Starting Your Career in Broadcasting

Working On and Off the Air in Radio and Television

Chris Schneider

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781581158014
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts & Business

Starting Your Career in Broadcasting is the complete guide to breaking into this competitive field--and staying there. It's packed with advice from top personalities including Bob Costas, Chris Berman, Larry King, Jim Lampley, Bob Kingsley, Rene Syler, Troy Aikman, plus station managers and other broadcasting pros, all sharing stories of how they got their start in broadcasting. Often hilarious, sometimes moving, always insightful, these anecdotes offer first-hand guidance on making the right career choices. Chapters explore specific on-air and behind-the-scenes jobs; broadcasting schools and what they teach; what news and program directors seek in job applicants; tips for being effective on the air; how an aspiring broadcaster can buy airtime; weathering the ups and downs of a competitive industry; and much more.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

The Big Bang! How Top Radio
and Television Stars Got Their Start

“The dream” was Larry King’s first conscious thought. Charlie Tuna was inspired by a disc jockey in Nebraska. Bob Costas was energized by New York legends. Jim Lampley stumbled into broadcasting. It got Bob Kingsley through painful nights after falling ill with polio as a child. E.D. Hill first knew it would be her life’s purpose while doing a writing assignment in the sixth grade. It hit me while I was watching WKRP in Cincinnati.“It” is the dream, the desire, and the need to be on the air, whether it be radio or television. Every successful air personality had to start somewhere.Without fail, those beginnings were rife with embarrassment, mistakes, luck, and learning. Some were easier than others, many improbable, but all captivating.

LARRY KING: BORN TO BE IN BROADCASTING

I found out after my first few years in the business that I was not the only person who thought that being on the air was what he was born to do; other notable figures have had that same sensation, like CNN icon Larry King.“It was my earliest memory, to be a broadcaster. I used to point to the radio, they tell me, when I was four or five years old and try to imitate announcers, and that’s all I ever wanted to do.” Being on the air was never a question for Larry—it was a necessity. “I never wanted to do anything else. When other kids would say ‘I want to be a fireman or a cop,’ I never wanted to be anything but a broadcaster. After high school, I knocked around a bunch of odd jobs and, finally, at age twenty-two I went down to Miami, knocked on doors, and got a job.”

Larry’s first air-shift was on May 1, 1957. He invented the national radio talk show, as we know it today, hosting an overnight call-in show on the Mutual Radio Network for almost two decades. He has interviewed nearly every major personality on both radio and CNN’s Larry King Live.

So are there any surprises in the way his career has gone? “I always thought I’d be a sportscaster. Sports was my avocation, still is. It’s still the first thing I read in the newspaper everyday.”

What was the spark? What made Larry King need to be on the air? King admits,“I don’t know what it was, but I had a genuine attraction to radio and then to television when it came in. And now I’ve spent forty-nine years on radio and forty-six on television—I’ve always done both.”

CHRIS BERMAN

ESPN & ABC superstar personality Chris Berman had the itch to be on the air at an early age, too. When I asked him if he had always wanted to be in this business, he said,“Yes, I mean always. My mother and father tell me of times that I turned down the sound of hockey games on TV on Saturday night and did my own announcing.They would have to ask me to please close the door.

“When I was in high school, now this is the early seventies, believe it or not, we had this little screw-in-the-light-bulb campus radio station. So I announced the football games on Saturday. Now, who really listened? Well, on a nice day, uh, no one. If it was raining, some of the parents would sit in the cars and listen to a few minutes of the game. So I had a chance to do a little of it in high school. I knew this was what I wanted to do. I thought I was pretty good at it, considering I was seventeen.”

BOB KINGSLEY

Bob Kingsley has been the host of a couple of the world’s most listened-to programs, the American Country Countdown and now Bob Kingsley’s Country Top 40. His love for radio goes back to when he was a polio-stricken child: “That’s all I had was that radio there. I could move my arm, my hand, just enough to turn the dial, particularly during the evening. The soap opera stuff during the day I wasn’t a big fan of, but in the evening when the Green Hornet and the Fat Man and all those great old radio shows were on. I was—what, six or seven—and it stayed with me. To be able to be involved in it today, I still think it’s a marvelous medium.”

E.D. HILL

E.D. Hill co-hosts Fox News Channel’s Fox News Live every weekday morning and is the author of the inspirational book Going Places.¹ Her life has taken her from a junior high student in Hong Kong to a VJ (video jockey) for VH1 to the hallowed halls of Harvard University, among other places, but she has known since the sixth grade that she was destined to be on the air.

“I was given a writing assignment about a news event I had experienced, which was a police chase of drug smugglers on the China Sea. I was a little girl watching that, so I wrote about it. I got a good grade on my paper and it made me realize I wanted to be a journalist. I wasn’t quite sure what type of journalism I wanted to go into, but I knew I wanted to be a journalist.”

Once E.D. had caught the broadcasting bug, she started having strange thoughts. “When I was out fishing, I always dreamed of being a Babe Winkleman, you know, having my own fishing show. I thought, ‘Man that would be the life!’”

