Robert Siegel has been instrumental in shaping domestic and international reporting at NPR over his 40-year-career. He retires on January 5th from co-anchoring All Things Considered. (PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY OF NPR)

After 30 years co-anchoring NPR’s afternoon news magazine All Things Considered, Robert Siegel is stepping away from the microphone. He retires today.

A few weeks ago, NPR put out a call for stations to have brief interviews with him from Washington D.C and KCAW got one. We’d barely begun, when Siegel said he had a story to tell me about former general manager Rich McClear.

Listen to the interview here with KCAW reporter Emily Kwong here:

Downloadable audio.

SIEGEL: Back in the stone age, before I became the host of All Things Considered, I was the news director here. I ran the department that did All Things Considered and Morning Edition and we launched Weekend Edition. It was a job that I did for four years. Part of the job meant dealing with station managers from around the system. At one point, there was an initiative at NPR to double the audience, in a ten year period or something like that. It was something that our President and the Board of Directors agreed to. It seemed like a completely uncontroversial objective for any broadcast organization to have. But, it actually brought out all these interesting differences and unique virtues of the public radio system.

Your colleague up there, Rich McClear was the manager of KCAW. And I remember him telling me, “We can’t double the audience because everybody listens to us already. It’s us and a commercial radio station. Everybody listens to us already. So we can’t see doubling the audience.”

And it occured to me that if KCAW had disappeared from Sitka, the loss to that community – this is the days before the Internet for sure – would have been much greater than if a much, much bigger public radio station had disappeared from New York or Boston or Los Angeles. It’s significance to that community was that much greater.

And I remember one of our network arts producers was furious at the idea of doubling the audience. It seemed to him like a news plot. News people thought there could be twice as many people who would listen to the news. The opera producer knew very well that the number of people who liked opera were listening! And you couldn’t double that number! So it raised all kinds of interesting questions about the purpose of public radio and the purpose of NPR within that.

KWONG: Yes, I like to think KCAW is a station that is a product of its environment more than anything. I’m so glad you made the time to talk to this station. Did you ever get the opportunity to visit a station like ours, a station in Alaska, that you remember in your career and what did you find there?

SIEGEL: As it happens, I have not visited stations in Alaska, which is a rarity because I’ve visited a lot of public radio station. They vary a great deal, from small community radio stations to big state networks. What I think they all have in common is a lack of cynicism about their purpose which is pretty rare about their purpose, I think, and a sense that there’s a kind of excellence that one should aspire to. Doing it right and doing it with integrity. Those are values that sound unassailable, but often they can be subordinated because, “Well, we’ve got to sell more advertising. So we won’t do what we really would do if we had our druthers.” And for me, that runs through stations as big as the ones in Boston and Philadelphia and Washington D.C. and little stations in Yellow Springs, Ohio and Billings, Montana. It’s a great varied system we work in.

KWONG: A great many listeners too. I’ve read that you picture a beloved aunt when you’re voicing your stories. That’s something I tell my interns now. And I’m wondering if that’s still true. Who do you picture now at this stage in your career?

SIEGEL: I picture one of my daughters or the other one! Sometimes my wife. I used to talk to my father a lot. This is a piece of guidance actually that I heard in journalism school many years ago from Frank McGee, an NBC anchorman. He acknowledged the notion that talking to millions of people is paralyzing. How do you talk to 2 million people at once? (Laughs) How do you address them? And so he just decided he’d talk to his father in his head. He would speak the way he would speak to his father because he had always spoken clearly and affectionately and tried to be as useful as he could be to his dad. And I thought it was a wonderful device and wonderful answer to this question of how do you talk to people.

Radio station program directors have always been telling their disk jockeys and news casters, “Yeah, you’re talking to thousands of people and you’re talking to them one at a time.” And that remains something true of radio, I think. It’s mostly a solitary activity. We’re mostly talking to somebody who is at home or in the car. Not a group of three people watching television together or the old scene of them gathered around the old fashioned radio in the parlor. So I think it’s all the more important for us to speak to people.

KWONG: How do you plan to spend our last few hours at NPR. Specifically, what are you going to do?

SIEGEL: (Laughs) I don’t know! Part of that will depend on what they assign me to do that day. I’ll be on the air on Friday, January 5th. My last day.

KWONG: Right.

SIEGEL: And for all I know, I’ll be talking to a reporter in Iran or someone digging out from the snow in Erie, Pennsylvania. So that will be part of it. I fear a lot of people will want to take pictures with me on that day from the staff. So I’ll be a minor tourist attraction in the studio. I’ll do my best to suck it in, hold it together, and get through the day without any outburst of emotion from me. I’ll tell you one secret though that they don’t know about Friday.

KWONG: Sure.

SIEGEL: I have decided to do the  last show in black tie, which is how BBC announcers did all their programs in the 1930s. So that will be festive.

KWONG: What do you hope for the future of public broadcasting in this country, when you look at the new reporters coming in such as me? What torch do you hope we carry and what do you hope we leave behind?

SIEGEL: Well I think in many ways, the greatest challenge right now for your generation for public radio reporters – or public media reporters – is first on the local level. Because local newsrooms have taken a terrible hit around the country, newspaper newsrooms. Very often the most important work that journalists do in figuring out how city hall managed to squander that much money or how the sheriff got away with that outrageous behavior. Whether the Ayatullah will survive in Tehran may prove to be a greater historical question with the hindsight of centuries, but it’s not quite so immediate as the agenda of reporting that local reporters have done for generations. So I think that’s a huge challenge for the many public radio station newsrooms that now exist. When I first came here, there were a handful that you could count on to have a reporter who had done a meaningful local story. Now that describes dozens of stations. And I think that’s the number one challenge.

And I think the second challenge is that, as we become more important and as people who grew up listening to us become the people who work here and run the place, to still retain some sense of fun putting radio programs on the air. We’re supposed to be good companions to people and it’s not all death and destruction and disease. And I hope that in our great significance we haven’t lost sight of the fun stuff that we do. I’m starting to get a wind up sign here, Emily…

KWONG: Last thing, how are you going to use your voice after this, you think?

SIEGEL: I guess talk to my wife and make phone calls to my daughters!

KWONG: Thank you so much and have a wonderful last week.

SIEGEL: Thank you, Emily.

KWONG: I’ve enjoyed listening to my whole life.

SIEGEL: Thank you. And thanks to all who support KCAW and by so doing, really help support what we do at NPR too.

KCAW reporter Emily Kwong got to meet NPR host Robert Siegel in 2011, when he visited Columbia University. She had just started volunteering at the college station.