Deborah Parenti

When I first got into radio, there weren’t many women to look to for guidance. In some markets, there were no female local news reporters. Middays were often labeled “housewife time,” built around a narrow idea of both the audience and what women in radio were supposed to be. There wasn’t really a roadmap—at least not one you could easily see. That’s changed in some important ways. Today, women are leading stations, shaping brands, and driving content across formats.

I was 26 when I got my first taste of Capitol Hill. I was the Marketing/Research Director of WING in Dayton and had uncovered some disconcerting information: our market was on track to lose a county from the metro due to work commute patterns. But we also had a chance of gaining – or at least splitting – a county to the south for the same reason, which would help steady our population numbers.

There was a time in broadcasting when leadership felt less like a promotion and more like a passing of the torch. The men and women who ran stations had walked the same hallways, pulled the same overnight shifts, and sweated the same sales budgets as the people they now led. They knew what it meant to ride in the station van on a rainy Saturday, to calm a nervous advertiser, or to stay on the air through a storm because a community was counting on them.