If you start your day with Alex Crowe, there’s a good chance he started the day before you did.
“Usually it’s about 3 in the morning,” Alex says, that he gets up to head to the studio to host Morning Edition and the “Wisconsin Today: Morning News” podcast.
Those early mornings are nothing new for Alex. Early morning swim team practices got him used to the pre-dawn hours. And swimming set him on a course to make a splash in the radio world.
Alex went to the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in part to join the swim team, and that’s where he developed his love for radio at WRST, the campus student radio station (and WPR affiliate). He says he did sports talk radio there, “because everybody goes to their local college radio station for national sports talk!” He also did play-by-play for football, basketball, volleyball and other sports.
That college experience led to a radio career, from country music in rural South Dakota to news in Milwaukee — and in Fall of 2022, he joined Wisconsin Public Radio.
Alex says he enjoys “getting to reach every corner of the state” on Morning Edition and the podcast, and he appreciates the depth of public radio coverage. “I love the ability to go more in depth than just a flat news headline piece.”
Off the air:
Alex is married (he met his wife at UW-Oshkosh) with a 15 month-old kid.
When it comes to parenting, he says “I’m learning everything as I go.”
Between his work and parenting schedule, he tries to fit in some runs and other exercise — “You know how it is when you’re sitting behind a computer screen for X amount of hours hosting a radio show, you feel like you gotta get out and move afterwards.”
In his limited spare time, he enjoys reading Stephen King — “that’s pretty much just straight from my dad, when I was little he always read it” — and keeping up with sports.
If he got to go back and do play-by-play for a sport, football would be Alex’s first choice.
– Rob Ferrett, co-host of “Wisconsin Today”