Talking With Due South Hosts Jeff Tiberii and Leoneda Inge

In the month since Due South debuted on WUNC, episodes of the new radio program have included an interview with NC Senate leader Phil Berger, a segment on Halloween confections at area bakeries, and a discussion about a local effort to center Indigenous stories in college courses. This should tell you something about the capaciousness of the show—and the breadth of experience of the people behind it.

Co-hosted by veteran WUNC reporters Jeff Tiberii and Leoneda Inge, Due South provides the sort of regional radio coverage that has been absent from the station since 2020, when The State of Things, a daily program that covered North Carolina topics for more than a decade, was discontinued. 

But Due South isn’t a dupe of its predecessor. For one thing, the show, which airs daily at 10 a.m., isn’t live; segments are recorded days or sometimes even months in advance, making for more deep dives and less spur-of-the-moment coverage. And as the name suggests, Due South isn’t confined to the state of North Carolina. The show offers expansive coverage from across the American South and affords as much attention to culture as it does politics. 

As co-hosts, Inge, who has reported on race and southern culture at WUNC since 2002, and Tiberii, who spent eight years as the capitol bureau chief for North Carolina Public Radio, play to their strengths. The end result is a broadcast that’s both curated and colloquial, niche and contextualized. It has that great NPR quality where you can tune in at any point and almost immediately catch on to what’s being discussed.

During Due South’s third week on the air, the INDY sat down with Tiberii and Inge to discuss the show’s inception and trajectory.

INDY: How did Due South come to be?

JEFF Tiberii: After The State of Things was gone, I said to the bosses, “What’s the plan?” We’ve got to have a daily show. At a station of this size, in an area of this caliber, with so many universities and so much growth, being the political state that it is, being the culturally rich place that it is—we have to have a daily show.

I think both Leoneda and I would agree that we work for our listeners. That’s the guiding star for us. And our listeners haven’t had a show for years. So I’m very excited that it’s finally here. There are lots of stories and segments and conversations that we want to get to.

Both of you have been WUNC reporters for a long time. How does your past experience inform Due South? I’m curious whether this show feels like a culmination of your previous work, or an entirely new venture, or a little of both. 

JEFF:It’s a little bit of both. There’s nothing new about sitting down across from someone important, or someone who has a level of familiarity with our audience, and chatting with them. But it’s a new endeavor in that a lot more people are listening to it now. Also, my reflexive nature is to go to elected officials to get answers to questions, but with Leoneda, there’s a difference—Leoneda holds court. Wherever she goes, it just happens organically. Leoneda knows everyone. 

Leoneda inge: Some radio hosts are just talking-head hosts: people prepare everything for them, and they present it. As reporters, we never had that luxury. We’ve had to meet as many people as possible. So we have a repertoire of people in every corner. 

My experience working for a local publication has been that even though our focus is the Triangle, there are sometimes really glaring national or international news items that it feels like we need to cover in some way. Where does Due South fall on that? Do you have any interest—or any feeling of obligation—to cover broader news topics through a Southern lens? 

Jeff: I would say yes. We’re trying to zag a little bit, and we want people to zig. For one thing, we know that if there’s something playing out in the national or international news ecosystem—like, if the president is impeached—it’s gonna be on WUNC’s airwaves throughout the day. We know that our listeners are going to be covered. So then it becomes this question of, do we address certain topics? And if we do, how do we go about it in a way that isn’t repetitive? How do we address them with a local tilt, a local slant?

Obviously, the biggest one right now is this awful calamity in the Middle East, which we have not spent a whole lot of time on yet. I think it’s something that we’ll touch on in the Friday news roundups. The roundups are by no means a catchall, but they are a place where we can drop things in—be it the Israel-Hamas war, or something environmental, something economic—in a two- or three-minute window.

Whereas other days of the week, our segment lengths are 12 minutes, 20 minutes, and 17 minutes. Sometimes the time windows are limiting in the sense of, like, “Oh, there’s this big thing going on. How are we going to talk about that for 12 minutes without it feeling out of place?”

Leoneda: We’ve heard that people welcome a different take on content at the time of day that Due South airs. At that point in the morning, listeners have been getting it hard from the BBC. They’ve been hearing them talk about war for an hour. 

Our goal is to discuss things you didn’t even know you wanted to hear. Even something like a simple interview about having the fall leaves turn: “Have they turned in your area yet, or is it too late?” People plan their weddings around those leaves. Those leaves can be a big economic boost for communities. Stories like that you don’t usually hear. 

The first Due South episode I heard was the “What’s at stake in the municipal elections?” one, which, topic-wise, was sort of what I expected to hear when I turned on NPR in the morning—then, two days later, I turned the radio on again and heard y’all doing a wide-ranging interview with Paula Poundstone. I’m not used to hearing a daily radio show that has so much variety. The show reminds me of the INDY in some ways, in that you give equal weight to politics and culture. 

Jeff: One of the ways I’ve thought about the show is reliable, not predictable. News fatigue is real. We want people to learn. We want people to laugh. When I listen to the show, there’s moments where I will smile, and that’s OK. You’re not breaking the rules by smiling if you’re listening to the radio or if you’re listening to news. News is by no means myopic. We’re trying to cover a large range of topics, and the through line is the South. The through line is interesting people and things you might not know about, or might not know enough about.

Leoneda: I’m a real stickler about that. I don’t want a topic to have been heard too many times on other programs at all. There is no way to run out of stories. There is no way to run out of people to talk to. I want to be even more of a stickler—

Jeff: She’s a stickler, if you can’t tell.

Leoneda: No, I mean, I’m just saying I want it to be so clear and passionate that people in New York are jealous. I brought up the model of Garden & Gun magazine. When Garden & Gun first started, they were trying to be a Southern literary magazine to challenge The New Yorker. But then it just built into its own big phenom. They cover the South hard. The New Yorker is probably now sometimes scared to do some stories or interview some people because Garden & Gun has so clearly owned the Southern region.

So that’s kind of how I see our show. We’re one of the biggest stations in the whole South, period. So we should just hold that and own it. Own where you are. W 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].

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