Jennifer Ludden, Class of 1988, has had an incredible radio reporting career. And it all started at WJPZ. This Tennessee native was recruited by "dorm mom" Sue Mandel (now Weingarten) to come "get a tour" of the radio station. Next thing you know, Jennifer was doing news, as well as music and morning show shifts.
After a summer working back home, she returned as a sophomore and quickly released that southern accent needed to go, particularly if she wanted to fulfill her dream of working in New York City, which she did after graduation.
Despite a myriad of other interests, Jennifer had a roommate with NPR experience. Thanks to Rob Weingarten, Jennifer was able to make a demo tape and land a gig at Maine Public Radio. Soon she learned French and headed to Montreal, where she freelanced. And her bilingual abilities took her West Africa in the mid-nineties. She tell us some pretty incredible war-zone stories from there, as well as her time in Jerusalem covering the Middle East. (Spoiler: don't wear a bullet proof vest while pregnant.)
After starting a family, Jennifer and her husband returned to the US, where she has covered many important national stories from NPR. She does an excellent job giving us quick explainers on complex topics, including immigration, the decline of marriage, housing, climate change, and economic inequality.
We close with Jennifer's advice to current students and young reporters: no matter what subject you're covering, it's all about the people. And that's true regardless of the medium you're working in.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. Today's guest is Jennifer Ludden from the class of 1988. She is the National correspondent for National Public Radio. Welcome to the podcast.
Jennifer: Hey there, Jon.
JAG: So I am thrilled to get to know you. This is full disclosure, my first time meeting you, and I want to hear all about your career, but we'll take it back to the beginning as we usually do.
Where did you grow up and how did you come upon Syracuse and the radio station?
Jennifer: I grew up mostly in Tennessee. I was looking to go super far away and I got the brochure for the Newhouse school and I was like, yeah! Something in that. I went up there without any proper winter clothing, honestly. And the big thing, the random thing that changed my life. Never thought about radio for many years. The random thing that changed my life was having Sue Mandel as my dorm mom.
JAG: Aw.
Jennifer: And one of our early meetings she just said, have you guys ever seen a radio station? Would you like to? And we're like, Ooh, cool!
And she said, great. Meet me Monday at seven, I think. But I thought it was just gonna be a tour. It was a recruitment meeting for newscasters. I was like that was a little tricky, but I don't know. I'm not good at saying no. So I'm like, okay, sure, I'll sign up. That was what started me off and changed every decision I made afterwards, although I still didn't plan on being at radio for a while. In the end, looking back, that's what made the difference.
JAG: It's funny, we have an episode with Sue and Rob, so they talk about their time and meeting at the station and getting together as well. So I assume news is where you started. Was that the bulk of what you did at the station, Jennifer?
Jennifer: Yes, I was a bit of a non-fiction nerd among my friends at Newhouse. A lot of them went to Hollywood and I was doing documentary type stuff. So I started at newscast at various points I had different things. I think I had an evening music shift at some point very briefly. I believe I was on the morning show. That was a little random also. But I did this, that and the other, and I was so lucky to walk in in 1984 is when I arrived at Syracuse, and, it went on FM that year and it was just very lucky on my part, and there was so much excitement about it, and I just remember being so impressed by all the people who'd come before and we're clearly making this happen.
JAG: Yeah. I remember anybody who was in that mid eighties timeline talking about how when the station went on FM, that they had just this massive recruitment of everybody wanted to be a part of it and that buzz on campus. I'm glad to hear that you got there just in time to be a part of it.
Jennifer: It was the student run station, right? If you're gonna do it, you wanna be the ones doing it. I know there was an NPR station there, people mentioned it, but it's ah, they got adults there oh, old people and the thrill was just being able to do everything and learn as you went, and people just managing the technical side, the marketing side, the news side, the sports, everyone doing it themselves. Just being part of that commitment and talent. It was incredible.
JAG: I love hearing stories like this. Are there specific moments from your time at the station that stick out to you as having informed your career since or life since, or any lessons you've learned?
Jennifer: They're kinda funny, but there were some lessons.
JAG: Funny's good. We can do funny too.
Jennifer: Okay. One is a super embarrassing, and this will be at my expense, no one else's. I remember very distinctly sophomore year, I'd come back from being home in Tennessee where I got a radio job my first summer because of having done this.
First summer of college I called up a radio station, this little country station in the small town that I had gone to high school in. And I don't know why, but they hired me to go, it was a CBS affiliate and I had to write up the local newscast. They didn't let me on the air much, but I got up at I think it was 5:55 in the morning and went by the sheriff's office, the police station got the reports from overnight.
