Glenn Geller has come a long way, in every way, since he set out two decades ago from sleepy northwest Indiana for Los Angeles. At one point, he was pulled over for speeding his little Ford Escort, with no AC or radio, through the Arizona desert. Geller came clean to the cop—he was headed for L.A. to make a new start, and he was flat broke. He got off with a warning.

The SoCal sun has shone on him ever since. In September, Geller, with CBS since 2001, was named the network’s entertainment president, succeeding Nina Tassler. The promotion is still sinking in. “It’s so amazing in this business that you can come here with literally nothing,” Geller says, “and really end up with something.”

Geller’s promotion may have prompted a chorus of “Who?” around Hollywood. But Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO, says it surprised no one at the network. “I’m very impressed by Glenn’s knowledge of the business, his taste, his character, and his stubbornness to fight for what he believes in,” says Moonves. “He’s not afraid to stand up to me, which I appreciate, as much as people might think otherwise.”

California Dreaming

The genial Geller had a typical childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, where he participated in sandlot sports and his school’s marching band. He describes the Calumet Region as something of a No Man’s Land—not quite Chicago, but not very Indiana either.

After getting his master’s at Northwestern, Geller told his family he was heading to L.A. His folks asked if he was serious. When Geller said he was, his father announced they would drive out in his truck, with the younger Geller’s Escort in tow.

“I really loved that journey,” Geller recalls. “I got to know my father in a different way. I asked him a lot of questions I probably would not have gotten to ask.” The one negative was an accident in Texas, which meant Dad could no longer tow the Escort.

After arriving, Geller reached out to every Northwestern grad he could and found work as an assistant in Fred Silverman’s production shop. Silverman, who had held top posts at multiple major networks, including president of NBC, recalls Geller as ambitious. “You can tell in a second if someone is bright, alert and inquisitive,” Silverman says. “Glenn was all three.”

Reading scripts and assisting a TV legend, Geller got a good look at how hits were made. “The real lesson was, you have to go with your gut,” he says. “Fred had a real strong opinion about what he thought would work.”

Geller moved to 20th Century Fox Television, where he was dubbed “Mr. CBS” by colleagues when a pair of his projects, Judging Amy and The Education of Max Bickford, aired on the rival network. So it was fitting that he soon landed at CBS. Geller toiled in current programming at both the network and the studio, giving him a keen perspective on the business.

Being an entertainment division president these days is much different than it was even five years ago, with OTT platforms not only competitors but buyers of network fare as well. Moonves says Geller has proven adept at reading the new landscape. “It became evident that this guy has the mind of a network entertainment president,” says Moonves.

When he’s not working, Geller and his husband, Jim, sing in a gay/lesbian chorus and remodel their L.A. home. “I spend my weekends at Lowe’s, doing home improvements,” he says. “Like a lot of America.”

Geller has a big rebuild in front of him at CBS. He sees promise in rookie shows including Limitless and Life in Pieces and wonders why some of the net’s veteran programs, such as Elementary, do not get the buzz of OTT series.

But he’ll take broadcast’s reach over buzz any day. “People welcome us into their living rooms,” Geller says. “They want to watch the good guys beat the bad guys. They want to laugh really hard. That’s what makes this the best game in town.”

At 16, Fritz Coleman had a “religious experience.” Seeing George Carlin at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Devon, Pa. in 1964 transformed his life.

“I was completely smitten by watching this man control the emotions of 3,000 people with just a mic and his twisted thoughts,” Coleman says. “It was the most amazing night of my life. I thought, ‘I’d love to try that.’”

Even before then, Coleman had long wanted to be on TV. Growing up an only child in Philadelphia, he enjoyed being the center of attention among adults and could always make them laugh. His heroes were Johnny Carson and Bob Hope.

“I always wanted to be inside that box, but I hadn’t finalized what form to take,” Coleman says. It ended up being weather, of all things. Coleman, 67, has spent over 30 years merging his stand-up skills, timing, spontaneity and affable personality as NBC4 Los Angeles’ weathercaster.

Not that TV seemed attainable for Coleman in college, when his poor grades caused him to enlist in the Navy. He was lucky, though; in addition to avoiding Vietnam during the war’s peak while his aircraft carrier cruised the Mediterranean, his 3½ years working for Armed Forces radio and TV introduced him to his future career.

Out of the Navy, Coleman worked in radio in the 1970s. Regularly invited to host at events and clubs, he emceeed at the Tralfamadore Café, a famous jazz club in Buffalo. N.Y. He wrote material to fill the time before the musicians went on, which led to a career in stand-up. He soon had 15-20 minutes of material as the de facto opening act. The owner eventually gave Coleman his own comedy night. It sold out every week.

Having “conquered” Buffalo, Coleman felt he was “ready for the big time,” so he moved west.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t go well at first. Coleman was good by Buffalo standards, but in Hollywood his competitors included Garry Shandling and Billy Crystal. Coleman kept at it, improving his observational comedy act at open mics in coffee shops and improve venues and, two years in, he was a paid regular at the Comedy Store.

In 1982, Coleman had another lifechanging experience as a result of a comedy show. KNBC’s news director happened to be in the audience as Coleman spoke about doing weather in the Navy; after the show, he asked Coleman to fill in as a weekend weathercaster.

“When that opportunity presented itself, doing weather on TV for the second-largest market in the entertainment capital of world, it sounded like the end of the yellow brick road,” Coleman recalls.

Radio and comedy turned out to be great training for a job in TV news, particularly for Coleman’s understanding of the relationship with listeners, point of view and the “discipline of time.”

That comes in handy when Coleman has only a minute or two to deliver the weather forecast for nine different microclimates in Southern California, or delve into larger issues such as El Niño storms or the state’s drought.

“Fritz makes it so relatable,” says NBC4 morning meteorologist Crystal Egger. “He understands every community so well.”

Colleagues say Coleman is the happiest person in the building. He always smiles, never complains and brings everybody Starbucks. “Fritz is it. He’s the real deal,” says coanchor Colleen Williams. “The guy you see on TV is the guy you see in person.”

Nowadays, comedy is only a hobby for Coleman. He still appears at various venues and has his own night at The Ice House in Pasadena. Over the years he has put on four single-topic, one-man plays—about being a parent, a divorcé, the local news and being over 50.

Where Coleman spends much of his time is out in the community, speaking at town halls and speaking at charity functions and fundraisers. “He is more philanthropic with his time than anybody I know,” Williams says.

“He feels it’s his job to give back to the community that’s spent so many years watching him,” Egger says. “He wants to thank them.”

Writer and producer Frank Spotnitz landed in television because of a phone call.

Shortly after the end of Season 1 of The X-Files in 1994, Spotnitz rang up series creator Chris Carter on behalf of a longtime friend, writer André Bormanis. Spotnitz had met Carter through a mutual friend’s book group, and Bormanis requested an introduction.

Carter said no to Bormanis (though he went on to work on the Star Trek TV series Voyager and Enterprise). But Carter did say yes to Spotnitz, letting him pitch ideas for X-Files and eventually hiring him as a writer.

“I was extremely green,” says Spotnitz of the job, which was his first staff gig after film school. “X-Files was really my second film school, and I learned an enormous amount.” After three years with the hit Fox show, Spotnitz had risen to executive producer and has stayed in television since, writing and producing series including ABC’s Night Stalker, Cinemax’s Strike Back and most recently Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.

One of the reasons Spotnitz has been successful in TV is his ability to understand complex worlds and translate them into characters and narratives viewers can relate to. High Castle, based on the 1962 Philip K. Dick novel, is a case in point. High Castle, which proposes an alternate 1960s reality for the U.S. based on the idea that Germany and Japan won World War II, has had a long and checkered development history. Spotnitz first boarded the project in 2012, when it was a miniseries at Syfy.

The boldness of the novel’s premise, like that of many works by Dick that were the basis of films including Blade Runner and Minority Report, made the adaptation daunting. “It’s a wonderful book. It’s a classic book. But it’s not a narrative for a television series,” Spotnitz says. “And I was really stuck for a little while because I didn’t want to touch it.”

Ultimately, though, Spotnitz realized one of the previous adaptations had completely changed the book and when he looked at it from that new angle, he says he felt “a little liberated.”

David W. Zucker, High Castle executive producer and television president for Scott Free Productions, believes Spotnitz cracked the code. “He’s found a way of both honoring and incorporating so much of what many people believe was an unadaptable novel and finding a way of making it incredibly compelling, but most of all relatable,” Zucker says.

Syfy passed on High Castle (BBC had rejected the project previously) and the project lay dormant for nearly two years. Cut to more recent times, with more content platforms launching more ambitious original shows, and Spotnitz got a call from Amazon Studios head of drama development Morgan Wandell, who “rescued it,” Spotnitz says.

But with Amazon spending lavishly to make its mark in original dramas, Spotnitz had more work to do. The streaming service wanted 10 episodes with an open-ended story structure that would allow for additional seasons. Initially, he had developed the story as a four-hour mini.

Amazon released the first two episodes of High Castle earlier this year, with the remaining eight landing on Nov. 20. The company says the pilot is its most-viewed and best-reviewed ever, and the show met with a buzzy reception at last summer’s TCA press tour.

Spotnitz hopes the series, beyond getting tune-in, will leave an impression on viewers.

“I hope this show reminds people of what a great country this is and how it’s worth fighting to change things to make it better, to make it live up to what it’s supposed to be to the idea of what it’s supposed to be,” he says.

Spotnitz has “a huge appetite” for storytelling.

“I feel like there are more stories I’d like to tell than I’m going to have time to tell in my lifetime and part of why I started Big Light was because it allows me to do more,” said Spotnitz, who will be celebrating his Nov. 17 birthday over the weekend receiving a Camerimage award for achievement during the Caeraimage Festival in Poland.

Coming up for Big Light is Medici: Masters of Florence, a historical drama about the powerful Medici family in Renaissance Italy. Spotnitz also revealed that he is working on a Sigmund Freud project and Ransom, about a real-life hostage negotiator.

Spotnitz knew he wanted to tell stories from an early age and had to convince his Army doctor father it was a good idea.

“I became very clear I think by the time I was 16 that I was not going to do that [science],” he said. “And then they decided to support me and were very supportive.”

The Japan-born showrunner first intended to go into movies but by his first year at the University of California, Los Angeles he had other intentions.

“I was just so excited by the opportunity to understand the world and make a difference in the world,” he said of his discovery of journalism. “So I was very, very idealistic and that’s what got me started.”

After graduation, Spotnitz went to work at United Press International and then the Associated Press. But he realized the more he covered, the less he liked the field.

“My understanding of what I was writing was very superficial and I didn’t really feel like I was making the difference that I had set out to make,” he said.

Flash forward and the industry vet has been able to dig deep into his stories, something he feels he can especially do with science fiction.

“I have to say I think I find science fiction the easiest genre to know why I’m writing it, which is to say when you’re writing science fiction it’s always about something,” he said. “There’s always an idea. There’s always a reason why you’ve chosen this apart from literal reality and I like that. I like stories that are about something.”

With rapid consumer and tech changes putting basic business models under extreme scrutiny, finding the right mix of tech, TV and sound business models has been job No. 1 at all the major programmers. That imperative has also made Marc DeBevoise a rising star in the digital world, first at Starz and more recently at CBS Interactive, where his teams developed the first broadcast network standalone SVOD product, CBS All Access.

“Marc isn’t just a media guy,” says Jim Lanzone, president and CEO of CBS Interactive. “He’s financially savvy, he’s digitally savvy and he’s an expert on the corporate development side,” which has made him “a key leader…during a period of transition for CBS, not only from linear to digital, but also within digital itself.”

He displayed his ability to use a variety of skills to put together a winning game plan at Tufts University—in the classroom and on the basketball court, where he was sixth man, coming off the bench for the Division III Jumbos.

“I played range of small forward, power forward and shooting guard” so the team, which had two 20-plus-win seasons during his college years, “could swing 2 to 4, as a knowledgeable basketball person would say,” he quips.

