Spring 2025 Edition
Alumni & Friends Magazine
Making (Air)waves
This year, WOUB celebrates its 75-year journey to becoming a trusted source of public media for Athens and beyond.
Jen Jones Donatelli, BSJ ’98 | March 24, 2025
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When OHIO’s Board of Trustees approved a request for a 10-watt FM station on campus, it was intended to operate on a non-commercial basis and serve as a place for college students to learn and grow. Seventy-five years later, those ideals are still shining through.
WOUB made its FM debut as WOUI in December 1949 after seven years as an unlicensed carrier current station. Ohio’s first college FM station—and only the third of its kind in the nation—has since grown into a thriving public media source serving 55 counties across three states on radio, television and the web.
“I like to say we’re a professional-supervised, student-powered newsroom,” says editor-in-chief Atish Baidya. “It’s pretty amazing and wonderful that we’ve been part of the fabric of Southeast Ohio for 75 years.”
A number of the station’s professionals were once OHIO students, including director of radio Mark “Rusty” Smith, BSC ’78, MA ’85, and community engagement and membership manager Cheri Russo, BSJ ’96, MS ’07. The media entity also boasts notable alumni such as actor and former The Daily Show producer Brian Unger, BSC ’87, and Queer Eye creator David Collins, BSC ’89, both of whom credit WOUB with helping them reach impressive career heights.
That level of affinity is common in “WOUB-ers,” who spend much of their free time inside the newsroom or shooting in the field for shows such as NewsWatch or Gridiron Glory. WOUB’s staff of more than 30 is supported by 150-plus student volunteers, many of whom get hands-on experience right from the start.
Third-year journalism student Harshita Singhania (back, left) works with fellow WOUB interns in the station’s RTV Communications Building studio last summer. Photo by Ben Wirtz Siegel, BSVC ’02
“Most colleges or universities require prerequisite classes or a certain amount of time before students can be hands-on,” says Russo. “What’s unique about WOUB is that students can walk in here on day one and hit the ground running. Start off as a volunteer to come work with us, and we’ll train you in the direction you want to go.”
Harshita Singhania, a junior studying journalism in the Honors Tutorial College, knows this firsthand—she wrote an on-air news story on her first day at WOUB. Since then, Singhania has done everything from running the teleprompter to managing social media, building her confidence along the way. “I’ve grown so much as a person during my time at WOUB,” she says. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Along with being a media training ground for students, WOUB also fills a need for the region—an area spanning Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky that Baidya and Russo refer to as a “news desert” of sorts.
“We don’t get a lot of media coverage in this area, and when we do, it’s not always for positive things,” Russo says. “WOUB works hard to serve this area with news and information people can use to make reliable quality decisions in their daily lives, and that’s something we hope to do for the next 75 years.”
Feature photo courtesy the Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections
Behind the scenes of Gridiron Glory, Friday, Sept. 24, 2021. Photo by Jintak Han
Web Exclusive: Playing the Long Game
Each fall, WOUB production teams dispatch across Southeast Ohio in a well-trodden weekly ritual for Gridiron Glory, which is celebrating 25 seasons on the air.
“It’s our goal to cover as many teams as we can,” says Donovan Varney, a junior journalism major who hosts a segment called “The Extra Point.” “We want to give communities that are widely under-covered in the media an opportunity to be on TV and hear about their games.”
The show highlights both regional high school football and impactful human interest stories. One recent episode spotlighted efforts at Eastern High School in Meigs County to honor an athlete who passed away at age 9 and would have been a senior this year, while another featured two brothers who each rushed 1,000 yards this season at Waterford High School in Washington County.
“Gridiron Glory was born from a desire to shine a light on Southeast Ohio football,” says community engagement and membership manager Cheri Russo, BSJ ’96, MS ’07. “That’s what makes Gridiron Glory so special—it was a need recognized by our students 25 years ago, and they pitched a show to meet that need.”
Successful OHIO alumni such as Columbus-based news anchor Matt Barnes, BSJ ’08; TNT sports reporter Allie LaForce, BSJ ’11; and Kimberly Kanner Galiette, BSC ’08, the first woman to technical direct the Super Bowl for ESPN, all cut their teeth on the program.
“As a woman passionate about sports journalism, being in that environment has been incredibly beneficial,” says current host Hailey Hollinger, a senior journalism major. “I feel prepared to take on the real world after everything I’ve done at WOUB.”
In honor of its 25th season, WOUB published profiles hosts from each season. Find them all here:
