Nikki Woods: Who Decides Which Stories Matter

I spent nearly two decades in national radio, most of it as executive producer of The Tom Joyner Morning Show — a program that went out daily to roughly eight million listeners across more than a hundred markets. People assume the job is logistics. Guests, timing, keeping the show on the rails.

It is, partly. But underneath the logistics is a series of judgments, made fast and made constantly. What makes the show. What gets cut. Whose story deserves ten minutes and whose gets thirty seconds. Which caller goes on air. Which subject we come back to tomorrow and which one we quietly let go.

Nobody outside the building sees those decisions. The audience hears a finished thing that feels like it simply happened.

What made that show unusual

Black listeners in America have long received their stories through institutions that were not built with them at the center. Somebody else decides what is newsworthy, what is universal, what a general audience will understand — and Black stories arrive already filtered through that judgment.

What made the Joyner show different was not only its reach. It was that the people making those daily calls were making them for a Black audience rather than waiting for somebody else to decide what Black people should care about.

That is editorial sovereignty, and once you have worked inside it, you notice its absence everywhere else.

Publishing turned out to be the same system

Different building, different gatekeepers, identical question. Is this story universal enough. Is it commercial enough. Will readers understand it without more explanation. Every one of those is a judgment about whose experience counts as the default, dressed up as a market observation. The same goes for the standards themselves: who decides what good writing is.

A Caribbean novel gets asked to explain itself in ways an American one never is. A book set in a Jamaican parish is asked whether readers will follow. A book set in a Connecticut suburb is not.

That question is what eventually became Maroon House Press. The founding story has its own essay: why I started the press. This one is about the judgment itself, and where I first learned to see it.

Jamaica came first

Both of those come after something else. Before the radio career, I was in Portland Parish helping build a computer lab in a school at New Eden, high in the Blue Mountains, in the district my mother’s family is from. I was twenty. I thought I was there to finish a project.

What that year actually taught me was about attention — who gets it, who does not, and how much of what happens to people never gets written down at all. I have written about that year separately.

Then two decades of a career spent deciding what got amplified. And now a press, a genealogy practice, and a body of research about a village the floods emptied between 1932 and 1943.

The question underneath all of it

What happens to the people whose stories were not considered important enough to preserve?

That is the question in the archive work, and it is a literal one. Jamaican civil registration begins in 1878. Before that there are parish registers, and before those there are the compensation records, which counted people as property because property was what the record was built to track. My great-grandmother exists to the state because she was born three years after registration started. Three years earlier and she would be invisible.

It is the same question in the fiction. Swift River is a novel about women who stand in cold November water and speak the names of the drowned, because the dead who are not witnessed do not stay put. That is not a metaphor I reached for. It is the problem, stated in the terms the place itself uses.

And it is the same question I was answering every morning in a radio studio, without knowing yet that it was the only question I had.

What the studio taught me to ask

Every record has a producer. A morning show does. A publisher’s list does. A parish register does. Before I trust any of them, I ask the question I learned in that studio: who made the call, and who were they making it for?

Frequently asked questions

Who is Nikki Woods?

Nikki Woods is the founder and publisher of Maroon House Press. She spent nearly two decades in national radio, most of it as executive producer of The Tom Joyner Morning Show.

What did Nikki Woods do on The Tom Joyner Morning Show?

She was executive producer, making the daily editorial calls for a program that reached roughly eight million listeners across more than a hundred markets.

What does producing radio have to do with publishing?

Both run on editorial judgment. Somebody decides what makes the show and what makes the list, and those decisions shape whose stories get heard and preserved.