In the classroom, where he was fascinated by the growing confluence of tech and media, he studied economics and computer science. He added finance to his skills after graduation, working as an investment banker in media and tech deals. Hoping to move into the media and entertainment industries, he returned to school to get an MBA at New York University, where he did internships at Cablevision and Miramax Films.

After landing a job at NBC, he drew on his financial skills to work in the business development group on the acquisition of Universal before becoming more active in digital, helping set up the company’s first centralized digital team.

In 2006, a mutual friend recommended DeBevoise to former NBC president Neil Braun, who was looking for someone to launch a digital operation at IDT Entertainment, which was later sold to Liberty Media and then merged with Starz after DeBevoise took the job.

“He was digital before digital was cool,” says Braun, now the dean of Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “Marc’s background in cable and broadcast companies, as well as Wall Street,” gave him the perfect combination of tech and business savvy to capitalize on TV and digital media’s convergence.

DeBevoise’s work landed him on several lists of up-and-coming TV execs, and caught the attention of CBS Interactive’s Lanzone, who hired him in 2011. DeBevoise has the no-nonsense , direct speaking style of an investment banker but Lanzone stresses that his people skills and his ability to “galvanize teams” have played a major role in their successes at CBS Interactive.

“Maybe he picked this up playing college basketball but it’s been super important at CBS, because our group operates across the entertainment, sports and news divisions,” Lanzone says. “Without everyone’s trust in Marc” and his ability to work closely with all those divisions, “we wouldn’t have been able to make this much progress so quickly on things like All Access [and] CBSN.”

Those products have also helped CBS bring in younger demos. “The demos for both services are incredibly young relative to the overall demo [and] they’ve allowed us to discover things about ourselves that can be incredibly relevant to the next generation of viewers,” DeBevoise says.

The next generation is also his big priority outside of work: With two young kids, DeBevoise says most of his free time is happily spent with his family. But he’s also managed to carve out time to help young people in New York City as the president of the board at The Door, which serves about 11,000 underprivileged youth aged 12 to 21. “It is a big-time commitment but has been incredibly rewarding,” he says.

DeBevoise says that he got involved with The Door after reaching out to a friend who led outside board recruitment for Robin Hood, which is one of The Door’s larger funders. After explaining that he hoped to work with young people and that he was looking to be involved with a not-for-profit that was “something close by, in my community, if possible…she introduced me to The Door,” he says. “I fell in love with it quickly.”

“It really fits [what I wanted to accomplish by helping] underserved, at-risk youth ages 12-21 and its main location is a building on Broome St. and 6th Ave. which is less than 1 mile from my apartment in the West Village,” he says. “I later joined the University Settlement board—essentially the parent organization to The Door—and we also launched a charter school inside The Door named Broome Street Academy.”

At work, a major priority continues to be expanding the reach of their digital properties, both on new devices and in newer market. “We are already in over 100 markets [for CBS All Access] and will be in 135 by the end of the year,” he says. “That will give us 85% coverage, which is tremendous progress in just over a year.”

“You still haven’t seen another broadcaster roll out as many stations on any platform other than TV as we have,” he adds.

Looking forward, they are working to launch on additional platforms. “You can now subscribe [to it] on Roku and you’ll see us coming to new platforms in the next few months,” he says. In addition, “we are looking at what additional bundles we can do—who we can development marketing relationships with and have co-billing relationships with.”

Developing better systems for analyzing data is also important, both for improved ad targeting and for their content strategies. “We don’t have show-stacking and full-season offerings and the ones we do go after to get back and buy from third party studios…will be based on user trends,” he explains.

Gray’s ‘Year of Great Achievement’ Capped Off With Schurz Acquisition

Plenty of people like to say that they “grew up in the broadcast business.” For Hilton Howell, it was quite literally the case. His grandfather started KWTX in Waco, Texas, where Howell was born and spent his childhood forming a connection with the business that would shape his life and career.

Howell, 53, likes to tell the story of Roy Disney coming to town to buy the ABC station. He remembers hearing over the dinner table about how intimidated everyone was by Disney and his team from Beverly Hills and how concerned they were about competing with “Hollywood.” Yet despite going up against “the most sophisticated media people on the planet,” Howell says, KWTX remained the dominant station in the area.

“It proved to me the stickiness of the broadcast brand and the value to the community,” he says.

Howell never actually worked in a station, per se. He hung around the Waco station growing up and then went off to college, law school and business school. He practiced commercial litigation law initially and eventually came to be involved in dozens of businesses, from lumber mills to insurance companies, always looking for the next great opportunity. He says Gray was the first.

“It’s a great business,” Howell says. “It serves a vital purpose, which is even more true today.”

Getting Face Time

When Howell and his father-in-law purchased control of Gray Communications Systems from the Gray family in 1993, the company had just three stations (and some other assets Howell divested). Today, Gray Television owns and operates network-affiliated stations in 50 markets (upon completion of all announced deals), up from 30 in fall 2013.

The company is focused on the kind of station Howell grew up with—devoted to the community and journalism. As Gray grows, it looks only for stations that fit its specific profile and mold.

“I see how terribly needed [TV] is today,” Howell says. “The attention to local community makes all the difference.”

Howell acts as a “boots on the ground” type of leader as president and CEO, says Jason Effinger, Gray senior VP, media and technology.

Howell goes out of his way to talk to people in the company in person. He does not hesitate to show up at stations in multiple markets on the same day just to look people in the eye, welcome them to Gray and tell them in a “very calm yet passionate demeanor” what Gray stands for and how it operates, Effinger says. “He’s really easy to talk to for someone with his experience and in his position.”

For instance, Howell went to Twin Falls, Idaho a few months ago after Gray had acquired KMVT and KSVT to take part in an event welcoming Gray into the community. The next day, he traveled to small-market North Platte, Neb., to thank staff and celebrate the station’s move to a new facility. He then flew to Madison, Wis., to meet with staff to unveil plans for a new building. Later that same day, he went to Wausau, Wis., where Gray had established a new low-power station to become the market’s Fox affiliate and sister station to Gray’s CBS affiliate WSAW.

“Every business is only as good as the people you have in the business,” Howell says. “I like to get out because people just need to have face-to-face exposure. I love it.”

Growing From the Bottom Up

The onset of the M&A push two years ago coincided with Howell’s decentralization of Gray’s management team to give local stations and their managers more autonomy and responsibility. Gray became leaner at the top and more cohesive and streamlined throughout. Howell trusts his team, knowing that transparency internally goes a long way to improve and increase Gray’s growth.

“Everyone in our company knows what our goals are and what they need to do to achieve them,” he says.

Despite having a busy schedule as CEO, Howell is selfless with his time, Effinger says, recalling an evening when Howell presided at three simultaneous company events. Last fall, Gray held its first news director meeting in some time. Effinger says Howell felt it was important to take everyone out for a nice meal, but there were too many people for one restaurant. So they split up the news directors into three groups and had three separate gatherings. A different senior VP was at each; Howell attended all of them. Instead of sitting down and actually eating dinner, Howell made a toast and shook everyone’s hand at all three locations.

Howell and his team work hard—even on weekends, if need be—because he has instilled a sense of duty and devotion for their work. He is not a “stereotypical CEO,” Effinger says. “He’s having fun because he believes in what he’s doing.”

“I’ve always loved television,” Howell says. “This is where I want to be. I can’t imagine doing other things.”

Michael Nathanson, the oft-quoted securities analyst who covers the media business, has many family members in show business.

Jeff Zucker, CEO of CNN, is Nathanson’s brother-in-law, a connection that was tabloid fodder when Zucker ran NBCUniversal and Nathanson would comment on NBC and its rivals.

Nathanson’s sister Caryn was a producer for Saturday Night Live and his brother Steve did publicity for Whitney Houston and Paramount Pictures. His wife was a booker at Extra; her sister Allison Wallach was an agent at UTA and is now president of Jupiter Entertainment; and her brother Lou Wallach was a producer and Comedy Central executive.

But Nathanson, a Brooklyn native, credits another Nathanson with kindling his desire to get into TV. Ted Nathanson, no relation, was a producer for NBC Sports. “I always heard his name and people would ask me about him, and I always felt like that would be a really cool job,” he says.

At Brandeis University, Nathanson wrote papers about television and society and was drawn to the business and finance side of TV. After earning an MBA at Yale, he landed a job at MGM/UA in L.A. The company was sold, went bankrupt, and Nathanson lost his job.

Back home, he joined Rainbow Programming Holdings—run by Josh Sapan, now AMC Networks CEO—as business analyst for Bravo, AMC and News 12 Long Island. He moved to Time Warner as director of business development at Time Inc., which was trying to get its magazines into video.

That was when Nathanson transitioned to Wall Street with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Bernstein was hiring people to analyze industries they worked in “who knew where the bodies were buried and where the issues were,” says Tom Wolzien, the analyst turned consultant who recruited Nathanson. He “had the experience and the knowledge of how these companies work.”

Nathanson was first covered European media companies. Along the way he met an investor relations exec, David Cameron. “I would never have suspected that the head of IR at Carlton Communications would become prime minister of Great Britain. Truly amazing,” Nathanson recalls.

Nathanson distinguished himself by recognizing and writing about how the recorded music industry was falling apart. “The companies were in total denial at the time, giving him a lot of pressure.” Wolzien says. “That’s when he cut himself out from the rest of the pack.”

After Wolzien retired, Nathanson began covering U.S. media companies. He moved to Nomura Securities, where he was a regular on the Institutional Investor All-America Research Team. Then he joined with Craig Moffett, another former Bernstein analyst, who had opened up an independent research company.

“In seven years of working together at Sanford Bernstein, Michael was the best thought partner I ever had. When Michael left Bernstein for Nomura, it was like I had lost my right arm. It was only natural that I would jump at the chance to put the band back together again,” Moffett says.

“Michael has an uncanny ability to draw longer-term strategic insights from the mosaic of data points that fly at us every day. Pattern recognition is a rare gift,” Moffett says.

“It doesn’t hurt that Michael is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. The greatest joy in starting a business is doing it with people that you genuinely like going to work with every day.”

These days, Nathanson reports on big media companies as pressure builds on the TV economy. He’s tracked falling ratings and slower growth in ad revenue.

“I’m worried about media. It’s going to get tougher. But I’ve seen industries collapse, and this doesn’t look anything like the music industry,” he says.

Neveretheless, Nathanson recently added coverage of Internet companies, which are growing share as TV advertising declines, to his beat, initially recommending Google and Facebook.

Christina Miller's promotion during Turner’s massive reorganization in 2014 sent her in what seemed like a very different direction. She went from strategy, marketing and program roles with Turner Sports and NBA Digital to leading Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Boomerang as president and GM.

What appeared to be a left turn was actually more of a U-turn to an area she knows well, though. Miller had served a stint at Cartoon and had worked at HIT Entertainment for nine years.

“That’s where I grew up, kids entertainment,” said Miller.

And though she sees a lot of commonality between sports and kids/young adult programming, she recalls a major project from her sports tenure that drove home a defining difference: Turner’s partnership with CBS on college basketball’s March Madness.

“It was this big moment and decision to really think about how you can change…every game live, all four networks at once, staggered start times,” said Miller. “All of these things you would do differently to an audience that was watching it for 30 years. So that was really about introducing change and innovating, but that’s to some degree changing habits.”

Now, in running Cartoon, Miller sees her job as enabling the network to create habits.

“When you look at kids, there’s none of that. You’re creating that,” said Miller. “You can’t let your adult brain get in the way sometimes about the relationship different demos have with technology or communicating that change to them. Kids are mobile natives. They are digital natives. They’re plural. They communicate visually. They expect this content to be everywhere and work everywhere. We don’t need to teach them that. We need to teach ourselves that they expect that.”

Miller credits her flexibility and ability to connect with viewers to three mentors over her career: HIT Entertainment’s David Jacobs and Turner’s David Levy and Lenny Daniels.

“They all have in common a sort of people-first approach,” said Miller. “I think with Lenny taking a risk moving me into sports made me more agile and adaptable. And all three of those guys made me work well with change.”

