An era is ending for the news department of KMUD FM, Southern Humboldt’s listener-sponsored radio station, as its community-conscious director Terri Klemetson is leaving her post.
Klemetson’s seven-year stint as KMUD’s news and public affairs director included establishment of an Emergency Response Team, expansion of the department’s team of contributors and an extraordinary commitment to outreach and journalism education.
But Klemetson believes KMUD news is poised for even more progress. “We have an awesome team of reporters and we’re going to be fine,” she said.
A Humboldt County resident since 2000, Klemetson grew up in the Midwest and studied political science at Iowa Central Community College. Encouraged by her mother to travel, she interned for Amnesty International in London and then taught English in China.
She’d considered careers with government agencies or the military but her travels changed her perspective. “Being overseas made me a little too critical of the US to work for the government,” Klemetson said.
After returning to Iowa to teach English to Somalian refugees who had been placed there, Klemetson travelled throughout the West Coast and moved to Humboldt. For five years, she “did a lot of shoveling rock and working instream” for Restoration Forestry on state-sponsored fisheries habitat projects.
She also volunteered for KMUD after moving to Southern Humboldt in the early 2000s and was one of the hosts of the station’s popular Women on Wednesday interview show.
Ever active, Klemetson moved to Arcata in 2005 to study wildlife biology at Humboldt State University and to work on endangered species surveys.
During the 2007 Summer Arts and Music Festival, then-station manager Brenda Starr asked Klemetson if she’d be interested in training in KMUD’s newsroom. Klemetson was anchoring the news one day a week when then-news director and current County Supervisor Estelle Fennell — who was a community media institution — left KMUD to pursue various community-oriented roles.
Klemetson took on a new and demanding challenge when she stepped in as the station’s news director. “I loved community radio so much and really loved KMUD so I rose to the challenge and decided to invest time in KMUD,” she said.
Moving back to Southern Humboldt, where housing is elusive, wasn’t easy. But she had friends who helped. “I couch-surfed for months,” she said, adding that the assistance of her friends made her initial phase of work possible.
Friends eventually referred Klemetson and her companion, Doug Bryan, to a place to live between Ettersburg and Honeydew — an off-grid cabin which would be their home for the next five years.
Klemetson had friends who were involved in environmental advocacy, which she thinks benefitted her early work at KMUD. “It helped that we shared a focus on a lot of the issues that people in Southern Humboldt were involved in,” she said.
She believed that community outreach and cultivation of new talent were essential to delivering the depth and range of coverage listeners wanted. She was better able to pursue that when Cynthia Elkins, the former executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center, joined the news department as its co-director in 2008.
With Elkins applying her management and legal experience, Klemetson had leeway to take an innovative step — she launched the Community Journalism Project (CJP), which essentially opened the doors of the newsroom to the community.
Having learned of the community journalism efforts of the Portland, Oregon-based radio station KPOV during a media workshop, Klemetson began teaching free CJP classes on subjects like journalism ethics, use of recording equipment and engineering.
The classes were interactive and Klemetson often used them as a springboard for fielding feedback on news broadcasts and explaining the department’s work.
“I just wanted to connect with the community,” she said.
Soon volunteers were doing newsroom work and several of them are now part of KMUD’s team of regular contributors.
Klemetson eventually transitioned into new efforts, such as expansion of engineering training for KMUD music programmers. She also teaches broadcast news at KRFH, Humboldt State University’s student-run radio station and is the co-owner of the Woodrose Cafe in Garberville, where she now lives.
She’ll continue to work for KMUD through January as the news department transitions into its next era with its new co-directors, Isabella Vanderheiden and Sydney Morrone.
Klemetson loves working for KMUD but it isn’t her style to do one thing for too long. “I’m 39 years old and at this point in my life, I want to make super-positive change and learn new skills,” she said. “I tell everyone that I need to close doors to open new doors and I need to do that to figure out what I can contribute to the world.”
Her next step hasn’t been decided. “I feel like I could embark on another career and help the community in a different way — I just don’t know what it will be,” she said.
(Disclosure: Daniel Mintz is a contributor to KMUD news.)
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