Mike Kiniry
Producermkiniry@wgcu.org
Mike Kiniry is producer of Gulf Coast Live, and co-creator and host of the WGCU podcast Three Song Stories: Biography Through Music. He first joined the WGCU team in the summer of 2003 as an intern while studying Communication at Florida Gulf Coast University.
He became the first producer of Gulf Coast Live when the show launched in 2004, and also worked as the host of All Things Considered from 2004 to 2006, and the host of Morning Edition from 2006 to 2011. He then left public radio to work as PR Director for the Alliance for the Arts for five years, and was then Principled Communicator at the election integrity company Free & Fair for a year before returning to WGCU in October, 2017.
In the past Mike has been a bartender and cook at Liquid Café in downtown Fort Myers, a golf club fixer/seller at the Broken Niblick Golf Shop in Fort Myers, and a bookseller at Ives Book Shop in Fort Myers. He lives near downtown Fort Myers with his daughter, and their dog and two cats.
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Miami-based photographer and author Kirsten Hines spends her life immersed in the natural world. She started off as a wildlife biologist but found herself more interested in talking pictures of the natural world than doing science with it. She has now published nine books in all, the latest of which is “Birds of Florida.” It’s a guidebook featuring 310 birds you can find in Florida, with photographs she took and brief descriptions she wrote that provide insight into the various species, and tips on where to find them. -
It’s impossible to point to an exact moment or song when what became known as Rock n’ Roll emerged, but it happened in the early to mid-1950s in the United States and was a fusion of genres including rhythm and blues, gospel, and country music. Dr. Clay Motley received his PhD in the history of American Literature but over time found himself drawn to music and its history, particularly Blues and early Rock n’ Roll. Last week he gave a talk at FGCU on the ‘The History of Rock n’ Roll’ so we brought him by the studio to chat about music and how this artform that took over the world came to be. -
Stuart Eizenstat met Jimmy Carter when he was running for Governor of Georgia in 1970 and remained a central figure of Carter’s team until he left the White House in 1980. During President Carter’s administration Eizenstat served as Carter’s Chief Domestic Policy Adviser, and throughout his career and life Ambassador Eizenstat remained a close advisor to President Carter. We speak with him about his career in politics and the changes he's witnessed over the decades, and about his longtime colleague and friend Jimmy Carter. -
How different news stories are presented by various news sources is rarely uniform. Different news outlets have different takes, or present different aspects of a story or highlight different facts about it, and this shapes what consumers of that news take away from the story. Add the internet and social media algorithms and you wind up with what are referred to as "filter bubbles" where, depending on which news sources you pay attention to, different people develop fundamentally different understandings of the same events or stories. We learn about AllSides Technologies, whose team uses various methods to estimate the perceived political bias of news outlets and then presents different versions of similar news stories from sources they’ve rated as being on the political right, left, or center, with a mission to show readers news outside their filter bubble and illustrate media bias. -
The 2024 nesting season is being described as "steady" even though several storms disrupted hatching success. Southwest Florida’s beaches faced multiple wash-over events, including Tropical Storms Debbie & Francine, and Hurricanes Helene & Milton. On Keewaydin Island in Collier County approximately 43% of nests were lost to impacts from these storms. Overall, there were 425 nests on the island (almost all loggerhead turtles) and about 242 of them were successful. Monitors from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida estimate that 14,975 hatchlings made it to the Gulf from nests just on Keewaydin Island. We talk with someone who has been keeping tabs on sea turtles in southwest Florida for decades. -
The three thousand sheriffs in this country wield a tremendous amount of power, have little accountability, and are difficult to remove from office. The Highest Law in the Land explores more about this seemingly untouchable office. -
In January of 1742, while sailing around waters south of Florida in search of Spanish vessels to "sink, burn or destroy" the British Royal Navy’s HMS Tyger ran aground at Garden Key in what’s now Dry Tortugas National Park. What unfolded after the Tyger ran aground at Garden Key is a fascinating narrative that is compiled in a new paper published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology titled “Hunting HMS Tyger, 1742: Identifying a Ship-of-the-Line in Dry Tortugas National Park” co-authored by Andrew Van Slyke & Joshua Marano. To get a sense of the Tyger and its crew's story, and the archeological efforts that go into this kind of identification, we talk with the team lead for the HMS Tyger identification effort. -
Naples resident Joanne Huskey lived abroad for decades as part of a diplomatic family – her husband Jim was a U.S. Foreign Service officer for almost 30 years. And their time overseas intersected with some historic events: they were in China when the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in 1989; and they were in Nairobi, Kenya when the U.S. Embassy there was bombed in 1998. Throughout her time abroad, her efforts were always aimed at "Promoting intercultural understanding and education." She joins us to talk about her life promoting intercultural understanding and the need for more of it in today’s world. -
According to 2024 data from the American Medical Association, around 40% of physicians surveyed indicated they were likely to reduce their clinical hours in the next year. One in 5 physicians say they intend to leave the profession entirely within the next two years, with nearly 28% of doctors surveyed reporting dissatisfaction with their current healthcare jobs. Our guest left direct patient care behind in 2022 after practicing as a Gynecologic Oncology surgeon for just four years. Dr. Wilbur then embarked on a project to conduct a series of one-on-one interviews with doctors like herself who had either recently left practice, or were strongly considering doing so, to shine light on this growing trend and what factors were driving it. We talk with her about her new book that came out of those conversations, “The Doctor is No Longer In: Conversations with U.S. physicians.” -
Research shows that suppressing melatonin production through excessive night lighting, especially blue light, leads health effects including an increase in certain endocrine-related carcinomas. It is now well known that circadian disturbance causes a 20–30% increase in breast cancer rates, and a similar increase in prostate cancers. We discuss the nexus between light pollution and human health, the environment, and public safety with part-time Naples resident, Dr. Mario Motta.
