WNIJ’s Susan Stephens happiest telling stories

by Mark McGowan

There were inklings of what was coming March 14, on Page 64 of The New Yorker, but neither Susan Stephens nor her colleagues at Northern Public Radio realized exactly what.

Someone had fielded a call seeking a tape of a piece of Sue’s – she’s only called Susan on the air – about Brian Slavenas, the helicopter pilot from DeKalb whose death in Iraq deeply tore his family amid great publicity. Another caller, a fact-checker for the magazine, wanted to confirm her job title and the radio station’s affiliation with NIU.

Yet when Calvin Trillin’s story appeared under the headline “Lost Son,” his long and thoughtful article began with Stephens, who, it turned out, had inspired his interest. “This happened on Interstate 78, in New Jersey, in November of 2003,” Trillin had written. “While listening to a story on NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ about a National Guardsman who’d been killed in Iraq, I found myself in tears.”

“Some stories obviously lend themselves more to a poignant telling than others. This was a great story to tell, and Sue told it exceptionally well,” says Tim Emmons, director and general manager of Northern Public Radio. “She recognized it as a terrific story. All the elements were there to kind of tell the whole story of the war, and people’s feelings about the war, in the story of this one young man.”

For Stephens, whose last few months have brought many trials, Trillin’s nod is the “one golden thing” and the source of odd joy and welcome confirmation.

“I always wanted to make someone cry,” says Stephens, sitting in the compact newsroom just outside the WNIJ studio in the basement of Northern Public Radio’s First Street headquarters. “I find myself crying over other people’s stories all the time.”

Her three-and-a-half-minute story on Brian Slavenas, ironically, is not one she wanted to pursue. National Public Radio asked her to produce the piece, which she “tip-toed” through as she “learned about him and the people who were important to him.”

“It was the hardest story because it was the saddest story. (Interviewing survivors) is something I don’t like to do, but in talking with people, they really wanted to talk about him. I didn’t feel like a vulture,” she says. “I was trying to do it reverently, to honor him, to give people a sense of what he was like, to bring him alive by letting them feel how he affected other people. In talking with his family and friends, it ended up not being sad. They would end up telling funny stories and laughing – and feeling happy they’d known him.”

Stephens is chatting after a one-hour shift on the air handling the seven local “breaks” during NPR’s “Day to Day” program. Only a few hours have passed since Terri Schiavo’s death, which tops the news.

This noontime gig isn’t what Stephens usually does, but WNIJ has been short one reporter since January. She’s still fighting a cold, coughing each time before she turns on the mic and slipping out once to take care of a runny nose. It’s put her behind on writing her scripts, although it doesn’t sound that way.

Despite the Schiavo story, much of the hour isn’t nearly as serious.

There’s an uneasy piece on the fingertip found in a bowl of Wendy’s chili, and another on killer bees in California that the national anchor had touted as “chilling.” It features creepy audio of a spooked beekeeper wandering into the swarm as the bees buzz around his veiled hat, sounding like something from an old-time radio play.

Stephens giddily turns up the studio volume twice as the buzzing crescendos, and then grabs her headphones for a closer listen. “It was cool,” she says afterward, “but not chilling.”

No one is likely to challenge her news judgment. “Sue is more than a journalist for us,” Emmons says.

“She’s our news director, which means she not only does her own reporting, but she’s supervising everyone else’s reporting, the editing, the story assignments. That really speaks to her ability to not just see a story for what it is but to help others see stories,” he adds. “Boy, she works hard. She works harder than just about anyone else in the building. She puts in a lot of time and effort to get stories to be right, and for radio, that means more than just ‘accurate.’ It means telling it in a way that kind of breaks through the speakers and gives people a real audio picture of the story.”

“Susan is an excellent journalist. She researches her stories very well and she does a very good job in choosing what she wants to cover,” program director Bill Drake agrees.