Wrote up a newscast for 6:30 and then a few more in the morning, and then I would go cover school board meetings at night. I was exhausted. Staying up late and doing stories on those. I'm sure I only did that cuz I had been at JPZ that year.
JAG: School board meetings and police plot are talking about paying your dues early morning to late at night.
Jennifer: It was great. So I come back from being at home where everyone thought I talked like a Yankee. But I had not lost my accent. I had quite a southern accent in my first newscast back sophomore year. I am in the booth and there were four guys. I don't remember who, in the booth behind the glass.
Who started literally falling off their chair, laughing at me because like from the get go, I was like, Z eight niiiiiine or something. I can't even fake it now. But it was a super southern accent, and I was so embarrassed In the middle of the third sentence, which was about a murder, I started giggling.
JAG: Oh no.
Jennifer: And it was humiliating. Oh, humiliating. And so I aggressively started losing my southern accent. I remember that very distinctly.
JAG: It's funny how stories just parallel throughout the years. I've talked to, obviously we have a lot of New Yorkers who came up from the tri-state area to Syracuse and they talk about losing a New York accent.
For me personally, I grew up in Boston and my favorite story to tell is we were at a Dunkin Donuts at 2:00 AM coming back from the casino one night and 17 year old me asked for a mahhhble krellah. The poor woman behind the counter said, you want a what? And my Syracuse friends are teasing me. Oh, I'm sorry.
A marble crueller, please. And it was through sheer being made fun of in the dorm and being told by professors, you're not gonna get on the air with that Boston accent. You better lose it. So now it only comes out. If I'm talking to my mothah, my fathah, my brothah, one of my best friends, so.
Jennifer: Yeah, I can't even fake it anymore. My family moved away. But yeah, it was bad. It took four years. But anyway, that was fun. The other memory that stuck out that in terms of lessons learned, the commitment and work ethic on one of those evenings where I had a music shift, I just remember that not only the person after me, but the person after them failed to show.
JAG: Oh, you got the double.
Jennifer: It was an all-nighter. It was an all-nighter. I'm like, what am I gonna do? I'm not gonna let us go off the air. I'm not gonna go dark. I don't know how many people were listening, but that's what you do. Everyone is there making this work. I can't leave. People oversleep, whatever.
So I pulled an all-nighter playing music at JPZ and I think I learned something from it.
JAG: Oh, I think you say you learned something from that, but I think that's a reflection on you knowing that you had that work ethic and that desire to not let it fall through the cracks and not go off the air that night.
That's a reflection on you, I think.
Jennifer: It's because of the commitment of everyone there really. Okay, the people, this, there were two no-shows, but you know what? Everyone else had that and it was part of the atmosphere.
JAG: You hone your skills at JPZ, you graduate and you've had an incredible career since then that I wanna get into with you. Where did you start and walk me through all the things that you've done since graduation.
Jennifer: Okay, so my main, one of my other main goals in going to SU was to live in New York City, which I know sounds silly, but it worked. I got a paid internship from an alumni at Con Edison and I was doing educational videos for Con Ed, everything you wanted to know and more about asbestos and all that.
When that ended, I did this, that, and the other. Among the things 1010 wins. Didi. Didi, 22 minutes. We'll give you the world. And also Rob Weingarten was huge in helping me and at one point he was managing a radio station. He and Sue were in Westchester County and I would go and fill in when he needed, vacation relief or something, I would do the afternoon newscast cuz just keep up those skills and make a little money.
And I was thinking. I had the television, radio, film production. It was very television heavy. I was thinking maybe I'll go to tv. At one point I thought maybe I'll do PBS documentaries. And I did work at a documentary production firm in New York as a secretary. I was a super bad secretary, and I thought, I just don't have the patience for that, to spend a lot of years working your way up.
And I thought, I just wanna do the stuff now. I wanna interview people, I wanna, write my own stuff. And I also happened to have a roommate there who had come from National Public Radio, NPR. So it was a combination of having my JPZ experience and this roommate and I started listening to NPR, and it just clicked one day.
I said, oh, public radio, I'll work at a station. So I started sending out lots of resumes and all. And what I did was I crafted together two stories. I borrowed my roommate's Walkman. Remember those? And I went around New York. I picked two stories at random and I interviewed people and I got a lot of sound and I needed to produce this and make it sound like the things they do at NPR, which I'd never really done with all that ambi in the background. And Rob was incredible. He was so wonderful. He said, you can come use our station overnight. There's no one in the production studio. And he let me go up and I spent another all-nighter putting together, mixing those stories for my demo tape. And then I also had my newscast from his station.