Whether it’s network websites and apps, 15-second microplatform Cartoon Network Anything, VOD, mobile games, virtual reality, linear or Turner’s Hulu partnership, it’s about “total consumption” for Miller.

“Our fans are watching our content on all platforms.” she said. “It’s not a different person on different platforms. So how do you make sure you’re giving them a cohesive experience?” The central question, she adds, is “How do we know that we’re programming and treating this whole ecosystem as a single brand and allowing people to come in and come out across the spectrum as easy and intuitively as possible?”

David Levy, president of Turner Broadcasting, has worked with Miller for the past 10 years and saw her career take off when she worked in Turner Sports and NBA Digital.

“Think about her having 30 bosses, because she was really being managed and herding all the NBA owners and teams and getting them in line for whatever projects she was working on,” said Levy. “When I took on my new role at the company, I thought [she was] the perfect person for me to bring back.”

Levy has been equally impressed with Miller’s time leading Cartoon.

“She’s brought Cartoon back to double-digit rating increases,” Levy noted. “In this marketplace, any time you have any kind of ratings increases it’s tremendous. And she’s done that in a kids business that is very fickle.”

As for when Miller has free time, it’s mostly about traveling and taking in all things media.

“Travel is up there as the highest one when I’m free and when I’m looking for a real way to wind down. Exploring the furthest ends of the Earth, I’m up for it,” said Miller. “Doesn’t really matter to me how long the flight is, I’m ready to go.”

Jack Dempsey runs the market leader in the so-called Tri-Cities along the Virginia/Tennessee border, but perhaps his best work takes place in a fourth city. While some broadcast leaders would rather sit through root canal than engage with their legislators in Washington, D.C., Dempsey, GM at Bonten Media Group’s WCYB-WEMT, hits the Hill every opportunity he can. “For me, it’s an honor and a thrill to point out the great things that local broadcasters do,” he says. “It gives you a chance to talk about the importance of local broadcasters.”

The significance of strong stations in their communities is not lip service from Dempsey, who took on leadership at WCYB three years ago after a long career at the station across the street (WJHL). It’s a tough time for local broadcasters, being squeezed by D.C. regulators and networks alike and fighting to remain relevant in the digital age. But Dempsey is energized by the challenge. “I don’t think there’s a better job in America than being a general manager in a small-to-midsize TV station,” he says. “Every day, you’re in a position to work with the news department, with the community, with people that head up nonprofits. It’s very rewarding to see your contributions around the market.”

Rabbit Punches

Dempsey shares some of his fighting spirit with his namesake, the famed prizefighter who ruled the heavyweight class a century ago. Growing up in Kentucky, Dempsey didn’t like his name as a boy, wishing instead it was Wyatt, as in Wyatt Earp. But he grew to appreciate that his moniker brought to mind the Manassa Mauler. “It’s always been an automatic ice-breaker,” he says.

Naturally, Dempsey is asked frequently if the two are related. Tracing the shared lineage involves an awful lot of “great” prefixes, but Dempsey says there’s a blood link. “I’m told I met him,” he says of a family reunion when he was 6 months old. “Legend has it he held me for a minute.”

Dempsey got his start in radio, selling time for an AM station in Lexington, Ky. Once, while hustling to get a furniture store to commit to an ad, enticing the manager with the promise of a 6-ft.-tall stuffed bunny to boost Easter promotions, the manager stepped away from his desk, allowing Dempsey a peek at a local TV station’s rate card. The radio station offered 100 spots, plus the bunny, for $400, while WKYT-TV commanded $100 for a single 6 p.m. news spot.

“That was my epiphany,” he says.

Mentoring Sook

Dempsey landed with WKYT Lexington, and a few years later set up at WOWK in Charleston-Huntington (W. Va.), where he became general sales manager. One person he managed there was an ambitious recent college grad named Perry Sook, the founder, president and CEO of Nexstar Broadcasting. Sook recalls working on a key client for about six months before finally getting them on the hook, only to have Dempsey tell him the agreed-on ad rates would not work. Sook was pushed to work out a better deal.

“Jack was a good teacher and a great mentor,” says the Nexstar chief, considered by many the architect of station retransmission revenue. “His booming voice certainly captured people’s attention.”

Dempsey’s first GM job was at WTSF in his hometown of Ashland, Ky., and he was later named GM at WJHL in the Tri-Cities in 1989. Randy Odil, head of TV at the former Park Broadcasting, promoted Dempsey to the WJHL top spot. “Jack was level-headed, honest as can be and great with people,” says Odil, who also echoes Sook’s testimony on Dempsey as a tough boss: “He can be very demanding in terms of getting things done.”

Dempsey spent a 23 years atop WJHL, a strong CBS affiliate in the Tri-Cities (Bristol, Va.; Johnson City and Kingsport, Tenn.), but one that’s constantly in the shadows of WCYB. Three years ago, the opportunity to run WCYB came up and Dempsey seized it. “At times you wonder what else you can do with your career,” he says. “At age 61, getting a chance to go to another station and basically redefine yourself—I considered myself so fortunate.”

At Bonten-owned NBC affiliate WCYB, which also operates Fox affiliate WEMT, Dempsey says he’s more involved in news than in his previous gig. With a “Getting the Facts Right” tag line, WCYB corralled 41% of the market’s TV revenue in 2014, according to BIA/Kelsey, and is a power in every way. Local television is a unique proposition in DMA No. 97. “People identify with, and really feel like they get to know, the on-air people,” Dempsey says.

WCYB is based in Virginia, but Dempsey can see Tennessee from his office window. When he’s in Washington, that means addressing legislators from both states. It’s double duty, but he relishes the workload. “What more honorable calling is there,” Dempsey says, “than to stand up for the industry?”

Layoffs and the unrelenting pressure to produce more content with fewer people have given many journalists, never a cheery bunch in the best of times, new reasons for pessimism.

Not Andrew Morse, executive VP of editorial for CNN U.S. and general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide. While articulately dissecting many of the thorny problems facing TV news, Morse returns over and over again to the idea that new technologies and attitudes can help traditional news organizations thrive.

