Rick Alloway: A Life in Radio and the Art of Listening

Episode Summary

Rick Alloway has spent more than forty years at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, teaching broadcasting and managing the student radio station, 90.3 KRNU. As he steps into retirement this summer, he joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore for a wide-ranging conversation about radio, teaching, and the enduring work of listening well.

About Rick Alloway

Rick Alloway is an associate professor of broadcasting and the general manager of 90.3 KRNU at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications. A 1977 graduate of the university, he began in radio as a high school student through the Explorer program at KFOR, where he worked for more than a decade before a stint in the advertising world. In 1986 he returned to the university to run its student station and teach — work he has continued for four decades. A member of the Nebraska Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame, he has hosted the a cappella program Vocal Chords on KRNU since 1995 and the public affairs series Campus Voices for more than twenty years.

About the Conversation

The conversation begins, as it often does on this show, with a mug — though this one is not really Rick's. He bought it for his wife, Shelley, and it reads, "Everything I brew, I brew for you." Every morning for as long as he can remember, Rick has been the one to make the coffee and carry a cup to her, a small ritual that has grown more meaningful during a season of health challenges. From there the talk turns Scottish, by way of Rick's adoptive heritage, to two words worth keeping: catawampus, for anything askew, and hurkle-durkle, the fine old term for lingering in bed a little longer than you should.

From that gentle start, Rick tells the story of a life in radio. He came to it through a Scouts career program at KFOR — "I went to one meeting and stayed for twelve years" — and later found his way back to the university's student station, where he signed the transmitter on before dawn and, when a student overslept, drove in to do it himself. He reflects on what has changed since: the slow decline of AM radio, the rise of FM and then talk radio, and an audience that has largely moved to phones and earbuds and smart speakers. What he mourns is not the technology so much as the human presence on the other end — the announcer who could make a stranger feel like a neighbor.

Much of the second half turns to journalism and trust. Rick argues there has never been a more important moment for careful reporting, precisely because the internet let everyone become an editor, with all the promise and peril that implies. He walks through the habits he teaches his students and practices himself: knowing whether a source is one you've heard of, second-sourcing before you share, and reading voices that challenge your own rather than only those that confirm it. He and the hosts sit with the stories that went untold for too long — the Tulsa race massacre, the Indian boarding schools — and with the harder work now of sorting the real from the fabricated. If there is a through-line, it is the one Rick has spent a career on: the discipline of listening closely, and choosing carefully whom to believe.