The public radio station housed on Morgan State University’s campus is under new leadership.
Mireille Grangenois, formerly publisher of The Chronicle of Higher Education, actually stepped into her new job as interim general manager of WEAA 88.9-FM last month. Her arrival coincided with the announcement that daily talk show host Marc Steiner would be leaving the station at the end of July.
She’s entrusted with helping to revitalize the station, including by introducing a “learning lab” for journalism students and strengthening music programming to draw more listeners, according to a release.
DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, said in a statement that Grangenois “has an impressive record of media management” and that he has “great confidence in [her] ability to lead this effort.”
Grangenois is no stranger to Baltimore. She began her career at the Sun working the general assignment, education and crime beats, and went on to write for Business Week, Gannett and USA Today before taking on advertising sales roles for Washington Post Newsweek Interactive and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was later brought back to manage SunSpot, the old website for Baltimore’s flagship newspaper, according to a 2000 article from the Sun. Now, Charm City has stolen her back from her job most recent job in D.C.
The focus on broadening student learning opportunities at WEAA is a prime opportunity for Morgan. The university is one of only five historically black colleges and universities in the country with a journalism program. It already offers a locally tailored multimedia reporting project to students, which last year got a hefty funding boost from the Knight Foundation, as well as a faculty exchange program with Penn State.
