WYSO: The Little Station That Could
Ken A. Bode
August 4, 2009
On a rainy July evening, I am perched on a stool in the control room of WYSO, an NPR station with a 52-year history in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A staff of nine operates from the lower level of a building on the campus of Antioch University, a college that closed its doors two years ago and is struggling to re-open.
Across the room is station manager Neenah Ellis, a twenty-year veteran of NPR in Washington, who took over WYSO last February. Ellis is preparing to manage the phones for a 7:00 p.m. call-in show, the last of three in a project called "My Home: Facing the Mortgage Crisis," a programming initiative that has WYSO collaborating with ThinkTV in nearby Dayton and the Dayton Daily News.
In the studio is the evening's moderator, Emily McCord, a reporter and local host of All Things Considered, who has recently returned from NPR's Economic Training Project in Culver City, California. Joining McCord to answer the phone calls they hope will come are three expert guests. Beth Deutscher is executive director of the Home Ownership Center of Greater Dayton. Professor Richard Stock is Director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton. Willis Blackshear is the Montgomery County Recorder.
WYSO serves the portion of west-central Ohio that includes Yellow Springs, Dayton and Springfield, an area designated by the Treasury Department as among those critically affected by the mortgage crisis. When Willis Blackshear took over duties as director of the office where all mortgages in the county are registered, he discovered that Dayton ranked #2 in the state of Ohio in foreclosures.
Since then, plagued by plant closings, rising unemployment and mortgage failures, the recession has tightened its grip on this part of Ohio. "We're looking at 2013 for this to clear up," says Willis Blackshear.
Richard Stock, who studies the impact on commercial as well as residential lending adds, "The rate of foreclosures is now 10-times as great as the early 1990's. Three more years is a frightening thought."
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Let's roll back the tape for a moment. For personal reasons I found myself spending several weeks this summer in Yellow Springs, getting my daily dose of NPR from WYSO. Hearing from the local experts who gather in the coffee shops of this village and listening to the station promos for the upcoming series, "Facing the Mortgage Crisis," I decided I wanted a little more background, so I asked Neenah Ellis if I could come by for a visit.
"This is our Katrina," Ellis told me. The problem is larger in this area than elsewhere and larger than generally perceived, she explained, also difficult for both the public and the people trapped in it to understand. To cover the story properly WYOS needed to find a way to immerse the staff and the station in the problem. The solution came in a grant from CPB.
In the summer of 2008, CPB made a pilot grant to cover the mortgage crisis to KETC in St. Louis. "They retooled the station to make themselves more community-centric, created a package of "lessons learned" and put it online," says Lynda Clarke, CPB's overall project manager.
In an effort to make the project national, CPB then looked at U.S. Treasury Department reports on top foreclosure markets in the country and developed a grants program. "We sent out a limited request for proposals (RPF)," explains Clarke. "You're in a market we want to cover, we said, and we urged stations to collaborate with other media to extend their reach."
Ellen Weiss, the vice president for news at NPR adds, "Economic literacy is in short supply in the media. We wanted to use NPR newsrooms as a test kitchen to build up their expertise. The objective is to give people power with information they can understand. What we want to provide is good, solid storytelling.
"Every station has a different capacity," Weiss continues, "and we are trying to build up a network of colleagues covering the same beat. With the economy the biggest story of the day, we're eager to see great economic coverage come out of this project—locally, nationally and online."
Supplementing that effort is the year-long "NPR News Economic Training Project" aimed at expanding and deepening business and economics reporting across all of public media. Supervising editor and professor in residence for the training is Jason DeRose, a 10-year veteran of WBEZ in Chicago and "Day to Day" where he edited business & finance news.
"We put out a call for applicants in April, and out of 102 who applied, we chose 22 fellows," DeRose says. He then devised three sets of seminars based on the economic experience of the candidates. Those with limited experience, like Emily McCord of WYSO, were given a week-long boot camp geared to understanding the language of the marketplace, explaining how banks and small businesses work. At the high end, those fellows already experienced in business and finance reporting, each will give a presentation on their specialty: how to cover the airline industry, the auto industry, international trade, the tech industry, as examples.
"It's a new model for how NPR works with local stations," DeRose explains, "suggesting your work should reflect national quality." He will continue working with Emily McCord for twelve weeks following the seminar in June, counseling and editing her reports. "We say goodbye in September," DeRose says.
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Back to WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
This station had a long tradition of deep community involvement, but according to locals—all of who appear to know and care about the situation—it ran off the tracks in this regard for a few years.
Under the management of Neenah Ellis, it's very much back on track, and the station's reporting on the mortgage crisis clearly reflects that fact. As I describe what WYSO is doing, keep in mind that this is a station in a town of under 4,000 in population, with its staff supplemented only by a project director provided by the CPB grant. However, its 37,000-watt signal reaches a potential audience of over 500,000.
For the "My Home, Facing the Mortgage Crisis, four reporters produced in-depth spots, each on a particular aspect of the problem. Some of these reports ran 7-8 minutes in length.
