Renai Bodley, the president and general manager at KPCW since 2017, announced she will leave the NPR station in May.
It’s an end to an era here in the Wasatch Back, but just the end of a chapter in Bodley’s life in news. And there’s a new chapter just around the corner, she said.
Born and raised in Roanoke, Va., Bodley attended the University of Virginia and found a job working in television news as a newscast producer nearby when a call from a friend sent her West.
“A friend that I worked with … called me and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you in Salt Lake.’ He was the news director at Fox 13, and he hired me to be the assistant news director. And that was 1996,” she recalled.
Three years later, she was promoted to news director, serving in that role from 1999 to 2015. In her 16 years there, she ushered in plenty of change.
“I started their morning show. I started ‘Good Day Utah.’ I started their 11 a.m. show, I started their 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. show — basically, when I got there, they were doing two and a half hours of news a day, and when I left they’re doing 11 hours of news a day. So we really grew the station,” Bodley said.
By 2015, she was ready to start something new for herself.
“I thought it was going to be a change from local news all together,” Bodley said. “I thought it’d be fun to see what life was like outside of the newsroom.” So she left the station.
Living in Park City, having moved to the Wasatch Back a year before, Bodley was connected with Leslie Thatcher, KPCW’s senior news director, through a mutual friend.
“I was on day three of my quasi-retirement, and I came by the station and talked to Leslie over lunch, and she said, ‘Why don’t you join us as a reporter?'” Bodley said.
She was hesitant.
“I’m not talent. I didn’t do on-air. I’m always behind the scenes. And they really needed a Wasatch County reporter, and I wasn’t interested in working full time,” she said.
Eventually she agreed to do the job for 20 hours a week. Quickly, she fell in love with it.
“I loved listening to the county council meetings and the city council meetings, and I loved how this station just really connected with the community. I became so immersed in Summit and Wasatch counties. Much more so than I did with the state of Utah,” she said. “When I was a news director down in Salt Lake, you’re removed because you’re covering the whole state. In here, you’re covering issues and reporting on people that you’re going to see at the grocery store, right? And so it was a whole different dynamic, and I loved it.”
Just under two years later, in 2017, Bodley became the general manager.
“I got the job, which was scary and exciting all at the same time because I had never really done radio up until a year and a half earlier,” she said.
Working for a nonprofit made the job much more rewarding, said Bodley.
“Your community is your owners. Instead of answering to the shareholders, you’re answering to your neighbors and your people who donate their own money to keep you on the air. And there’s a huge sense of responsibility that comes with that,” she said. “You work harder when you know that your community’s really relying on you.”
And after just shy of a decade at KPCW, her most defining thread was growth, not just with the community — where there was never traffic like now when she moved here — but also at the station.
“The station has grown so much from when I was general manager in 2017. There were 11 full-time people, and right now we’re budgeted for 18 full-time people,” she said.
She saw this as a consequence of the area’s growing population.
“You had a lot of new people move to town who really liked the small-town feel of the area. And they, I think, become pretty quickly attached to the radio station because that helps them feel attached to the community,” she said.
Becoming immersed in the area on a granular level through KPCW has been impactful and inspiring, said Bodley.
“It’s been a great ride. I’ve really enjoyed being at KPCW. It’s a fabulous staff. It’s a great community of supporters, and it’s really impressive how this community invests in local journalism. I think people recognize how important it is,” she said.
Bodley’s own passion for local journalism, and desire to be closer to family, is calling her back to her hometown for a fundraising role at a small public radio station, also an NPR affiliate, licensed to Virginia Tech.
“I’m going into a strictly fundraising position for WVTF. … It’s all talk, a morning edition in the morning and then ‘All Things Considered’ in the afternoon and other public radio programs sprinkled in between. And then they also have another radio station that is all classical music,” she said. “I get to kind of speak to my passion, the importance of local journalism and why people should support it and invest in local journalism.”
It feels like a perfect fit for Bodley, who “is literally coming home again.”
“The station is right down the street from my parents’ house. And I was a member of the Roanoke Youth Symphony growing up, so I know about classical music. And they also have a really good local news department that has actually won a couple of Murrow Awards,” she said.
With a sister in Washington, D.C., and a brother in Chapel Hill, Bodley is ready to be close to her family, though she acknowledged that 28 years living in Utah makes this state in a way more her home than Virginia.
“It’s bittersweet. I love the Park City community, and I am hoping that I’m not leaving it forever. I’m leaving the door open to come back again someday, (but) an opportunity to be closer to family is really important for me right now. So I think this is the right move at the right time,” she said.
While leaving is hard, she said she has a lot to look forward to. Primarily springtime, she said with a laugh.
“It’s sunny and 75 degrees there today. The daffodils are up. The trees are blooming. And we’re in a snowstorm,” she said.
And of all the times to leave, now feels right, she said.
“We just had a record-setting winter pledge drive, and it feels like the station is very stable right now,” she said. “I think that’s a good time to transition leadership, when nothing’s broken, nothing needs to be fixed — everything’s clicking on all cylinders.”