Broadcast
Beginning my career in television, I started working with FOX 13 St. George, a small affiliate station in southern Utah. This allowed me to learn the fundamentals of broadcast television, including being my own engineer at times and keeping the station on the air, and after a few months of internship experience, I was given the freedom to edit and produce commercials unsupervised. The lessons I learned while at FOX 13 were foundational and continue to influence me today. I moved from Utah to Arizona to work for a Warner Brothers affiliate and eventually its sister station, an NBC affiliate in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Working in Commercial Production had been part of my life for four years by then, but I was searching for a new challenge. In addition to my production responsibilities, the TV2 news team offered me various opportunities to develop new skills, such as news editing, new photography, technical directing, and audio engineering. This led me to jumping markets and ending up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, working for FOX 25 as the prime time news audio engineer.
After working with FOX 25, I left broadcast and moved to agency work along with industrial media production for eight years, but returned to broadcast with a small UPN affiliate just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. My role of Production Manager at UPN TV2, producing "The Morning Show" with its founder and station manager, allowed me to improve the quality of the station's locally produced shows and news broadcasts. Redesigning the graphic packages and reorganizing the work flow of the editors and producers helped transformed "The Morning Show" into the most-watched locally produced show in the region. Upon leaving the UPN affiliate, I became Station Manager at Bullhead City TV4, a cable access television station that broadcasts city meetings and also produced four highly watched topical programs.
While at Bullhead City TV4, I again used the same techniques that were successful at UPN TV2 to improve the production quality of all four shows. I oversaw a complete transformation of the studio, which included the rebuilding of sets, purchasing of new equipment and engineering the studio's audio, video, and lighting capacities. In addition, the existing high school internship program needed to be revamped. What were languishing students waiting to have hands-on broadcast experience soon became responsible, skilled interns. Under my direction, they gained real-life knowledge and experience that they used later on in life in their broadcast careers. Being the Station Manager of TV4 was truly one of the most rewarding positions of my life.
