Sue Schardt

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Sue Schardt is an American media specialist and musician with a career in public broadcasting. She heads Margin Media, LLC, and produces a weekly radio program, In The Margin of the Other on MIT’s radio station WMBR. In 2018, In The Margin of the Other was featured in One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, an exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Schardt's first film, Nothing in the Way of Beauty, was released in 2024. A private premiere screening in Philadelphia featured a musical set with Marshall Allen and Kash Killion of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Early life and education

Schardt was raised in Syracuse, NY. Her undergraduate years were spent as a music education major at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, where she shared a dorm room with soprano Renée Fleming.

Career in radio

Schardt began her radio career as the morning show director and music librarian at WBUR, one of Boston’s flagship public radio stations, before going on to work under the mentorship of philanthropist Norman Knight at Knight Quality Stations. Schardt went on to work at the Christian Science Monitor, overseeing an effort to grow Monitor Radio's public radio distribution; over her tenure, Monitor Radio expanded to reach the largest audience ever achieved by the Christian Science Monitor.

In 1998, Schardt launched her first independent organization, SchardtMEDIA, to focus on international broadcasting and select public radio projects. With London-based World Radio Network, she provided the strategic design and launch strategy for NPR’s first overnight service, WRN from NPR. In 2004, Schardt partnered with stations and funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to conduct a new benchmark study, Mapping Public Radio’s Independent Landscape. Schardt also worked with Koahnic Broadcast Corporation to design and launch Native Voice One, a network joining reservation stations across the US and Alaska. She was a long-time strategist for From the Top and public radio stations across the United States. In 2017, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters recognized Schardt with the Michael Bader Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to public radio.

In 2007, Schardt assumed leadership of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. In this role, she led efforts to instigate innovation and expansion of talent-led, mission-focused media across the U.S. Schardt went on to serve as the founding executive producer and creator of Localore, a national initiative directing multimedia talent to explore new approaches to make stories ‘with and for the people,” with a goal of enhancing the experience and understanding of diversity in America today. AIR published three reports from the field to review the impact and extent of the three rounds of these national productions: Spreading the Zing: Reimagining Public Media through Makers’ Quest 2.0, What’s Outside? Public Media 2014, and Break Form: Making Stories With and for the People.

Schardt has written and presented on media-technology in the U.S and abroad, including at the 2017 3D Journalism Conference in Moscow, the Australian Centre for Moving Image’s Co-Creative Communities forum, NEA’s National Council meeting, the European Radio Features “think tank” in Leipzig, and the FCC’s Future of Media in the Digital Age. In 2015, Schardt served as a delegate to the National Public Broadcasting Corporation of Ukraine. Schardt has served on the NPR Board’s Distribution and Interconnect Committee, and as an advisor to Native Voice One. Since 2014, she has been a contributor to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism's “Predictions for Journalism” series.

References

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