In the past week, podcast listeners to this show have come from across the US, Canada, Austria, the UK, and Spain. If you’re one of our far-flung podcast listeners, “Hello!”
If you live in New Orleans, you might hear us on WWNO. In which case you will have probably heard, as part of the local news, reporters from The Gulf States Newsroom.
The Gulf States Newsroom is an NPR-driven news-gathering collaboration of WWNO, WRKF in Baton Rouge, and NPR stations in Alabama and Mississippi. It was launched in 2020, by NPR and the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. In 2025, the Corporation For Public Broadcasting was de-funded by Congress and no longer exists.
Those same budget cuts ate into the financial viability of all public broadcasting outlets – including the member stations of the Gulf States Newsroom – forcing them to scramble to come up with strategies to stay funded.
You can’t accuse the Deep South of being ahead of the game in much, but in the case of The Gulf States Newsroom, back in 2022 they’d hired Marci Schramm as their Director of Development,an HR term that roughly translates to, “The person we all depend on to go out and find money to fund this thing.”
Marci Schramm, Director of Development at The Gulf States Newsroom. Since the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, she’s navigating a whole new world of NPR budgeting and planning
Marci’s background included 9 years as Executive Director of New Orleans’ French Quarter Festival – the years that saw its most explosive growth – and that’s when we first met her here on Out to Lunch, in 2016. Today, Marci ensures the Gulf States Newsroom continues to run at full capacity as it earns numerous prestigious Edward R Murrow Awards for journalism.
When you watch the news on TV, you’re quite often looking at film of people in life and death situations in other countries, and sometimes in other cities in the US. Ifyou live in New Orleans, you’ve probably had the unnerving experience of relying on this kind of news footage to assess the risk to your own life at the hands of a hurricane or flood.
It’s essential here to have a TV news station you can trust. It’s too late for a news outlet to earn that kind of trust the day before a storm blows into town and for that reason, despite our reputation as “The City That Care Forgot,” we take local news reporting seriously in New Orleans.
WWL TV is one of the oldest television stations in the South. Tod Smith began working there as a production assistant in 1980 while he was a student at Loyola University – which at that time owned WWL.
Tod Smith, General Manager at WWL-TV, shepherding the organization from a straight-ahead TV channel on a single screen in a living room three times a day to a multi-platform information source on mutiple devices 24/7
Tod graduated from college, worked for a while for Shell Oil, went back to TV and was Sales Manager at WWL in the 1990’s, then went into management at stations in Arizona and Virginia before coming back home to take over as General Manager of WWL TV in 2012. He’s still the station’s General Manager today.
Tod Smith, Marci Schramm, Peter Ricchiuti, Out to Lunch in the billiards room at The Columns in Uptown New Orleans
People will tell you they’re a cat person or a dog person. They’re mountain people or beach people. And then there are NPR listeners and – believe it or not – people who have never-even-one-time listened to public radio. You can’t hate those folks – they don’t know what they’re missing. But we NPR listeners absolutely know what we’d be missing if public radio went away.
So, we’re all exceptionally grateful to Marci Schramm for everything she does every day to keep public radio news on the air. And with a legacy that includes Nash Roberts, Garland Robinette, Eric Paulsen, Sally Ann Roberts, Angela Hill, Hap Glaudi, and Morgus the Magnificent, WWL-TV is a part of the history of modern New Orleans. As General Manager of the station, Tod Smith is a part of that history now too.
Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. Photos by Jill Lafleur.
