Kristy Duncan
What year did you graduate and what was your degree?
I graduated in 1991 with a journalism degree with a broadcasting concentration
What was your position at KCPR?
I was a DJ and also a news director.
I started at KCPR in ’89. I started off at KCPR working in the newsroom. Then as a DJ, I did both a regular format show and I did a special program show called “Octopuses Garden,” which was Beatles and Beatles related. It was either solo stuff, but also covers, which was a little unusual at the time because it wasn’t a regular college alternative. But, I played a thirteen-part “Eleanor Rigby” Cover by a band called Screaming Broccoli so that qualified. I was also on the exec board as news director. For that, I was also teaching essentially a one-hour news broadcast course that was tied to the station and helped run the news.
What was your favorite part about working for KCPR?
I’m a huge music junkie. Even if it hadn’t ended up being news director, I would have loved doing it even just as a DJ. All of my closest friends today are still people from KCPR. The camaraderie, the community that was there around the station, being involved in music, being involved in radio, and also because it was student-run, we had very little interaction or input from any of the faculty. It was just a great experience because you had to do everything yourself – whether it was production or promotion, planning or figuring out what was going on air. It was just the whole thing. It’s hard to say just one.
Who do you work for and what is your position?
I work for Adobe. I’m a group product manager in an area that’s part of their Adobe Experience platform, which is the digital experience side of Adobe. I was working at a talk radio station while I was finishing up school, and the owner ended up switching it all to be on satellite feed. That was the first big change that was going on in the radio industry at that time. I ended up getting a job as a writer and that kind of morphed into early interactive multimedia web, so my career ended up taking a turn.
How did, if at all, KCPR help or prepare you for your career trajectory?
It helped a lot, even the first job that I got out of college where I was working as a technical writer and into multimedia web. As a writer, knowing how to put together a production line and getting information out in a clear way and learn quickly about something that isn’t my area of expertise, that all fell back to journalism training, really from KCPR.
In interactive media, because I’ve done some production at KCPR, scheduling, working with teams, leading teams, from the news director standpoint, that was all general communications, that was all skills that I started to fall back on and build upon when I first started making a career shift.
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