Emily McCord reported on mortgage counseling "scams" directed at people who are known to be in or facing foreclosure. She described how one desperate homeowner was told by a private, for-profit, mortgage- counseling firm to write three post-dated checks amounting to $2,100. She also described how to recognize potential scams and how to report them to a special hotline run by Ohio's attorney general.
Juliet Fromholt did a report on financial literacy describing the difficulties of the home mortgage process and the conflicting information borrowers facing foreclosure may receive.
In "Facing Foreclosure on Grange Hall Road," special projects editor Aileen LeBlanc took the listener through the foreclosure process from the perspective on one man, Steven Pitman of Beavercreek in suburban Dayton. Mr. Pittman lost his job and now faces losing his home. With his original mortgage re-packaged and sold up the line, Pitman echoes the common complaint that he can't find anyone even to talk to about it. At the end of the report he says, hauntingly, that if the bank and the sheriff come to order him out, "I'm not leaving."
LeBlanc also did a report on greed and fraud in the appraisal process, explaining the influx of computer based appraisals, how they produce a lower quality product for the consumer but greater profit for the banks and mortgage companies.
McCord produced a story about a local mortgage counselor who spends her days trying to help others, only to return to her deteriorating neighborhood in the evening to face a looming foreclosure possibility of her own.
Jerry Kenney's report, "A House, No Longer a Home," was on the visual and financial effects of empty houses in a neighborhood. In this report, that neighborhood is his own.
These are remarkable stories reflecting strong reporting, gripping storytelling and a deep sense of community service. All are posted on the WYSO website and will be assembled into a one-hour special to air later in August.
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Back now to the July 30 call-in program.
One example of the quality of experts WYSO manages to attract is tonight's guest, the aforementioned Montgomery County recorder Willis Blackshear. Though it is not part of the duties of his office, Blackshear has taken it upon himself to examine every mortgage registered in Montgomery County (Dayton and environs) and identify those presently in foreclosure or facing that possibility. Over the last year, he has sent roughly 2,400 letters to borrowers who hold a mortgage that has either an adjustable interest rate or a balloon payment, alerting them to pending hikes in their mortgage bills.
Another is Alfred Patterson, a mortgage counselor recruited by Blackshear to make direct contact with those facing critical mortgage problems. A woman near tears calls on the second WYSO program. She faces foreclosure because her co-borrower died leaving her with the entire debt. Patterson reassures her: "There is a solution. Here is my private number and I promise I will get in touch with you."
I listened carefully to all three call-in programs. The callers were seeking advice, some desperately, and usually learned where they might get it. The experts and counselors described the problems that cross their desks every day and explained how they could help solve them
Some examples of callers to WYSO on the "Facing the Mortgage Crisis" programs:
People who are frightened into paralysis by the complexity of the process and fear of losing their home. These folks show up with a briefcase full of letters from the bank or the sheriff, none of them opened.
Borrowers whose mortgages have been packaged and sold so many times they can't even find out who owns it now, nor can they find anyone to talk to. "I never get the same person. Each one tells me something different."
Homeowners facing foreclosure whom receive a constant barrage of phone calls and mail solicitations from newly formed counseling agencies, many of which are quick-buck scams. "We don't know who to trust."
Borrowers and mortgage counselors who have found that the banks simply prefer foreclosure to any kind of mortgage readjustment. "The bank just puts up a wall. You spend 20-minutes on-hold every time you call."
The WYSO experts handled questions like these:
Can I just give up, quit paying, turn over the keys and walk away?
When is bankruptcy an option? When is it not a good idea?
Is there a place to go to find out about predatory foreclosure operators?
What do I do when I find myself in an "upside-down" situation, when property values in my neighborhood have dropped so badly that my home is now worth less than I owe on it?
The callers were given specific advice concerning their individual problems or, often, referred to not-for-profit mortgage counseling agencies or hotlines at the governor's or attorney general's office.
The next steps for WYSO include a community forum co-sponsored with ThinkTV in Dayton and hosted by the Dayton Daily News.
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There is more to this story. Thirty plus stations have received grants to do programming on the mortgage crisis, and doubtless there are many other success stories. Also, there is an ongoing CPB-PBS collaboration on economic coverage which is fully described at the CPB website.
For this report, I chose to look at it from the bottom up, from a station in a village in Ohio. Despite the good-news reporting in the national media about how the recession is ending, this remains an area where factories are still closing, the effects of job loss are still rolling in, and the staff at WYSO is waiting for the second wave of mortgage foreclosures--their own version of Katrina. They want to continue the reporting and are ready to extend the project. If they can find the money.
From this Ombudsman's perspective, I can't recall seeing a more successful collaboration, greater sensitivity to the problems of a local community, nor more resourceful and effective reporting. How do we say it in the world of public broadcasting? "Support comes from . . . ."
Though I may be getting chalk on my shoes in saying so, I hope CPB can help.
