Editor’s note: WIZS part-timer Jayden Watkins took some time to sit and chat with John Charles Rose for Thursday’s segment of TownTalk. In what amounts to a role-reversal of sorts, Watkins was the interviewer who posed questions to John Charles to learn more about his life’s work and his vision of the radio station’s role in the community.
There are so many different ways to define “family” these days: there’s family that we’re related to, by birth or by marriage; then there’s “work” family – the people we spend so much time with as we go about our jobs; and there’s also the community of people who live near us, in the same town or even in the same neighborhood.
And since WIZS Radio is a family-owned business serving a local market, Rose finds himself keeping an eye out for them all as he goes about a normal workday.
“I care a lot about what I do,” he said on Thursday’s TownTalk, reflecting back on his career that includes owner/operator/reporter/writer/interviewer/engineer/ad seller.
“I’m still in it, rollin’ hard, rockin’ and rollin’, going just as hard as I can,” even though it may not have been exactly the career path his father would have chosen for his only child.
John D. Rose III would have been 81 this year. Since his dad’s death in 2007, John Charles has stepped in and stepped up to be the guiding force of the radio station.
Gathering news has evolved from the days when he followed his dad around the Henderson Daily Dispatch newsroom and later around the radio station, which members of the Rose family bought in June 1989.
“My daddy just loved radio,” Rose said. “I love radio and I loved my dad,” so it wasn’t a surprise that when it came time for college, John Charles headed off to UNC-Chapel Hill to study broadcast journalism.
By that time, however, he’d already learned the workings of the local station inside and out. He started out mowing the grass, but soon found himself inside the station behind the mic and running the board.
“I grew up around him doing his job,” Rose recalled of his childhood years with his dad. “We listened to scanners and went to car wrecks and fires and things that were going on that were news items. You didn’t gather the news electronically like you do now. You had to go…you had to be there and talk to the people there on the scene and find out what was going on.”
He graduated from UNC in 1998 and “I’ve been rollin’ ever since.”
But it’s not always easy, he readily admits. There are fewer and fewer locally owned and operated radio stations in the U.S. “It can be a difficult push at times.”
He said he’s proud of the staff that keeps things (mostly) humming as the radio station keeps its focus local.
“We’re a mainstream radio station,” Rose said. “We don’t have a niche, but if we did have a niche, our niche is local…local is what people want to hear.”
But when you’re a small station with a small group of employees, it’s tough to be at every city and county meeting, every ribbon-cutting and sports event important in the life of a community.
“My family now – the wife and children that I have – they suffer at times for want of more attention and time from me. Because I work too much,” he said.
Of all the good parts of the job that he can name, that’s one of the parts that isn’t good because of the effects it has on his family.
And of the things he’s proud of – getting a college degree, having a local radio station that provides a valuable service to the community – he is proudest, hands down, of his family.
“I’m so thankful that God wanted me to be in union with another…and blessed to have children,” he said.
He finds himself giving a lot more thought these days to succession planning. “I want the radio station to be present for Henderson and Vance County long after I am dead and gone. I still don’t have a clear picture of what that looks like, and maybe we never discern that.”
What he is sure about, however, is that if the local paper doesn’t print the local news, or if WIZS doesn’t publish the local news, who’s going to do it?
“Part of my passion is for the radio station to be there and present for its community” long into the future, he said.
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