By the time Andy Robins became WMUK's second news director in 1998, he had already reported for the station for more than a decade. He would go on to lead the news department for 23 years, until his retirement just four years ago.
Andy was known for the care he put into each report, whether it was a minute-long spot or hourlong documentary. As news director, he positioned himself as a firewall between his staff and anyone who wanted a story changed or cancelled.
Andy died suddenly on Dec. 3 at the age of 69. Current WMUK News Director Sehvilla Mann, Director of Content Gordon Evans and Announcer and Producer Cara recently sat down to remember Andy and listen back to some of his work.
Conversation
Sehvilla Mann: Of the three of us, I worked with Andy for the shortest amount of time. Short was eight years, so that's long enough to get to know somebody. But Cara, I think you worked with Andy the very longest.
Cara Lieurance: That would have been from about 1992 when I came on full-time. Andy was a reporter at that time and later became news director. Later in the 90s.
Gordon Evans: 1996 was when I came here to work. Andy was on staff.
AUDIO: For WMUK, I’m Andy Robins.
Gordon: He was kind of the one person that could dedicate pretty much their whole week to reporting at that time. I came in to be Morning Edition host. Tony Griffin was the news director then.
Cara: What we're going to hear is some very fine news writing and voicing. The way he makes the sentences so clear, they seem simple, but they tell the story and the news in the most amazing way.
Sehvilla: He talked to some folks who were banding hummingbirds.
AUDIO: high pitched chirps. Voiceover: That's the sound of a really unhappy ruby-throated hummingbird. Its tiny wings buzz inside a soft white mesh bag after being caught in a trap near the Fort Custer National Cemetery.
Sehvilla: He had an ear for that, for the for the detail, the audio detail that would bring a story to life.
Cara: An excellent practitioner in that he always, always got that ambient noise for any report.
Sehvilla: That's right. Yeah, and you can hear that actually in another story he did.
AUDIO: Man says: Hey, radio check. Voiceover: Two members of the team in bright blue isolation suits looked like they were on the set of a science fiction movie, but they were actually there to evaluate a simulated smallpox attack by terrorists inside the theater. Army Lieutenant Colonel Burt Francisco [spelling approximate] commands the military team based at Fort Custer near Augusta. [walkie-talkie type sound in background]
Gordon: One thing Andy always made sure, though, was not to just put the sound in. The sound had to help tell the story.
Sehvilla: Yeah, you hear that too on one of the pieces he filed related to aviation which was a passion of Andy's.
AUDIO: Humming airplane engine sound. Voiceover: The 25 planes in the National Air Tour got to Kalamazoo a few hours late because of fog at Ypsilanti's Willow Run Airport. But that didn't dampen the enthusiasm of a large crowd of old airplane buffs at the Kalamazoo Aviation History Museum.
Cara: Is it time for me to jump in with some Beaver Island anecdotes?
Sehvilla: Yeah, let's talk about that.
AUDIO: Fiddle playing
Cara: This documentary was one of the biggest undertakings that the station really did in the early 2000s, around 2006 and 7. It took a couple years to pull all of it together and it started with the fact that Beaver Island has a strong community of Irish families that emigrated from a specific place off the coast, the island of Arranmore in Ireland. It turned into how the music was preserved there.
Andy kindly let me bring my husband along. He was my brand-new husband at the time. We all split up and did different things here and there, but Dan tells the story of going to a graveyard with Andy where he froze to death as Andy researched the names in the graveyard.
And I remember for every time he turned on the recorder for an interview, we had to sit still for two minutes to get that ambient sound. And it made all the difference.
Sehvilla: Reporting was so important to Andy. He was also in a leadership role in the news department for quite a bit of his – for most of his career here.
Gordon: As it turned out. I think back to that time, I had not been here long, about a year and a half when Tony Griffin became seriously ill and then passed away at the end of 1997. Tony was the first news director here and had been here as news director since 1973. So, just almost 25 years when he passed away.
And I think Andy at least at first wasn't sure he wanted to apply for the job. I think like a lot of journalists, he looked at the idea of moving into a leadership or managerial position and thought, "Well, then I can't report as much as I would if I remained a reporter."
Ultimately, he did decide to pursue it. And you know, you would be hard-pressed to find two people more different in their personalities than Tony and Andy.
Tony was this very outgoing, gregarious type, and Andy was much more reserved. And I think what Andy recognized was, he was not going to be Tony Griffin. But he could fulfill the role of WMUK's news director well if he kind of focused on just being himself. And focusing on his strengths and what he could bring to it. And also looking for ways to improve, such as an internship program that we did not have until Andy decided we really needed one.
Sehvilla: Andy could be steely when he needed to be.
Gordon: Yes, and Andy was very much — dig his heels in. You could see it when somebody was coming to complain just because they didn't like the story. That's not good enough. You have to show me what we did wrong before you're going to get us to issue a correction or even get us to say sorry.
Sehvilla: As we all hunkered down during the pandemic, and in fact I was working from home and Andy was working from home, Andy pursued a story about the Census that was, despite the pandemic, taking place that summer. And that was a milestone and a growth opportunity even in what was the year before Andy retired.
Gordon: Right. Andy had gotten some information about what was happening in Kalamazoo regarding the Census and how some of the workers were being instructed to do certain things that didn't seem to be really above board.
AUDIO: Voiceover: Last week, a federal judge ordered the Census Bureau to ignore tomorrow's deadline set by the Trump administration and keep counting through the end of October. But some Census workers, like this field supervisor in Kalamazoo, say they're still skeptical about the end result. [Census worker, voice disguised] It's sad to know that for the first time, we're really not going to get an accurate count and it's so important to everybody in the United States to have that count correct.
Gordon: This is the only time in the almost 30 years I've been at WMUK that we did a story where we altered voices. And I remember the discussion with Andy. At that point I was Director of Content, so I'm, you know, the news director's supervisor and we were having this discussion about, ‘is this something that we really need to do.’ And we decided it was.
