Radio Milwaukee Names Jordan Lee As Executive Director

For Jordan Lee, it’s all about the music. Plain and simple.

After serving in an interim role since January, Lee is taking over as the executive director of Radio Milwaukee (WYMS-88.9 FM) – the station’s third in a little more than three years.

“It’s back to basics,” he said. “Our mission is pretty clear. We use music to bring people together. We had some leadership that was trying to use other tools to do that. I’m just going to focus on music. That’s what we’re known for. That’s what we’re good at.”

Music has been at the core of Lee’s professional journey.

“I came from the Milwaukee music scene myself,” Lee told Milwaukee Magazine. “It’s inherently a part of where my vision goes. I’m taking a look at how we can improve the existing programs we have. I have no new programming initiatives at all right now. Probably won’t. But there’s a lot of room for improvement and a lot of opportunity to increase the impact in what we’re already doing. I feel we lost a little bit of time these past couple years by trying to do new things that quite frankly I didn’t hear people from Milwaukee asking for.”

Lee specifically pointed to Radio Milwaukee’s effort to move into news.

“That was a mistake,” Lee said. “I feel strongly that we need to be focused on storytelling in music. We have great news with stations like WUWM and WHAD. We recently partnered with Kristin Brey (WTMJ radio host and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist). Let’s let those people do that great work. We want to be focused on music.”

Lee replaces Maxie C. Jackson III, who took over the top leadership role at Radio Milwaukee in September 2022 after a stint a New England Public Media. Before Jackson was Kevin Sucher, who resigned in January 2022 after less than two years on the job.

A native of Kenosha, Lee said he “grew up culturally” in Milwaukee, performing as what he described as a First Stage Children’s Theater “brat” and then doing gigs as a musician at venues like The Rave and the old Globe East concert hall. He moved to the city at age 17 and currently resides in Bay View.

Lee most recently served as senior director of programming and has spent more than 15 years across two stints at Radio Milwaukee, including serving in various leadership roles.

Lee first joined Radio Milwaukee in 2008, a year after it launched, as a morning show host and, three years later, moved to assistant program director before becoming program director and station director. In January 2022, he joined Paragon, for which he had previously served as a consultant, in a full-time role. He returned to Radio Milwaukee in November 2023.

“I’ve known Jordan going back a number of years through the various roles he’s played in the organization,” Radio Milwaukee board chairman Al Orr said in an interview. “I once had an opportunity to see him speak at a donor event. His ability to articulate the mission, vision, promise and opportunity of Radio Milwaukee really struck me. He spoke from the heart without prepared notes. He displayed a natural leadership style that night. If you look at all the experiences he’s had as a convener in the community and his industry experience both with this organization and with his consulting stint, he’s developed this mix of credibility and commitment and natural leadership. That’s what we all felt was really important as we move into this important new period for Radio Milwaukee.”

Orr said that Lee rose above all other candidates when it came to selecting the next executive director, and he stood out in his interim role. Lee’s promotion to the executive director role will provide important stability for the organization, he added.

“He has a really unique way of leveraging relationships, and his path to this place has positioned him and equipped him in a way that none of the others who recently proceeded him were,” said Orr. “They didn’t have that mix. I feel like this is an opportunity for us to find some long-term leadership in the role.”

Lee’s on-the-job accomplishments at Radio Milwaukee include serving as a catalyst for creating and launching HYFIN, an urban alternative station dedicated to celebrating and supporting Black music and culture. In addition, he led strategic planning, supported the implementation of new and innovative programming and developed and implemented community engagement strategies.

“Music is a tool that is much older than any of the communication styles we have,” Lee said. “It’s also a tool that we can wield for good. That’s been our mission from the get-go.”

To that end, Lee stressed the importance of cultural advocacy through music. “That’s going to be the solution to some of our city’s consistent divisions,” he said. “People are really excited about sharing other cultural experiences. Look at what’s happening in food when people here have an opportunity to try something that is different.”

Among the initiatives that Lee plans to foster is “continuing to push the envelope on artists we feel are strongly representing the new sounds of what we want people to pay attention to.”

“We also really want to double down on our local efforts,” he said. “We’ve really been doing a lot of experiments throughout the years of trying to find impactful ways to create a better platform for Milwaukee musicians. There’s a lot of ground that we can still solidify in those spaces.”

Lee said he’s also actively restructuring the executive leadership of the organization to “ensure that we don’t lose track in the future.” He’s setting the framework to create a trio of leaders at the top of the organization with himself as executive director, Tarik Moody as senior director of strategy and innovation, and the hiring of a deputy executive director.

“Tarik is one of the few staff members who’s been around longer than me,” Lee said. “He really knows where we’ve been, and his reputation in Milwaukee as being a strategist and a technology innovator is rock-solid. He’s going to keep us aware of what’s going on with disruptions, technology changes and economic waves of change.”

The deputy executive director will serve as a chief financial officer of sorts, he said.

“That person is going to make sure that we’re making good financial decisions around programming and execution of ideas,” Lee explained. “With me focused on culture and mission, Tarik focused on technology and my new deputy focused on finance, those are really the main pillars that we’ve always expected the executive director to be good at, which has left me wondering if there are unicorns out there who are good at all of those things.”

The deputy executive director will have to possess certain attributes to join the Radio Milwaukee leadership team, Lee said. “We’re going to be really focused on someone who knows Milwaukee but specifically the nonprofit business sector in Milwaukee and understands how the funding ecosystems work around here.”

The restructuring was essential for Lee in agreeing to move into the executive director role.

“I came back because I wanted to invest my energy into this thing that I care so much about,” Lee said. “That’s the same reason I’m restructuring the leadership team. We really need to future-proof this company because to me, it’s a really important part of the fabric of Milwaukee.”

Along those lines, Radio Milwaukee also announced the promotions of two other key organizational leaders –  Element Everest-Blanks as program director of HYFIN and Kenny Perez as program director of 88Nine.

“These promotions represent the strength and stability of Radio Milwaukee’s leadership, as well as our dedication to reflecting the diversity and pride of our city,” Lee said. “It’s been since day one that we’ve wanted to be a rainbow coalition of culture and sound. We’ve really wanted to be a place where you think you only like one thing, but then you come over here and you learn that you like a lot of things. You just need to have a chance to get exposed to them.”

Once a deputy executive director is in place, Lee wants to grow Radio Milwaukee’s staff. “We really want to do more by investing more in what we’re doing.”