“There are two things that stand out for me: One, she always finds a way to put an interesting angle on an otherwise common story. The second thing is that she’s probably the best writer in the building. She can take a story that got a lot of coverage, like the Slavenas issue, and make it seem relevant to people’s lives, rather than just a headline you’d find in a lot of other local media.”

Stephens, 38, grew up in Oxford, Mich., as the sixth of seven children born to Francis, a General Motors foreman, and Betty, a homemaker who also worked with the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program. She has three brothers and three sisters, one of whom – Debby – was living in Rockford when Sue earned a degree in communications from Oakland University, in Rochester, Mich.

She moved to Illinois to help Debby with the children, and to seek a job in radio.

“I thought I would be a TV producer or a DJ, but I found I got bored with those pretty quickly, and I decided I really liked doing news, telling stories, getting out and talking to people and letting them talk for themselves,” she says.

The disc jockey opportunity arose first – “overnights,” she groans – but Stephens soon began reporting news for WKKN radio, now known as WNTA. She then jumped to WROK, where she spent one year before coming to DeKalb a decade ago as news director at WNIJ. In that time, she has made good on her interest in film, producing a documentary on the Rockford Peaches baseball team.

NPR attracted her with “the time you’re allowed for a story. The style of journalism in public radio is like a magazine compared to a newspaper,” she says. “And public radio has been really supportive of my career enhancement, my education. They send me to conferences and workshops, and I get better at what I do.”

Her work long has enjoyed recognition, and it’s not the first time she’s commanded the national airwaves. Stephens was among a group of WNIJ reporters on the scene in Utica, Ill., to describe for the country the aftermath of the fatal tornadoes of April 20, 2004. One of her stories on the tornado took second place in the Illinois Associated Press’ “Best Breaking News Story” competition.

Fifteen people have sent e-mails or cards since The New Yorker article appeared. Some she knows, including a member of the League of Women Voters in Rockford and a public radio colleague in Macomb. Others are strangers who know her voice.

“Obviously, I was very proud of the fact that one of our people had that kind of impact. On the other hand, the fact that it was noticed on a national level came from the fact that it was broadcast on the national version of NPR’s ‘Morning Edition,’ ” Emmons says. “We do stories like this locally all the time. Obviously, not every story has as much meaning, or such a poignant nature as this one, but there are many, many stories that have this kind of effect on local listeners that are never heard beyond our own signal area. This one was, and that’s terrific.”

Stephens – the journalist – also appreciated Trillin’s work.

“His story was one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve read. He did it perfectly. He told it so well, in ways that honor the families involved and honor Brian Slavenas himself,” she says. “It totally reminds me of why I’m doing this. Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in the paperwork of being a news director, the day-to-day drudgery, but when it comes down to it, it all comes back to being a reporter who tells stories, and I feel really, really lucky to be able to do that.”

But for Stephens – the human being – the article carries different meanings. Some are funny (“Now I can die. I’ve been in The New Yorker,” she jokes) but some will stay with her forever, the way certain events cling to the memories they surrounded.

She has missed numerous days of work since December, when she and her new Pontiac Vibe began the first of several trips home to visit her seriously ill parents. The odometer already has passed 12,000 miles. Advance word of the article, even without realization of the role she would play in it, brought joy to her father.

“I was able to tell my dad about it,” she says. “He was still in pretty good shape then, and excited for me.”

Francis Stephens died March 7, exactly a week before the publication. Betty, Sue’s mom, remains hospitalized.

Back in DeKalb, near the end of her hour of local breaks, she uses her fingers to erase a question mark written after her name on the studio marker-board that lists the schedule of hosts. There is work to do here, where life goes on.

“I’ve got to get the newsroom back to full strength, to make this region a better place by exposing problems and injustices, to find people who have hit their lowest point and to make them right,” Stephens says, “and to just let as many people as possible tell their stories, so we can relate better and understand our neighbors better.”

4-11-05