As a child, Tim Peterson devoured the monthly Disney Adventures Magazine. By the time he was in high school, he was reading his dad’s Car & Driver magazine cover-to-cover and regularly toting the Style section of The Washington Post to school in northern Virginia. He got his first byline on the pages of his school paper The Orange Peal.
From there, a future in feature writing seemed a likely career path. But while at Northwestern University, where Tim earned a degree in political science and cultural-linguistic anthropology, an interest in radio was piqued at the school’s station WNUR.
After graduating, he saw the inner workings of Chicago’s WFMT studio through a connection there. He developed a love of audio-rich pieces he listened to through his headphones on long train rides to work while living south of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. And he learned how to make that audio in Maine while pursuing a certificate from the Salt Institute for Documentary Storytelling.
Features writing is still part of the impressive portfolio of stories he’s produced for newspapers, WPR and NPR, including UW-Madison’s Camp Randall and the Civil War and Mount Horeb as the “Troll Capital of the World.”
He started at WPR in 2019 as a producer of “Central Time” and has since become second-in-command of “Wisconsin Today” as its managing producer.
“I was initially excited about feature writing … but working for NPR and WPR I really do believe that we offer something special and each of us working here brings a different perspective and background, and that’s part of the beauty of it being a public service,” he said.
When he’s not at work, Tim has become a sort of craftsman of the cardboard and duct tape variety, under the direction of his 4-year-old son. A recent project was a booster pack made out of old shampoo bottles.
