Joanne Williams, veteran Milwaukee television reporter and documentarian
Few journalists are more familiar to Milwaukee viewers than Joanne Williams. The veteran reporter has spent most of her decades-long career on local airwaves, first as an anchor at WTMJ Channel 4 and then as a fixture of the Channel 6 newsroom, where she spent nearly 29 years. Since retiring from Fox 6 in 2008, Williams has settled into a new role as the host and segment producer of Milwaukee Public Television’s long-running “Black Nouveau,” a monthly spotlight on the city’s black community. A former president of the Milwaukee Press Club and founding member of the Wisconsin Black Media Association, she spoke with the Shepherd Express about her TV news career and her first foray into independent filmmaking, a documentary about a fateful 1960s theater production.
You hosted one of Milwaukee’s first morning news shows, right?
Yes. It was called “The Morning Scene,” on Channel 4, and we started in 1973, Pete Wilson and I.
What was local morning news like back then? Was the template similar to how it is now?
It wasn’t! We created it. We went on 30 minutes before “The Today Show” started, from 6:30-7 a.m. We were an experiment, actually. We were told by the news director we were going to try this morning show and see if anyone would watch, and so we did. And people did watch it. They watched a lot. So we stayed there for a while. It was sort of seat of our pants, just Pete and me. I wrote copy for the show and I did the weather, and Pete wrote news and sports, and we set up the interviews. We produced the whole show. Sometimes I would direct the show, depending on how things went. I’d direct from the set when the director wasn’t there, because that was 6:30 a.m., which was early back then.
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You’ve been in many roles over the years. Which one did you enjoy the most?
I really love live TV. Probably that has something to do with my theater background. But I love live TV and I love anchoring, and I like talking to people and I like doing interviews. Of course, my first love in television news, I discovered after I started working at Channel 4, is editing—video editing. At the time it was film editing. And I love editing. I was an editor when I was chosen to go on the air, so gradually I got away from editing as much, but now I’m getting to do that more again.
How did you get involved with “Black Nouveau”?
Well, that was kind of fortuitous. I had left Fox 6. I had retired from Fox 6, and I was looking for something else. One of the producers, who I’d known for a long time, asked me if I could come and substitute host, because one of their hosts was sick and couldn’t come. This was two days before they were taping. So I came in and did a guest host. Then they decided they wanted to go with just a host, so they decided to choose me.
You’ve been hosting “Black Nouveau” for six years now, but the show has been running since the ’80s. Do you feel you’ve been able to put your stamp on the show?
I hope so! I try and present myself and the show as something not only the black community should watch and be interested in and learn from, but that anybody can watch and be interested in and learn from. Like we said in our February edition, this is Black History Month, but Black history is what we do all the time at “Black Nouveau.” We want to tell you the stories that happen in and around Milwaukee all year round, about people and events, issues, arts and culture. And we hope that people watch all year round because they learn something new with every show.
It’s interesting you come from a commercial TV news background, because one of the common complaints about local news is you almost never see the local black community depicted in a positive light. You’ll see three minutes of crime coverage, but there’s never a deeper look into the community.
That’s what “Black Nouveau” does. That’s where people can turn to see it, the wide variety of people and activities and issues. But to give credit to commercial TV, which I worked in for some 40 years, in a newscast you only get so much time. You have to get in a lot more stories, and you have much less time to do things, so you can’t go into the depths that you can in public television. That’s one of the luxuries we have—being able to do a story that runs for six or seven minutes, where in a newscast it might run a minute and a half. So we can give it the time to breathe and go into some depth.
What are your favorite stories to tell on the show?
I like stories with very interesting individuals. I like to talk to people who have really interesting stories to tell, about themselves or their families or about what they do. And I like stories about the arts, because that’s something I’ve always been very interested in. When I was at Northwestern, before I got my radio/television/film degree, I was a theater major, so I did a lot of theater. So I like the arts. But if I can tell a story about a really interesting person, whether they’re famous or not famous, it doesn’t matter. That’s what we try to do, interesting stories about interesting people.
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Have you ever considered returning to the stage?
Oh yes, absolutely! Maybe one of these days I will try auditioning for something. Of course I wasn’t very good, and that’s why I changed to radio/television/film as my major [laughs]. But I enjoy it. And my sons got into theater, so I was happy when they did that. Now with the documentary I’m producing, that relates to theater. So I’ve never gone too far astray from reading a script. You’d be surprised at how many theater skills I’ve had to use over the years for television.
Can you tell me about the documentary you’ve been working on?
The title is Kaukauna & King: 50 Years Later, and it’s about a student exchange at Kaukauna High School, up in the Fox River Valley. A social studies teacher at Kaukauna wanted to give his students a broader view of the world, and to let them know there was more to the world than just their small community. So he wanted them to be in a play. The play was In White America, but he couldn’t cast the play because it’s the history of African Americans from slavery to Civil Rights, and there were no black people in Kaukauna. So he had to strike an exchange with Rufus King High School in Milwaukee. Kids from there went up to live with families in Kaukauna for a month, and kids from Kaukauna came down to Milwaukee and lived with families here. And this was all done in 1966. This was 52 years ago, right in the midst of the civil rights movement. So I wanted to find those original students and see what that experience was like for them, both for the kids from Kaukauna and the kids from King.
In the course of doing research, there was this theater teacher at King who had never heard of the exchange, but she heard about the play and decided she wanted her kids to do that play, so in November 2016, a multiethnic cast at Rufus King did In White America again 50 years later … And coming up in April we are going to be taking the cast from Rufus King High School up to Kaukauna to perform the play. They’ve been invited by Kaukauna High School to perform the play so they can see what students were involved in 50 years ago. It’s on April 25 and it will be open to the public.
Hopefully some of the people who saw it 50 years ago can come to the play and we can talk about what their impressions were then, and what they are now, and what they’ve learned from it. You know, I’ve learned through this process that you can do a lot of things and say a lot of things through theater that you may not be able to say in other venues. It’s a safe place for people to watch a story with which they’re unfamiliar, and then have a conversation about it after the show, and to ask questions and make comments that they may not have had any other opportunities to make any other place except the theater. It really is a way for people to develop understanding.