In addition to his role as the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson has been tabbed as host of WDET-101.9 FM’s Detroit Today talk show.

He begins the regular public radio hosting gig on March 16. The show, which tackles serious and occasionally irreverent Detroit issues, airs from 9 to 10 a.m. weekdays.

Wayne State University, which hold’s the station’s license and provides it free space, announced his hire today.

“I’m really excited to join WDET as host of Detroit Today,” Henderson said in a statement. “I've been a listener since I was a kid, and that listening will be key to bringing my brand of civil discourse and inquiry to the air with listeners all over the metro area and the state.”

The station has been searching for a permanent morning show host since Craig Fahle left his eponymously titled show on WDET after seven years in July to become director of public affairs and senior adviser for the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

Producer Laura Weber Davis has filled in as interim host since Fahle left, and Henderson joined her as co-host in recent months. He now assumes the full-time hosting duty while keeping his Freep role.

Henderson doesn’t have a full-year contract because of where the university’s budget calendar currently falls.

“Because of where we’re at in the Wayne State fiscal year, the current agreement is for 28 weeks and pays $30,800. We will move to annual contracts after that,” said Matt Lockwood, WSU’s director of communications.

Based on what WSU is paying him now, a 52-week contract would be $57,200.

Fahle was paid $100,000 annually at WDET (and is getting a similar salary at the land bank). He was also co-general manager and did a longer show.

WDET has a $3.6 million annual budget and 20 full-time staffers.

Henderson is widely praised as a Detroit thought leader and is increasingly sought for national talk shows such as Meet The Press.

“We are thrilled to welcome Stephen Henderson to the WDET team as host of Detroit Today,” said WDET General Manager Michelle Srbinovich in a statement. “A Detroit native and resident, Stephen is a trusted voice and a fantastic listener who recognizes the value in informing, engaging and connecting Detroiters around the issues that matter most to our community.”

When Fahle left, WDET’s goal was to have a new host hired within three to four months, Srbinovich told Crain’s at the time.

"We interviewed many candidates, but Stephen stood out. He is a trusted figure with an outstanding journalism background and a deep interest in having conversations with our listeners and the community at large. He shares Craig's ability to provide analysis and commentary on a range of issues that we are facing here in our region as well as a desire to find common ground, qualities that our listeners told us were important when we surveyed them last year," she's said in response tonight to questions emailed by Crain's.

Fahle’s show, which began under a different name in 2007, ranked 27th in the Detroit market in its morning time slot, averaging about 7,000 listeners among adults age 18-plus, according to Nielsen Audio data, and another 4,500 for a nighttime re-broadcast.

More recent data on the morning airtime post-Fahle wasn’t immediately available.

Radio industry observers said the strength of Fahle’s show was not in its numbers, but that it drew a dedicated audience of the city’s influential residents, along with politicians, civic figures, and others.

Srbinovich, a Crain’s “20 in their 20s” honoree in 2013, was co-manager at the station overseeing WDET’s business functions while Fahle was in charge of editorial direction.

“The Craig Fahle Show” aired 9-11 a.m. weekdays. It repeated in the weekday evenings.

The format was to interview community and political leaders, celebrities and take calls.

In its place, WDET resurrected an hour-long local issues show, called “Detroit Today,” that airs at 9 a.m. Mondays-Thursdays.

That’s what Henderson will helm for the station.

"The Craig Fahle Show was two hours long. We are starting with one agenda-setting hour, but our plan is to expand our local talk programming this year," Srbinovich said tonight.

Henderson's new job comes amid several other media obligations.

In October, the Free Press reorganized its newsroom oversight structure, and a memo outlining the changes from Editor and Publisher Paul Anger said Henderson would assume a “more active role in the newsroom” in addition to running the editorial page.

His specific additional duties were not spelled out in the memo.

Henderson also hosts a weekly talk show, “American Black Journal,” and co-hosts the weekly news wrap-up show “MiWeek.” They air on Detroit Public Television.

“So I thought about this quite a bit, and did the Monday/Wednesday thing as a trial to see 1) whether it was a decent fit and 2) whether it was too much of a time commitment,” he told Crain’s this evening via email. “I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the work, and the time isn’t too onerous. So when they asked whether I’d do it permanently, I said yes.”

He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize at the Free Press for commentary for “his columns on the financial crisis facing his hometown, written with passion and a stirring sense of place, sparing no one in their critique,” according to the Pulitzer citation.

Henderson said that being over-stretched is something he's weighed.

“I worry all the time about whether I’m over-stretching – and so does our publisher, Paul Anger, for the record,” he said. “But what interests me about the gig is how different this space is from the other things I do. At the Freep, I have tremendous control (as editorial page editor) over what I write and what the paper’s policy positions are, but I’m also somewhat bound by history and precedent and the specters of the people who came before me in this job. It’s also clearly an advocacy space, and is cabined by that imperative to some degree.”

Henderson shared some of this thoughts about what makes the radio show unique for him, and ideas for the future.

"With ‘Detroit Today,’ I have felt far more freedom, even in the few weeks I’ve been doing it, to branch out even further," he said. "In the first week, for instance, I suggested a segment with a University of Michigan linguistics professor about why the national ‘word of the year’ was a phrase; we jumped from there to a pretty interesting conversation about language ideology and the history of word usage.

"That same week I had (Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley) come in to talk about his series of columns about race in downtown Detroit, and we talked about the difference between the reaction he’s getting and what I might experience if I were writing the same thing – a conversation only he and I can really have.

"In the future, I’d love to build into the show segments that represent some of my broader interests – music, for instance. I’ve been a musician most my life and was a member of the Michigan Marching Band in college. There’s space here to deal more deeply and personally with my Detroit roots, and there’s an opportunity to expand the show’s reach into national issues."

Henderson, a Detroit native, joined the Freep in his current job in January 2009. He previously was a reporter, editorial writer and editor at The Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, where he covered the U.S. Supreme Court from 2003-2007, according to Henderson’s Pulitzer bio.

He won the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ 2001 prize for editorial writing.

Henderson graduated from University of Detroit Jesuit High School and the University of Michigan.