“I’m fond of citing…the phrase that losing generals fight the last war, not the next one,” he said. “What we need to do is aggressively embrace, from a position of strength, the fact that the business is changing and fight the next war without fear of what it means for what we did in the past.”

That willingness to embrace radical change is particularly important at CNN, which is working to revitalize its operations under the leadership of Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide.

Morse is a central figure in those efforts, with oversight of both the network’s global digital businesses and its domestic newsgathering, as well as the Washington bureau and D.C.-based programming. As 2016 election coverage heats up, CNN hopes to build on the strength of its popular digital operations, which celebrated their 20th anniversary in August, to attract new TV viewers.

“He is a rare combination of someone who has excelled in both worlds [of TV and digital] and successfully brought them together,” says Zucker, adding that those traits make Morse ideally suited “to lead CNN into the future.”

Raise Your Hand

Morse comes to that role with a lifelong love of journalism. “I can remember running around holding a lumbering VHS video camera that my grandfather gave me and trying to bang out a newspaper on my Apple IIe in elementary school,” recalls Morse.

After graduating from Cornell, where he edited the college paper, Morse unsuccessfully applied to dozens of daily newspapers. He eventually landed at ABC News as a desk assistant. “On that first job, I realized that if you raised your hand to do things no one else wanted to do, you got noticed,” Morse recalls.

That enthusiasm led to a role in 1997 with ABCNews.com, where Morse produced the first live webcast of the State of the Union address. He then had an eight-year stint overseas, first in London and then Hong Kong, working on some of the biggest international stories of era for ABC News.

“It was a marvelous odyssey,” Morse says of the experience that included professional successes—covering the USS Cole bombing in Yemen, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as well as a turning point in his personal life. Following a promotion to ABC Asia bureau chief, Morse met his future wife in Hong Kong (he eventually proposed to her by email from Iraq).

In 2005, the two decided to return to the States. Morse honed his skills as a producer, working as executive producer of Good Morning America’s Weekend Edition, and in digital, where he eventually oversaw ABC News’ digital portfolio. He and his wife also started a family; Morse now coaches soccer teams for both his son and daughter.

In 2011, Morse raised his hand to embark on a new challenge as head of U.S. television at Bloomberg. “We pivoted the resources and the cost structure to create an original digital video engine that could be programmed back into TV,” in effect reverse-engineering digital video for TV, he explains.

Digital First

That success brought Morse to CNN in 2013. While the network still lags significantly behind Fox News in TV ratings, CNN. com racked up 194 million video views and attracted 34 million unique viewers in July, compared to 81 million streams and 8 million unique viewers for FoxNews.com.

CNN is betting that those successes will give it a major competitive advantage during the 2016 election season. The company has been investing heavily in its digital political coverage, hiring what Morse calls an “All-Star Team” for CNN Politics, which has been the most popular digital political destination for five months running with 18 million unique visitors and some 136 million page views on desktop and mobile in July. “We are really starting to see results every day breaking news across digital and TV,” Morse notes.

“I’m fortunate enough to know what it feels like to sit in an editing room one minute from [longtime ABC News anchor] Peter Jennings going on air and being terrified that the piece won’t be ready in time,” he adds. “But the reality is that the days of rushing…to make just a 6:30 broadcast are over. The deadlines we need to meet are everywhere, and all around us.”

And that, Morse continues with characteristic optimism, “is why this is such an exciting time to be a journalist.”

Rece Davis grew up in Guin (GYOO-in), a town of 2,000 people in northwestern Alabama, surrounded by football. The first three football seasons he remembers as a kid, the local high school won back-to-back-to-back state titles. It was like something out of a Friday Night Lights episode, he says. Football “was part of the culture. I fell in love with that.”

Fascinated by the sport and the people who called the games, Davis would spend his Saturday nights spinning the radio dial, listening to every college football game he could find. At the time, he thought he would end up as a broadcaster, but only after “a long and distinguished career” playing football; alas, “my talent ran out after high school,” he says.

Now 50, Davis has already had a long and distinguished career in sports broadcasting. A 20-year ESPN veteran, Davis has been serving as a play-by-play announcer for college grid and basketball games and hosting pre-and postgame shows for the last decade. This past Saturday, he started his newest gig: host of ESPN’s College GameDay football pregame show, the most prominent morning show about the most prominent college sport.

“I don’t know if there’s a show on TV that has as strong a connection with [football] fans and fans of sports as College GameDay,” Davis says.

Calmness Amid the Storm of Live TV

In February, Davis signed a deal with ESPN through 2021 that included taking over for Chris Fowler as host of GameDay (Fowler is focusing on calling Saturday primetime college football games on ABC and tennis on ESPN).

Leading up to the start of the season, Davis admits to no nerves or apprehension, just excitement. That’s no surprise. Being unflappable is one of Davis’ greatest qualities, according to GameDay producer Lee Fitting.

Take the time years ago that Davis did football play-by-play for the first time. It was the East–West Shrine Game, the annual postseason college football all-star game. He and his analysts knew ahead of time that former President Gerald Ford would be at the stadium. They had seen him, surrounded by Secret Service agents, but were under orders not to approach him. Sometime later, out of nowhere, someone jabbed Davis in the ribs. It was Ford. So on his first football broadcast as play-by-play announcer—not just for ESPN, but ever—Davis had a former president on the air beside him. Talk about trial by fire.

“I can throw the kitchen sink at him and nothing affects him,” Fitting says. “Viewers would have no idea the level of chaos in his ear at that time. He’s so smooth.”

Davis brushes it off. He suggests his calmness might come from when he played sports as a little kid. Before games, instead of giving him technical or substantive advice, his dad would just tell him to “stay cool.”

“People at home don’t need to know nor want to know how the sausage is made,” Davis says, adding that if a light stand were to fall on the desk in front of him as he is delivering on camera, he would simply take his hand, push it away, say “we’ll get that cleaned up” and continue.

“He’s a producer’s dream,” Fitting says. “He can get you in and out of any possible scenario, segue from A to B to C as well if not better than anybody in the business.”

