With Lois Reitzes retiring from 90.1/WABE-FM after a whopping 46 years at the station, station management has announced a replacement show featuring Emmy-nominated writer Jon Goode and longtime producer Kim Drobes.
The show, dubbed “The City Lights Collective,” will debut Monday, July 7, soon after Reitzes’ official retirement in late June. It will air at 1 p.m. on weekdays, the same time slot currently held by Reitzes’ arts show “City Lights with Lois Reitzes,” which debuted a decade ago when WABE dropped classical music from its main feed.
Drobes spent 19 years working with Atlanta consumer advocate Clark Howard on his former syndicated radio show before joining WABE in 2021 as a producer of “City Lights.”
Goode is a poet, playwright and author. A former accountant, he began creating poetry after a colleague convinced him to show up at a poetry event at the once popular Yin Yang Music Cafe. He has since performed on HBO’s “Def Poetry,” TV One’s “Verses & Flow” and BET’s “Lyric Café.” He has also created content for networks such as Nickelodeon and CNN.
“At the center of everything is storytelling,” Goode said in an interview Monday with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “whether you’re writing a commercial or a poem or doing a piece for ‘City Lights.’”
He believes “Atlanta is an ever-evolving thing. I want to show Atlanta to itself … It’s a chance to give the gift of Atlanta back to Atlanta.”
Once Reitzes announced her departure, Drobes pitched her bosses on the “collective” show concept with Goode, and to her surprise, they said yes.
The revamped “City Lights Collective,” she said, will take the word “collective” to heart.
Credit: WABE
Credit: WABE
While Reitzes often devoted a good portion of her hour to a single interview with an artist or creative, Drobes and Goode will air multiple audio pieces from different people around the community. Anticipated contributors, she said, include Shane Harrison, who previously worked for the AJC and now runs ArtsATL; local writer and playwright Kelundra Smith; and Rough Draft Atlanta editor-in-chief Beth McKibben.
“It’ll be more like ‘All Things Considered,’” Drobes said. “We’ll have more stories per hour. We’ll continue to do interviews, but they won’t go longer than 15 minutes.”
Goode said “this show will mix in different voices and different points of view from multiple races and age groups in Atlanta.”
They plan to do more pieces out in the field beyond one-on-one interviews and actively encourage listeners to attend more plays, concerts and art exhibits.
Drobes thinks people “are looking for more diverse content, more eclectic content. And to be honest, people’s attention spans have gone down a little bit.”
The reality is WABE did not have a singular personality that could effectively replace Reitzes.
“We thought about cloning her, but that didn’t seem to work,” joked Goode. “This is ‘City Lights,’ not ‘Black Mirror.’”
Credit: Rodney Ho/rho@ajc.com
Credit: Rodney Ho/rho@ajc.com
Reitzes, in fact, isn’t entirely disappearing. She will contribute to the show when she wants to.
“She has a permanent green light,” Drobes said. “She loves to read, and we love her author interviews. My guess is that will be the first call I get.”
Reitzes, 71, decided to step down in early February. She joined the station during the Carter administration, focused on classical music, her long and abiding love.
“It’s hard to think of milestones in my life that haven’t taken place while I’ve been with WABE,” she told the AJC in March. “I started when I was in my 20s, and the job has been intrinsically linked in the best ways with my life ever since. It’s a major part of my identity.”
Drobes, who worked as Reitzes’ producer for several years, said she was shocked when Reitzes made the announcement a few weeks ago.
“We had an internal joke that I would retire before she did,” Drobes said.
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