Fishing shows aside, it took E.D. quite a while to find out what kind of on air job she really wanted to pursue. “Through high school and college I kind of pared it down; I was a punk rock DJ, I wrote, I worked in radio,TV, film, and then I realized I wanted to be a TV reporter.”

CHARLIE TUNA

I was on staff with Los Angeles Morning Drive radio legend Charlie Tuna and longtime ABC, NBC, and HBO commentator Jim Lampley at 710-AM KMPC in Los Angeles when it was an all-sports station. Charlie now has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but his beginnings were a bit more humble. He got started by practicing at home, alone in his room, in Kearney, Nebraska, at the age of five. “I’d talk like I was introducing records and talking to people on the radio.” Charlie chuckles, remembering,“You sit in a little room all by yourself and make believe you have an audience, kind of like you do today.”

Tuna was inspired by listening to local disc jockey Jack Lewis.“This was 1949 and he started talking about things like UFOs and flying saucers which were just starting to get talked about. It was just fascinating to me. Then, when I was eleven years old, I had him on my paper route and I would tremble every time I had to go up to him to collect money. I could never speak. I couldn’t even look at the guy—he was it.”

Charlie Tuna got his first break as a DJ at a junior high sock hop.“The kids thought,‘Wow, he’s really good.’ I thought,‘Well, I’ve been practicing in my room at home for years.’ I wound up being the first guy they paid for doing that. They gave me twenty-five bucks a week, I guess, and all the concessions I wanted, candy or soda pop. From there, the kids were always encouraging me to go down and audition at the local radio station. I was very shy but my dad knew one of the chief engineers. He asked if I could get an audition, so I went down and cut a tape in their production studio. They gave me the standard, ‘don’t call us we’ll call you,’ and about six months later, they did.”

JIM LAMPLEY

Jim Lampley started “fiddling around with broadcasting” in college. “I definitely was not a kid who grew up knowing what he wanted to do, especially being a sportscaster. I actually got started in politics. I worked for a U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina when I finished undergraduate school, but when we lost the campaign I had to think of something else to do. I signed up for graduate school in mass communications.”

Jim was soon hired by ABC to do sideline reports during college football games, but only after he was first rejected for being too arrogant during a talent search that included a nationwide field of 432 candidates. The network was looking for a new, young face to put on their college football broadcasts and figured that looking at college students might be a good idea.

“My whole sportscasting career is an accident as the result of that talent hunt, which took place in 1974. I told a guy named Dick Ebersol, who happened to be Roone Arlidge’s personal assistant at the time, that they were absolutely crazy. That this was all a big ego trip for them and I hoped they had fun. On my screening form, someone wrote, ‘Arrogant, Abrasive, Alienated, Antagonistic.’ It infamously became known as the ‘Four A’s.’ Later in the hiring process ABC was having trouble finding someone they could be really confident about putting on the air. So, Roone Arlidge, remembering the abrasive but confident young man who had told them off, said, ‘Let me see him.’” The rest is history.

BOB COSTAS

Bob Costas has become an icon in the broadcasting business, working for HBO and NBC as a sportscaster and talk show host. Bob now anchors NBC’s Football Night In America, covers the Olympics, hosts shows on HBO, and fills in as a back up for Larry King on CNN.

Did he know he wanted to be on the air from an early age? “Yes. I think I first entertained thoughts of being a sports broadcaster when I was ten or eleven years old.” Growing up in New York, Bob was inspired by legends in the business,“Mel Allen, Red Barber, Jack Buck,Vin Scully, Jim McKay, Lindsey Nelson. I went to Syracuse because I had heard they had an excellent program, not just in journalism but in broadcasting. At that time, there weren’t that many high-profile universities that actually had a concentration in broadcasting, so I went there because of that reputation. You could work on the campus radio and television stations as an undergraduate so you got some hands-on experience. That was an important and useful first step to just start there.”

WILLIAMS, COURIC, GIBSON, CRONKITE, & KEILLOR

NBC Evening News anchor Brian Williams started his broadcasting career in little Pittsburg, Kansas, “doing everything but operating the transmitter,” at KOAM-TV. CBS’s Katie Couric started her career off the air, as a desk assistant for the ABC Bureau in Washington. She moved on to CNN to be an assignment editor and later a show producer before her meteoric rise to stardom. ABC’s Charles Gibson got his start in college radio at the University of Princeton.

CBS News legend Walter Cronkite worked in public relations, newspapers, and small Midwestern radio stations before joining United Press in 1939 to cover World War II. After joining CBS in 1950, one of Cronkite’s earliest jobs included working with a puppet named Charlemagne on the CBS Morning Show. Another legend, Garrison Keillor, started broadcasting at the University of Minnesota. After graduating, Keillor wrote for the New Yorker magazine before being inspired to create a widely reknowned live radio variety show.

That is how some of the greats in our business got their careers off the ground, so the next question is, how do you get your career in broadcasting started? We will start looking at that in chapter 2.

End Note

¹ Hill, E.D. Going Places. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.

Is Broadcasting Right for You?

In the radio and television business, there are about as many ways to get hired as there are to get fired—not quite, but close. When all is said and done, the ways to get started boil down to a basic six:

Get an on-air position in a small market.

Get a job off the air in a small, medium, or large market.

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