George Scheibner

Manager, Operations

George Scheibner is WHQR's Production Manager. You hear his voice on-air a lot because he works extensively on the AudioVault hard-drive automation system which programs WHQR in the nighttime hours and on weekends. (No, he is not really at the radio station twenty-four hours a day as some people seem to think.) He also does the weekday Midday Edition newscast at noon and have his musical playpen "Soup to Nuts" on Saturday nights at 9:00 pm. Maintaining the studio equipment, dashing to the transmitter site out in the Green Swamp when there is an emergency with our twenty kw transmitter and engineering our periodic live broadcasts also keeps him busy. 

George has been doing one or another form of radio since the late 1960's. At Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven, CT they didn't even have a radio station until George and some friends began "broadcasting" over the student union PA system for fun.  That led to four years as a "townie" working at WYBC, the then-freeform student station at Yale University which led in turn to nearly nine years at WPLR-FM, a freewheeling album rock station which has become something of a legend in Connecticut radio. He also spent a year in New York working for a short-lived Rolling Stone Magazine radio series for which he interviewed rock musicians and wrote short radio scripts.

While all this was going on, he taught radio broadcasting at his alma mater, Southern Connecticut.  In 1984, his teaching experience earned him an assistantship in grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill. George’s graduate studies in turn resulted in some part-time work at WUNC-FM. It was his first foray into noncommercial radio. He found it to be a good fit for himself and even managed to pick up some experience announcing classical music in addition to working with NPR news programming shifts.

He likes the fact that public radio was and is an intelligent approach to the medium and its audience. He finds that it encourages a degree of programming creativity which he had seen inexorably diminishing on the commercial side. George rediscovered his enthusiasm for doing radio on the noncommercial part of the FM band.

So he began his public radio odyssey around the state of North Carolina. George worked at WUNC until 1991 when he took a program director position at WDAV in Davidson, NC. WNCW in Spindale, NC was George’s next stop. The staff was almost entirely made up of musicians and the creative on-air music mix ranged from bluegrass to folk to blues and even some rock and roll.  Almost like WYBC and WPLR but with NPR and without any commercials.  Now do you understand where "Soup to Nuts" gets its inspiration?

Working in radio, even public radio, means adapting to continual change. George has been here at WHQR nearly twelve years now and has seen "the little radio station that could" go through a lot of changes as it and its staff have grown while serving the region with community-based public radio.

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