In June of last year, Robert Sanchez departed his role with iHeartMedia as Vice President of Northeast News and Program Director of WBZ News Radio. At the time, it was announced he would be shifting to an “innovation-focused consultant” role with the company. However, just over a month later, he was named the Chief Operating Officer of Nashville Public Radio.
Now, that might seem like quite the transition, going from an executive role with the largest radio company in the nation, to leading a pair of public radio stations in the Tennessee capital.
But, Robert Sanchez isn’t your normal executive.
As we continue our Public Radio Week series, I sat down with the Nashville Public Radio COO to pick his brain about what led him to depart his job with iHeartMedia and choose a different path and different speed at this point in his career. We also touched on what makes public radio different from commercial radio, what challenges the medium faces, and what excites him about the future.
Garrett Searight: You’ve now been at Nashville Public Radio for a few months. How have things gone for you in the new role?
Robert Sanchez: It’s been a learning experience, for sure. It was surprising to me how different commercial and public radio are. The culture. The mindset. How we approach many aspects of the business is different.
I’ve learned a lot in my 7 months here things I wish I knew when I was programming radio stations. I’ve also brought some useful skills that are additive to the organization. But I realized about a month in that I needed to change my own mindset and approach. We are a mission-driven organization and the type of results we’re measured on the most is the quality of our reporting and the public service we provide. We have budgets to hit of course, but for the most part, what a public radio staff needs from its COO is decidedly different than what a commercial enterprise needs.
Thankfully, I learn quickly, and the staff has been very patient with me; dare I say forgiving as I’ve gotten my public radio sea legs.
GS: What was it that drew you to Nashville Public Radio?
RS: First and foremost, the opportunity to work for and learn from my mentor Steve Swenson (President/CEO) one more time. I’ve been in radio for 34 years, and not including the last 7 months at Nashville Public Radio, he’d been my boss for 18 of those years, so more than half of my career.
He recruited me to WCBS in 2000 and to the CBS Radio cluster in Washington, DC in 2011, where we accomplished some pretty extraordinary things. And so, for the third time in my career, I moved to a new city to work with Steve.
And to be fully transparent, I also needed a break from the news, which had just become so draining.
The Buffalo supermarket shooting was kind of the last straw for me. It was a Saturday. I was in Washington, D.C. with my fiancé and we had just gotten back from the grocery store when (iHeartMedia Executive Vice President of News) Chris Berry called me — because Buffalo was in my region. I coordinated coverage through that Monday and I thought to myself “I can’t do this anymore.” I had just turned 50 and started to question whether I was done with this business. I turned to Swenson for advice and our conversation evolved into one about Nashville.
GS: How different is your day-to-day role as COO at Nashville Public Radio compared to your previous stop at iHeart?
RS: Well, it’s a different job. I was the News/Talk VP for iHeart’s Boston cluster and Regional News Director for the Northeast. While some skills transferred over, the COO job is definitely tapping my knowledge of all departments.
I guess the biggest difference is that there’s a lot of variety in my day-to-day. It’s part strategy, working with our CEO looking one, three, or five years into the future.
It’s also successfully executing that strategy while overseeing all internal functions, making sure things get done, and keeping the organization running well in the process. Most departments roll up to me directly, so one minute I’m talking cash flow with our finance director, the next minute it’s our chief engineer in my office, then it’s working with our development and sponsorship sales departments on revenue. All before lunch!
The WPLN and WNXP program directors also report up to me, so I still get to dabble in programming a little, but just a little. They have an extraordinary amount of independence to manage their brands as they see fit. And when news does break, like the recent tornadoes we had in Middle Tennessee, I’m the one calling the PD and ND on a Saturday, not the other way around.
GS: How different is the listener profile for your public radio stations compared to stations like WBZ and WCBS, if at all?