Letting His Teammates Score

Like any good quarterback, Davis says his top priority as a host is to put the commentators and analysts—his teammates—in the best position possible to succeed. Sometimes he disagrees with them on-air as a way to push them to validate or back up their point, “not by tossing them up softballs all the time,” Davis says, but by challenging him, poking them or clarifying them.

So when that light stand falls on set or an audience gets rowdy or some other sort of chaos ensues, Davis handles the problem for the viewers at home and for his teammates on set. No matter how famous or accomplished his analysts are, “they are taking their cues from your demeanor. If I’m rattled, uptight, flipping out, they’re likely to be uneasy,” Davis says.

It also helps that Davis is preternaturally prepared. Some hosts only know the material they are being asked to present, Fitting says, like knowing the questions to a test ahead of time and memorizing just those answers. Davis knows sports so well that it “doesn’t matter what comes up,” Fitting says.

Anyone can write up a list of questions for analysts, Davis says, but “the best hosts are part of the conversation.” And to stay involved, those hosts need to know what they are talking about and not be afraid of sharing. Davis says he considers Bob Costas and Fowler, his predecessor, among the best.

“I tell people that going from Fowler to Rece,” Fitting says, is like the 49ers going from Joe Montana to Steve Young—“one Hall of Famer to the next.”

This has been another dream year in a fantasy-like career for ESPN sportscaster Chris Fowler. He has called national and international championships in his two favorite sports, college football and tennis, and now is on an assignment for the ages—being behind the mic at the U.S. Open starting today to cover Serena Williams’ quest for tennis’ first singles Grand Slam in 27 years.

“In terms of documenting an achievement, it would be the most amazing thing I’ve seen,” says Fowler, who has spent nearly three decades covering a wide world of sports from high school games to World Cup matches. “Any Grand Slam event is a piece of tennis history. When you add on to it what Serena could achieve and put it in New York in the biggest tennis stadium in the world, it’s hard to imagine anything more. There will be a wild scene—it will be electric.”

Fowler has a chance to help lay down the soundtrack for potential sports history because ESPN is beginning an 11-year deal for start-to-finish coverage of the Open, ending CBS’ 47- year run at the Flushing, N.Y., fortnight. Fowler, who covered early-round Open matches for ESPN the past six years, will be in the booth three additional days (for a total of 10) and call three more matches (18 total) than last year.

But he will break away this weekend for his other big gig, as play-by-play guy on ESPN’s Saturday primetime, college football games on ABC, heading to Arlington, Texas, to cover Alabama vs. Wisconsin.

Fowler then will fly back East to call the Ohio State-Virginia Tech game on ESPN Labor Day evening before returning to New York for the last six days of the Open, including the women’s championship Saturday afternoon, Sept. 12, and the men’s final Sunday afternoon, Sept. 13.

Fowler will skip the Sept. 12 Oregon- Michigan State grid game to be at the Open. “It’s very important for me to call the finals,” he says. “For years I’ve eyeballed that booth, so finally it is kind of a dream to be able to do it.”

Fowler has called two of Williams’ three major tournament wins this year, the Australian Open and Wimbledon. A title in New York, along with her French Open trophy, would make Williams the first singles player to win all four majors in a calendar year—the Grand Slam—since Steffi Graf in 1988.

The Game’s the Thing

Fowler built his success as a host but has gradually gravitated back to his first love, play-by-play, which he fell hard for growing up in Rockford, Ill., listening to fabled Chicago sportscasters Lloyd Pettit and Jack Brick-house.

“Calling games always has been my passion, never reading scores or highlights,” he says.

About 95% of his tennis workload now is play-by-play, and although he would like to mix in some hosting at the Open, he’s hesitant to because of the unpredictable length of matches.

Fowler knows all about that. He and analyst Patrick McEnroe called the longest Grand Slam final in history, 5 hours and 53 minutes, between winner Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal at the 2012 Australian Open.

“I’m a little bit claustrophobic,” Fowler says, “so sometimes a tennis booth is not a comfortable place to be unless the action out the window is really fun and exciting. Then you forget about what a small space you’re in.”

Longtime ESPN executive John A. Walsh and other key talent evaluators considered Fowler a keeper early in his career and gave him his big break in 1990, tapping him to host weekly college football pregame show College GameDay.

“It soon became obvious to everyone that he was made for hosting, he was made for college sports, that he understood it all,” says Walsh, who retired this year as ESPN executive editor and senior VP. “Chris is very smart, very contemporary. He’s a student of everything that he does and is in a perpetual state of learning.”

Fowler hosted the award-winning GameDay road show for 25 years, turning over the role this year to Rece Davis. “I’ll miss it terribly. I’m not sure how easy it will be to be involved in the show, or even watch it,” Fowler says. “It’s a huge part of my life, and I’ll never have anything again like that. GameDay was a labor of love, something we built from the ground up.”

After Fowler replaced Brent Musburger last year in the Saturday-night football booth, it became difficult to juggle play-by-play and GameDay. One had to go, and the choice was clear to Fowler when ESPN offered him a nine-year contract as lead college football and tennis announcer for a reported $35 million.

“It’s been a tremendous run on GameDay, but I was offered the chance for a new challenge,” Fowler says. “College football and the playoffs is hugely important for the company, so there wasn’t any doubt what was best for me to do.”

In addition to finding fame and fortune at ESPN, Fowler met his wife, Jennifer Dempster, who appeared on the network’s ’90s exercise show BodyShaping. They are ardent travelers; France is one of Fowler’s favorite spots, and it’s where he proposed on the final day of the 1999 Tour de France. The couple married a year later.

“Travel is a passion and a hobby, and it’s a never-ending quest,” Fowler says. “As long as I’m able, we’ll be trotting around.”

Tennis is another of Fowler’s passions. He played frequently as a youngster and now considers himself just a recreational player, although he ventured into the big time a few years ago when he stepped onto a court at Wimbledon with one of the game’s heaviest hitters, top-ranked American John Isner.

Fowler was watching Isner, whose serves have been clocked at just shy of 150 miles per hour, practicing and told the 6-foot-10 pro he’d like to face his serve so he could describe it better on the air.

