Faces of Southeast Missouri: Dan Woods

Dan Woods in the general manager of KRCU, the public radio station operated by Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO). He first got into radio when he was an undergraduate student at SEMO.

Aaron Eisenhauer

Public radio helps people learn about things they didn’t know they didn’t know about, KRCU general manager Dan Woods says. That leads to great conversation, creating a bond with other listeners who have heard the same stories.

That ability to create connection, Woods says, is what he loves about radio.

“I feel like it’s an extended family in a lot of ways,” Woods says of a public radio station’s relationship with its listeners who support the station financially. “Many people we know — especially volunteers that help us — we’ve known them for years, and we know what’s going on with them, and we see them at fun drives or events, and we get to catch up, and it’s really a cool thing. It is a lot of fun.”

In high school, Woods says he wanted to be the next Dan Rather, and even watched the afternoon news updates and replicated them, using a computer program to create graphics. But when he got a radio spot telling about campus events as Seymour the SEMO Starving Student on the radio station Q99 in the spring of 1991 while a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University, he was hooked. Radio it was. And he’s never looked back.

“Radio’s a very intimate medium with the voice, and I like [how] your words paint pictures if you do it right, and people can get an idea in their mind just by what you say and how you tell the story, what you see, what you hear, what’s around you, and they can sort of imagine,” Woods says. “Theater of the mind I think’s just a real powerful thing.”

While still an undergraduate, Woods got a job as an announcer at the National Public Radio (NPR) broadcasting station KRCU on SEMO’s campus. When he graduated, he worked for the NPR station in Savannah, Ga., where he did the morning edition. Two years later, an opportunity opened up for him to do operations back at KRCU. He made the move back to Cape Girardeau and worked in that role for six years before becoming general manager of the station in 2002.

Woods says being an announcer is all about pacing and voice inflection, and listeners can tell if an announcer is smiling or not while they’re speaking. Telling stories and playing music for listeners in an effective way can help people go in a different direction, he says.

“A piece of music can bring back memories … of a special person, a special place, a special time in your life, and you may not hear it every day, but when you do hear it, you go back. … That’s powerful,” he says. “Bringing that music and these stories to people, it can really impact people’s lives.”