RS: Similar, but also different. We go after the same demographics, and for the most part, do a great job at carving out our share. That said, our demos are aging just like everyone else’s. Like all radio, every year we see a decline in PUMM so we’re all trying to figure out how to reach our audience where they are.
To steal a phrase from Mack Linebaugh, WPLN’s VP/Audience Engagement, we need to figure out how to build a new media company inside an old media company. I’ll add… without breaking the old media company in the process, please.
But to answer your question directly, the public radio consumer is much more invested in their local NPR station than what you’d typically find elsewhere on the dial. There’s more buy-in, I think, in part because they’re the ones funding the content, but it’s more than that. Many of them see us as a civic and cultural institution. Something valuable and worth supporting, like the philharmonic.
GS: Are there any specific challenges public radio faces that you don’t see in commercial news/talk or all-news formats?
RS: Hmm… I’d say the misconception that we’re funded primarily by taxpayer dollars. When I got here and dug into the finances, I was stunned at how little we get from the federal government through the CPB and how hard we have to work to get it.
WPLN and WNXP are community licensees, which means there’s no parent entity to lean on. We are on our own for funding all our good works. If we need a lawyer to review something, there’s no corporate legal to call. It’s $450/hour that comes out of our checking account.
GS: Do some of the same challenges that face commercial news/talk stations also face public radio stations?
RS: As I mentioned earlier, declining PUMM which leads to declining revenue for all stations, whether commercial or non-profit.
I also think brand awareness is a constant struggle. We don’t have money for traditional advertising (a reality in both commercial and public radio these days) but what we do have is lots of boots on the ground. Our reporters are visible. The stories we tell have impact and get noticed. That definitely helps move the needle for us.
GS: Have you found public radio stations — and listeners — more adaptable to digital content options?
RS: Yes, I think so. We’ve had extraordinary success with The Promise, our signature podcast hosted and produced by one of public radio’s rising stars Meribah Knight. She won a Peabody the first season. We’re into season 4 now and partnered with Serial/New York Times and ProPublica on “The Kids of Rutherford County” which was the # 1 podcast nationally on Apple podcast.
Paige Pfleger’s reporting on how Tennessee’s Justice System allows dangerous people to keep guns was published as a digital article in partnership with ProPublica. The article featured rich contextual extras you just can’t convey as impactfully on the radio. That kind of digital-first reporting is the future of public “radio.”
Over at WNXP, our music discovery station, the PD Jason Moon-Wilkins, and I have lots of conversations about being more than just a radio station broadcasting at 91.1FM. He said the other day that we put 80% of our resources into radio and 20% into digital and his goal is to flip that 80/20 towards digital. WNXP has all the raw ingredients to make that happen and I see a future where WNXP is a lifestyle brand more synonymous with the music scene here in Nashville than as a radio station.
GS: What does the future look like for public radio? What is on the horizon that excites you?
RS: For WPLN, we strive to be the primary news source for Middle Tennessee. This is something that had been in the works since 2019 and was accelerated during the pandemic.
As we look toward the future, there’s an opportunity for public radio to step into roles that newspapers have traditionally filled with investigative reporting and quality journalism. Not to sound dramatic, but for the sake of our democracy, we have to be ready to deliver on that.
On the radio, there aren’t any other stations in the market that offer news or information in a meaningful way. The TV stations have a specific lane that works for them but as is the case in many markets, there isn’t always a lot of nutritional value there. And as our local newspaper shrinks, WPLN has grown, from eight news people three years ago to close to 30 today.
We participated in the digital transformation program developed by the Poynter Institute and that yielded The NashVillager, a daily newsletter that has grown quickly and generated a lot of interest. It’s not a rundown of the stories we’ve got on the radio. It’s its own stand-alone digital product, hosted by some of our most vibrant personalities and each day it makes a visceral human connection with the reader. I can see that expanding into something beyond a newsletter.
At the end of the day, radio is just a distribution platform, and increasingly not even the most important one. We’re well-positioned for the future… and that excites me.
