copy Rewrite Girl.” She worked her way up through “pester power.”
Mathes said, “We had the only female head of photography and commercial television in the country at that time, Betty Chadwick. She wasn’t a particularly willing mentor, but I pestered her [asking] ‘What time do you have to get the film back for it to develop?’ and ‘Teach me how to edit.’ And I just pester, pester, pester. And so finally they were like, ‘Geez, this woman, she’s just not going to stop.”
Pester power worked and eventually, “They gave me a beat. I did the education beat called Chalk Talk. Very corny. And so I come on on set and do my one little story and then walk off and, I did pretty well. And then eventually I was weeknight co-anchor [of the 11:00 PM news] and I was 19. I was a sophomore in college.”
She left the business briefly to work for Western Electric Defense Corporation, where she had classified clearance. However, the industry kept calling.
“The news director at a commercial radio station in Cincinnati called me and asked me to apply. It was very interesting, the way he asked the question was critical because he said, ‘Can you do radio?’ And he did not say, ‘Have you done radio’? Because I hadn’t. He said, ‘Can you do radio?’ I am sure I could do radio. And so I got the job in Cincinnati working for WCKY,” Mathes said.
She later moved to Detroit to work for WJR. However, a few years later downsizing cost her the job but she didn’t want to move again. “I’d only been in Detroit a couple of years, and so I’m using all my networking and somebody said, ‘I think there’s an opening that hasn’t been posted yet for news director over at the public station.’” She noted, “I knew nothing about public radio, but I thought if I can stay in town, ok. So, got the job at WDET as the news director for two years.”
The General Manager at the time left and appointed Mathes as interim GM. Mathes recalled him telling her “I’m leaving… I think you have a skill for this and if you don’t at least try [the job], you’re the biggest chicken in the world.” She stayed as the GM at WDET for over 20 years. She moved a few more times before landing at her current station KUOW, where Mathes has been for over 10 years.
She noted the importance of giving back saying, “I owe it to give other people a leg up because I’m standing on somebody’s shoulders as well.”
Mathes noted she learned a lot from her Vice President at WDET, Arthur Johnson. “He just had this calm about him. I would get agitated about things and I remember he called me in one time and he said, ‘Caryn, you draw your line in the sand way too soon. It’s no skin off your nose to talk to people,’” Mathes recalled.
Outside of her career Caryn Mathes also feels she is standing on the shoulders of countless other African Americans. “I remember coming home from school and seeing my mother and grandmother, huddled around the TV watching, news film of, the march on Selma and the dogs being sicced on people and the fire and we’re having tough times now in a different way.” She later added, “It is hard for me not to throw hands when people say, ‘Oh, I don’t vote.’ And it’s like, ‘Do you realize how many of my people died and suffered for the right to vote?’”
Through her incredible career, Caryn Mathes has won countless awards including being named a Women of Influence by both DC Business magazine and the Puget Sound Business Journal. She also noted one of her greatest achievements was developing a Diversity Equity and Inclusion team long before other outlets.
“We commissioned a racial equity team back in 2017. So we were working on this long before the George Floyd murder. We’re kind of in the vanguard for media,” Mathes noted, “A lot of stations come to us and say, ‘Tell us how you’re you’re doing that.’ And I tell them ‘It’s not a checklist. It’s a complete transformation of your organization. So strap in and get ready.’”
While she doesn’t have any plans to retire in the near future, Caryn Mathes does have a vision of what she would like to do. “I’m not quite sure when I’m going to retire, but I think one of the things I look forward to in retirement is I can finally be an activist. You know, when you lead a news organization, I don’t sign petitions. I don’t give money to the causes that I believe in, because even though it wouldn’t in any way influence our news coverage the optics of it wouldn’t look good.”
She added, “ If I’m a retired person and I need to get on the streets and protest, I will be able to do that. So that’s one of the things I look forward to.”