And I never was gonna lie. Obviously, I would never say these aired anywhere if someone asked. But they never asked. And it ended up, they didn't. And I got my first job at Maine Public Radio using that tape. And thank you Rob and Sue. They just set me off on the path I'm on.
JAG: Again, parallel throughout the year, throughout 50 years of this radio station of paying it forward. Rob and Sue talked about folks before them that had helped them out and then they're paying it forward and helping you. I just love hearing stories like this. So how long were you in Maine and where'd you go from there?
Jennifer: A couple years in Maine and then I got the bug. I decided, it's really far up there and it's, there's New Brunswick on one side, French speaking. And I did a lot of coverage of the Acadians up in the far north, near the border with Canada.
JAG: Oh wow.
Jennifer: The ancestors of the Cajuns. And I started retaking French and I just had this desire, I'm like, if I'm ever gonna try and speak it, it's gonna be now or never. So I it was a recession. A mild-ish recession.
I couldn't get, a lot of people weren't hiring. Or flying people for hiring. So I quit and I moved to Montreal to try and speak French. Quite an accent up there. I did my French a little bit backwards, but loved it so much. Freelance for NPR. Freelance for the Christian Science Monitor. After I got there, then the NPR station, WBUR heard me and said, oh, you're sounding great.
Then they had an opening, I did two or three years at WBUR. But I had this bug about maybe going overseas. An editor had said to me, hey, you should consider West Africa. We don't have anyone there. You've got your French, such as it is. And I ended up getting a contract with NPR in West Africa in the mid-nineties.
I was there. It was amazing. It was life changing. I loved it so much. And then I had met a guy, we had a long-distance relationship. I said to my boss, I really, I need to go back to New York. I love what I'm doing. He totally understood and said what if I put you in Paris and you covered Africa from there?
And that's when I started, I stopped trying to plan life, right? So I was in Paris. Like a little less than a year and a half with my boyfriend now husband. And then we both got job offers. He was with ABC News. He'd taken time off to hang out in Paris, but he worked a lot there as well. And then we both got offers to be the Middle East Bureau chief, he for ABC, me, for NPR, based in Jerusalem.
JAG: Wow.
Jennifer: And that was the first place we both got jobs at the same place and that was incredible. We covered like from Egypt to Iran. So much happening.
JAG: And that's in the nineties. There's news breaking every three seconds at that period in time.
Jennifer: Late 90's, yeah. 99, 2000, 2001. It started out as being, the big peace agreement that we were covering, the Oslo Accord, peace in our time, the end of the a hundred years conflict. And then the second intifada happened with Israel-Palestine. So that was extremely busy. We also had the Israeli pullout from Lebanon. I had four trips to Iran. That was incredibly fascinating. They were much more open than they are right now. They were having elections. It was opening up to the media a little bit. It's heartbreaking to see what's happening in Iran now. It's always been a tough country, but it was a fascinating trip.
JAG: It's really amazing to me. Jennifer, how much of the world you've seen at some pretty, we'll say, interesting times in history in the last couple decades. Any stories from your time overseas that really stick out to you? In memory?
Jennifer: Yeah. There was one time. You know, when you go to these places you could say it's a stupid idea to go to a place where everyone else is evacuating. But once you're there, you do try to be very prudent and make safe decisions. But there was one time in Liberia, it was the day I was supposed to leave, and the frontline came outside our hotel. That was a little scary. We were cowering on the floor and thinking about what if they come up the driveway, and it turned out to be fine in the end. We were very lucky. They had very good, the hotel owners. Had good security. They hired guys to be security outside and it passed, but that was pretty dicey.
And then we were evacuated the next day. And it was a little sad because I remember like calling my mom to tell her I was fine and, she didn't even hear about it in the news. It was Liberia. It was a civil war that had been going on for years and you just, it was humbling.
And so then I ended up, instead of reassuring her saying, mom, do you understand what happened to me today? Oh geez. The other thing I was pregnant toward the end of my time in Jerusalem. And my boss has never made me do anything I was uncomfortable with. And I am grateful for that.
I did probably in the end go on one trip, looking back, I should not have. Had the bulletproof vest. When you're that pregnant, it doesn't cover the sides. It only covers the front and back. And, a firefighter broke out nearby us. And I thought, okay, this is ridiculous. I'm being stupid.
