“As a longtime listener and 20-year member of the Community Advisory Council, I am extremely invested in the long-term success of WKSU and the people who make it the wonderful, fair, and accurate news provider it is.
WKSU is a NE Ohio gem and I am so excited for our beloved station to embark on the Ideastream partnership, which will serve to expand our hometown treasure to more of Ohio. This partnership will provide the resources to make WKSU even further-reaching, giving it greater visibility and more resources to cover the news that affects all of us. In addition to all of this opportunity for greater and more substantial reach, WKSU will remain the sole NPR news and information service for our community and it’s connection to Kent State will continue to be recognized and celebrated on-air and online. It is clear to me that this is a win-win for Kent State, WKSU, Ideastream, and our entire community.
The passion our community has for WKSU is clear and that passion helps to make it as important of a local treasure as it has been. Through the hard work and dedication of the WKSU folks, membership is the highest it’s been in a dozen years. Abandoning those members would not only make no sense from a business perspective, but it is something that WKSU leadership would never even consider! WKSU’s home is here, with all of us, and this partnership won’t change that.
Our community and the WKSU staff have together created something wonderfully beneficial for our region. And the wellbeing and security of the WKSU staff has been at the center of discussions since the very beginning when this partnership was being considered a full year ago. As a CAC member at that time, the protection and respect of WKSU staff was paramount to all of us. And, as we move forward, WKSU staff will see no decrease in their salaries – in fact, all will have the exact same or even higher salaries.
I am so very excited for the possibilities of this partnership! I encourage all of us to donate, and continue our donations, to this wonderful organization. Our donations will continue, as they always have, to be allocated to WKSU to support its continued success right here in NE Ohio.
I encourage everyone to donate what they can to WKSU, to support the current fund drive at https://donate.wksu.org, and to support every fund drive in the future!”
– Paul Perantinides, Esq. of Perantinides and Nolan Co., LPA