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Post by nicmart on Aug 20, 2013 11:08:02 GMT -5
A weekend DJ outranked the news director? Hmmmmm. Sounds bad. The news director wasn't consulted, but he was clueless and would probably have done deferred to the threat from Bluegrass Field.
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Post by nicmart on Jan 9, 2013 15:02:18 GMT -5
I was hired as a newser by Karolyn Kell just after the general election in 1977. She was almost immediately fired, and management replaced her with the press flack for the police department, who had zero experience as a news director. I had been covering a controversy regarding the then Citizen's Advocate (who was Black), whose powers some council members wanted to trim. When I prepared to go to the decisive meeting about the CA, the new director said I couldn't cover it. As I pleaded my case he said, "I don't care what that [racist slur] has to say." I went anyway.
One slow weekend I was cruising around in the news car with a friend, sharing some weed. As we went by the airport I noticed that a small plane had crashed, and I tried to get the airport to respond. As I remember, someone gave me the details but senior BG Field management didn't want it to get out, so they called the DJ on duty and threatened to never cooperate with WVLK again if the story ran, and the DJ canned my piece. I called it into AP and it ran as the lead story around the state for the entire weekend. Everywhere except WVLK. If it hadn't been for spliff I wouldn't have gotten that story.
Sometime that winter I was in the studio with one of the major name jocks and we shared his primo ganja. It was more than a little embarrassing when I broke down laughing during the part of my segment dealing with highway fatalities. I guess nobody was listening because there were no complaints.
A few months later I was in the studio with the same jock, and a part of my news blab dealt with people announcing their candidacies for political offices. The jock told me I should run for mayor, and that he would be my campaign manager. Shortly thereafter I quit WVLK, announced for mayor, and never heard from that DJ again.
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