I need to stop thinking of myself. So the next story that popped up, that there were incursions into Palestinian area. Around Bethlehem and so forth. And the next time I was like, I can't do that. And I reported it remotely. And it was a great story because instead of just walking around outside and finding whoever happened to be outside and speaking to them, I was catching people in their homes. In their businesses, maybe that is Locked up or whatever. And I feel like the interviews were more intimate in a way. Okay. And people were more open. And it was a lesson.
JAG: Have you ever told your son, your daughter, have you ever told them about how, about being in that situation?
Jennifer: Oh, I don't think they care. Maybe when they're older. They're college age now. They're not so impressed with mom, I don't think. But maybe one day.
JAG: Okay, so Middle East, Paris, Jerusalem, and then at some point you come back stateside, right? Is that next?
Jennifer: Yes. Yeah. We decided, though I've had colleagues who've stayed abroad with children.
We came home. My husband actually got a job here, and so we moved to DC and then I became a national correspondent for NPR. I've covered lots of things. I have that journalistic ADD, every five years. I gotta try something else. So I did some national security, post 9/11 reporting.
Which made sense coming from the Middle East. Yeah. Then I did immigration for a number of years. That was just fascinating. It was during the Bush Administration, you had this Republican administration trying to do this sweeping immigration reform like Ronald Reagan did way back when amnesty was not a nasty word. And their party was really shifting under them. It just fell apart.
JAG: This is George W. Bush? The second bush?
Jennifer: Correct. And I traveled the country a lot of the, what I did back then, there were a lot of raids on, meat processing plants and other places that depended on undocumented workers.
And just looking at how Americans weren't lining up for those jobs and the disruption to families. It was fascinating. And then I covered family issues. A lot of the lack of paid family leave that's changed. The decline of marriage amongst some groups, the rise of out of wedlock births, which has really shot up in recent years,
JAG: Huh. Yeah. Why is that?
Jennifer: This was really fascinating. I did not understand the connection, the economic link to this rise of out of marriage births for a while. I had to do a lot of reporting. It's a real divide in education. So it's much more common with people who have not had a four-year degree.
And basically what couples told me is like they wanted what some of their parents had, which was being able to raise a family on one income. And that is much more difficult now than it was a couple generations ago.
JAG: Sure.
Jennifer: They said, we don't wanna get married until we feel financially set and secure.
But waiting for that to happen, it can take a while. But meanwhile, they want children and they don't wanna miss the years that to do that. And so they go ahead and have children and have their family. But there's this idea that whereas older generations may have had a low key wedding, the backyard where you don't spend any money and you start out poor together.
They feel it's important. It is a generation who are children of divorce. They feel it's important to be financially set and the, and it's just really hard to get there for a lot of people today.
JAG: That's interesting because it's almost flipped from the way it always was because, if we're being honest.
There is a biological clock on a window on when you can have kids, but people are realizing, not the same for marriage. You do the kids in that window where you have to have the kids with the marriage that can wait. That's fascinating.
Jennifer: Absolutely. Yeah. And now I'm covering economic inequality and a lot of these issues.
Oh, I, oh, I went and covered, I edited climate for five years. Climate change and energy stories.
JAG: That's something I wanted to ask you about. Because I find that entire area fascinating. There are so many pieces of climate change and where we're at with all of this. I'm gonna ask you a very pointed, specific question here and ask you to narrow it down.
If there was one thing that you wished the general public knew about climate change that they don't or it's not talked about, what is it?
Uh, that's a really hard question. I, this is gonna sound like a cop out. But I would say it's that, you know, we just really still don't know all the ways th warming is gonna play out, right? You may have caught a recent story about research showing there's gonna be more air turbulence on airplane flights. And it's clear air turbulence that pilots have a hard time seeing.
You know, it's like who saw that coming? And there will be more things like that. There's are really complicated ecosystems that are playing out here and I think it speaks to, okay, the other second thing, maybe the eyes glaze over part of climate change here is that we really, really do need policies to, get us winding down off fossil fuels.
I mean, there is incredible technology. The clean energy shift is underway. It is. It is amazing. Wind and solar in so many places now are cheaper than coal or natural gas, and that is heartening. That is great. The market knows this. Businesses know this. Utility companies, this shift is underway, but it's not happening fast enough and to make it go faster, we just really do need policies to push it and you know, not just the global climate talks, but obviously national policies, state policies, local, your city council, your county. You know, everyone has a role here to do something, to just kind of keep it going and make it go faster.
JAG: I grew up in Boston, but I live in Detroit now, so my Detroit bias is gonna come out here. Where do electric vehicles fall into this whole equation?
