GRAY-HAIRED, tall, and solidly built, Jane Christo is a formidable, and controversial, presence. A quarter-century ago, the onetime advertising executive took charge of Boston University’s puny public radio station and built it into one of the most powerful in the entire public-radio firmament, heard by more than 400,000 listeners each week. Respected and feared, Christo today presides over a burgeoning empire of radio stations.
The WBUR Group includes not just the flagship Boston station but also WBUR-AM (1240), in West Yarmouth; there are rebroadcasting agreements with small stations in Sandwich and Harwich. Several years ago Christo added WRNI (AM 1290), in Providence, also heard on WXNI (AM 1230), in Westerly, Rhode Island. All told, the group reaches a potential audience of 5.2 million listeners in Eastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and Rhode Island. ’BUR also has a slick multimedia Web site at www.wbur.org.
“To me, she’s all about being part of a founder generation à la Ross Perot or William Paley,” an insider told the Boston Globe in a 1997 profile of Christo. “She has all the entrepreneurial instincts of a start-up corporate type. She invented a place when there was no place.”
What’s most remarkable about that quote is the identity of the speaker: Christopher Lydon. It says volumes about Christo’s reputation as a mercurial presence who’s guided by her enthusiasms, her enormous drive and ambition, but who can also make life miserable for anyone who dares to defy her. Indeed, the 1997 Globe piece, by media reporter Mark Jurkowitz, was prompted by a couple of ugly departures by folks who’d run afoul of her — one whose only apparent sin was to insert a minor change in the wording of underwriting credits. (The strife at that time also led to an unsuccessful union-organizing drive — opposed by, among others, Lydon and his crew. “We were really unable to get them on board,” says Jordan Weinstein, a former staff member who’s now in public relations.)
“She’s interesting and smart and quirky, but you don’t want to get too close, because you know she’s a little dangerous,” says a former WBUR staff member of Christo. And this person spoke for many current and former employees, virtually none of whom would agree to be quoted, even on a not-for-attribution basis, given the power Christo wields within public radio.
“I can’t characterize myself,” replies Christo. “I know that I love what I do, I try to do the best I can. I’m not a perfect person.” But she strongly disagrees with the notion that she plays favorites, arguing that she manages the station with one goal in mind: to make WBUR as good as it can be. “If people characterize that as playing favorites, I think that they’re wrong,” she says.
Says Bruce Gellerman, co-host of the noontime magazine show Here and Now: “She is extremely ambitious and reaches far. Does it sometimes mean her ambition gets the better of her? Yes, but that’s to be expected. Is Jane a mean woman? No. Jane is a complex woman. It’s lonely at the top.”
Despite misgivings over Christo’s management style, sources say that morale is generally good; that they appreciate the workplace-friendly touches Christo has introduced, such as free Friday lunches; and that, more than anything, they respect her for building a great media organization. Unlike all but a tiny handful of public stations, WBUR has state-of-the-art facilities and pays salaries that people can live on. And regardless of how they feel about Christo, they believe she did the right thing in moving to sever the station’s ties with Lydon and McGrath.
To be sure, at a station where on-air reporters make what one source estimated as ranging from $45,000 to $80,000, part of the support for Christo stems from her decision to stand up to two highly paid employees who built their own operation-within-an-operation and who only rarely mingled with others. (More than one source describes The Connection’s former staff as “the cult.”) Part of it, though, is based on genuine agreement with Christo that it makes no sense to give away a share of a show that was conceived, launched, and financially supported by WBUR.
Yes, Lydon, McGrath, and company, as they have said on several occasions, created the show every day, and turned it into something truly special. But that’s no less true of the other shows on WBUR. And yes, the Car Talk guys managed to wrest control of their show away from the station. But Car Talk is sui generis, utterly unimaginable without hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi. By contrast, all The Connection needs is a good host and a good producer. Lydon and McGrath may be the best choices, but they’re hardly the only conceivable ones.
Two weeks ago, one of NPR’s biggest stars, legal-affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, told the Globe that it was “really, really, really unlikely” that her stint as a temporary host next month would lead to a permanent switch. Well, why didn’t she just say no?
PUBLIC RADIO is not like public television. The Public Broadcasting System is decentralized, a situation that has allowed WGBH in Boston to become a national programming force, supplying more than one-third of PBS’s prime-time line-up. By contrast, NPR is a strong, centralized network for public radio.
Although WBUR is free to purchase programming from a variety of sources — the BBC, NPR’s smaller rival Public Radio International (PRI), or other stations — the single most important thing any station’s general manager does, Jane Christo included, is make sure the programming fees are paid to NPR so that the feeds of Morning Edition and All Things Considered keep coming in. According to an Arbitron survey from last fall, some 235,000 people listened to Morning Edition every week on WBUR; Lydon’s audience, though impressive when compared to the rest of the station’s non-drive-time fare, was barely more than half that.
Christo’s principal insight was that public radio’s future lay in news and information. Over the past quarter-century she turned WBUR into one of the first 24-hour all-news public stations, loading up the hours with offerings from NPR and the BBC and building a formidable fundraising operation to pay for it. But there’s no doubt that she would like to do more — much more. And The Connection has been a key to her plans.
When The Connection was launched, in 1994, it was strictly a local show. Lydon, coming off his quirky mayoral campaign of the previous year, often used his perch to talk about the troubled Boston school system, the Boston Public Library, and the like.
It wasn’t too long, though, before Christo took The Connection national, distributing the show through PRI. By last year, when ’BUR landed a deal to distribute The Connection through NPR (thus precipitating the “partnership” dispute), the show could be heard on 75 stations with a weekly audience of more than 400,000, from New York City to the small stations that make up Wisconsin Public Radio. But though the program developed into a remarkably eclectic mix (subjects ranged from the Dalai Lama to the Asian economic crisis, from the politics of Florida to the politics of jazz), something — namely, its strictly local flavor — had been lost.
That something was replaced, in part, with Here and Now, begun several years ago as a one-hour magazine show with a largely local emphasis. But now Christo is preparing to offer that show, too, for national distribution.
Earlier this year WBUR’s Rhode Island affiliate, WRNI, began broadcasting a two-hour “news and ideas” show called One Union Station, after the station’s Providence address, on weekdays from 2 to 4 p.m. Christo expects to add it to WBUR’s line-up by late summer, replacing NPR’s Talk of the Nation. It, too, will be offered to a national audience.