Jennifer: They're important. They're huge. But the electricity that they're gonna be charged on needs to be clean also. So it's all gotta happen together. It's a huge, it is a kind of an overwhelmingly huge thing. So the electricity, our grid has to get cleaner, right? It has to be more and more fueled by renewables and then when you charge your electric car, it's gonna be clean.
JAG: That's the what goes in versus what comes out. Got it. Okay.
Jennifer: But transportation is a huge piece of it. A lot of emissions, in fact, the biggest chunk in this country at the moment.
JAG: So from there you move on to issues of economic equality and tell what you're doing. Now, this is also fascinating.
Jennifer: Poverty, homelessness. A lot of housing. Again, the housing crisis has just exploded. It got worse during the pandemic as people moved all over the place. Basically, we've got this massive shortage of houses. After the big collapse. After the great recession in 2008, for a decade, the country did not build as much housing, as our population growth demanded.
So now we have this huge challenge of catching up at a time when construction is really expensive, land is expensive, the supply chain has been disrupted. There's a wide acknowledgement of this and cities putting more money toward this. The housing crisis has fueled the homelessness crisis, and millennials are so ready to move out on their own, and it's crazy expensive for them.
People worry they're not ever gonna be able to buy a house or be able to afford children or something. It's really tough. So that's what I'm grappling with now and a lot of the, the racial inequities as well. I'm wrapping up a story on zoning. We've got a small trend starting and I think it's gonna continue of some places ending their zoning mandates for single family homes, which have a pretty ugly history.
It was used to keep out black families in many cities. It's led to a lot of segregation. But it's a big key to try and build more housing. You have to allow the duplexes, the triplexes, the small apartment buildings in a lot of these areas and states and cities are starting to do that.
JAG: Are you seeing a big sea change in that, generally speaking, as different generations are coming up and ideals change a little bit? Or am I just stereotyping there?
Jennifer: No, I think since 2020 there's been, the George Floyd the devastating video that everyone saw. The protests for racial justice. It absolutely seeped into policymaking to the goals that cities and states have to try and address racial inequities along with the affordability crisis.
It's all tied together. Absolutely.
JAG: You have reported Jennifer, on so many different areas and aspects and topics. I'm wondering, two-part question. What motivates you? What kind of gets you going in the morning? And then also what advice you would have for a current student or a young reporter just starting out to be a successful reporter.
Jennifer: Ooh, those are big questions! I think what I try and, my colleagues at NPR also try, you're motivated by the real people who are living these situations are, storytelling. It's age old, it goes back to humanity and telling stories about people is the heart of it. It can be about a policy change or an economic shift, but you have to illustrate that with the voices of real people and you'll learn so much from them.
They're the first-hand source always. And I would say for people going into journalism that is gonna hold true no matter what medium you go into. And actually it's, that's the other thing is, it's all media now, right? So I spent a long time crafting the art of writing for radio, the haiku of getting every syllable counts. And, infused with this ideal that, oh, it's much harder to write short than it is long.
Of course, it takes longer. It's, rewriting, and then all of a sudden, we have to learn to write for the website now. And by the way, take pictures when you're out there and maybe some video on your phone, right? So it's everything is multimedia now, and the more skills you can bring to all the different ways of telling stories, including on social media now, the more equipped you'll be for whatever outfit you would like to work for.
JAG: It is interesting. You talk about the shift in all the different multimedia approaches and it not just being radio anymore. As someone who works full-time in podcasting, I've seen that your company, NPR, has really been at the forefront of way ahead of the commercial radio companies in podcasting.
You've been doing this since before it was cool. So it's interesting to hear your perspective on that, on how you need to have that multimedia approach and think about presenting stories in so many different ways. Because listeners consume it in so many different ways now.
Jennifer: We may have been out there early, but everyone's there now. Everyone.
And truly, it's a lot of competition. It's a tough time. It is a tough time, and everyone's trying to figure it out. We do all this polling now, and people are bombarded with so much news and you skim, there's no way you can read everything. But it is heartening to know that there is still even among, especially maybe younger generations, a desire for the deep dive.
The long podcast, the long conversation or reported piece. There absolutely is a hunger for that and that is great. I don't think that radio is changing. Young people don't even own radios. But there's always gonna be some platform for the age-old tradition of oral storytelling.
JAG: Jennifer Ludden, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us today. Really appreciate your perspective and your career that, again, started back at the days of JPZ, like so many of our illustrious alumni. Thanks so much for your time today.
Jennifer: Thank you, Jon, and thank you for doing this amazing series. It's so fun to listen to. Thank you very much.