Fowler, wearing jeans and a hoodie at the hallowed tennis grounds where all-white attire is the law, grabbed a racket and braced for serves unlike anything he had ever faced. “The first two were down middle to my backhand, absolutely untouchable,” Fowler recalls. “Then I said, ‘Give me your fastball to my forehand.’”

Isner obliged, blasting one in the 130 mph range. Fowler, anticipating where the ball was headed, made contact, returning a shot back Isner’s way. The ball was pretty close to making it over the net, but hit the tape at the top and dropped back onto Fowler’s side—a success nevertheless.

“I was very proud to even make solid contact with it,” Fowler says.

Mike Hopkins doesn’t descend from Hollywood royalty. He didn’t do a stint at McKinsey & Co. or launch a start-up out of his college dorm room. Sun Valley is familiar turf, but it’s not home.

What Hopkins has done, relentlessly, better than most, is straight-up work. He has applied his curious mind and a rare knack for building consensus, ascending through the TV business while pulling off the feat of being both accomplished and approachable. Widely respected during his 18-year career at Fox, where he steered the distribution troops through game-changing launches and thorny negotiations, he has always learned by doing. And now he gets daily lessons as CEO of Hulu, a post he has held since October 2013.

“Almost everything” about the Hulu role has been brand-new to him, Hopkins readily admits. “A typical day for me has so much variety,” he says. “Distribution is a part of what we do, but now I go from marketing to programming to the technology.

“At Fox, every year it was something new,” he adds, recalling rollouts of video-on-demand, TV Everywhere and regional sports nets. “I do get a charge out of launching new products.”

A lot of top executives whose purview expands just fake it till they make it. (Emphasis on “fake it.”) The self-made essence of Hopkins makes him seemingly incapable of the megalomania and bluffing that predominates in the industry.

“He is disarmingly unassuming,” says Michael Biard, who worked for Hopkins for 10-plus years at Fox Networks and is now president of distribution. “He’s not pretentious, and he doesn’t put on a lot of airs. That enables him to comfortably rub elbows with all manner of folks and put them at ease.”

Hopkins doesn’t recall being an especially avid TV viewer during his childhood in San Diego. Regular doses of The Dukes of Hazzard, maybe, “no more or less than anyone else.”

Still, something happened one fateful day in the Hopkins household.

“I distinctly remember when we got cable,” he says. “My parents added a family room over our garage. And we had HBO. I remember thinking, ‘We have all these movies!’”

It would take a while before that fascination with video delivery would become Hopkins’ daily work, but the dots connected along the way were not insignificant. After graduating from Cal State Long Beach (he would later earn an MBA at UCLA), Hopkins went to work in sales for Harte Hanks, then a media company known for hawking shoppers and PennySavers.

Restless after five years of old-school sales, Hopkins jumped at the chance to join the Weather Channel just as cable was starting to blossom. “From the second I started, I loved it,” he recalls. “Original content basically didn’t exist outside of news and sports. Cable was nascent and growing and really exciting.” His early niche: affiliate sales and marketing.

Hard-Won Wisdom

When Hopkins moved to Fox a few years later, original content was in a full-on boom. One of his first projects was securing distribution for a new network known as FX. His run in Century City would also be marked by bruising showdowns with multichannel video programming distributors and, later, the Fox station affiliates that were added to his purview in a restructuring.

“There were several times we had multiple high-profile deals going at the same time,” Biard says. “That’s when you really see the measure of the man. He has the ability to really see things from the other side and is never afraid to ask what may seem like an obvious question. He’s also never afraid to look at things from a different angle.”

This isn’t subordination or yielding of the high ground, Biard adds. “He has a tremendous amount of self-confidence. And that comes from an ability to distill things down.”

Along the way, Hopkins would serve on the boards of the Big Ten Network, Nat Geo and, fatefully, Hulu. His board post there made him a known commodity for the stakeholders and a strong leadership bet in the wake of a turbulent period when the service was shopped and then pulled back off the market.

Hulu has grown in its seven-plus years into a well-funded challenger to Netflix and Amazon, with 9 million subscribers. It has a war chest, writing nine-figure checks for streaming rights to Seinfeld and South Park and commissioning big-ticket originals including the J.J. Abrams-Stephen King event series 11/22/63. In all, 130 individual shows are now available on Hulu. Under Hopkins, Hulu has been active, ditching the “Plus” from its subscription offering and reportedly exploring an ad-free tier at a higher monthly fee.

If the company is running a marathon, though, “I don’t think we’ve hit the first water station,” Hopkins says. “We’re in the second or third mile,” with a huge advantage for the coming era when “the vast majority of content will be distributed via IP.”

Hopkins’ mission now is not unlike those in the distribution trenches—he is still preaching the gospel of working together. “I want to create an environment where people can row in the same direction,” he says. “I know that how you build consensus is, you can’t just dictate it.”

Much of Jon Hookstratten’s Job involves hammering out agreements with Fox’s litany of distribution partners amid the ever- changing rules of network engagement. It makes for some tense negotiations, but Hookstratten learned from the best. Son of the late, legendary entertainment lawyer Ed Hookstratten, Jon absorbed his father’s debate style as a kid, and later when they were law firm partners. The senior Hookstratten, known as the Hook, could be blustery and intimidating. The junior Hookstratten developed his own style of getting to yes.

“He stuck by his clients through thick and through thin,” says Hookstratten. “But I learned that you can’t always be like that. In today’s world, you’ve got to be able to understand everybody’s side of the situation.”

A key part of being executive VP of network distribution is keeping more than 200 affiliated stations happy. While Fox and its partner stations have feuded bitterly at times in the past, with the network pushing hard to maximize retransmission returns, it’s difficult to scare up a negative word about the low-key Hookstratten among the station representatives. “When Jon comes back to deliver a message from the network, it may not be something we like to hear,” says Jeff Rosser, Fox affiliates board chairman and group VP at Raycom. “But he can deliver that message better than anybody I know. He takes time to explain things, and we’ll debate with mutual respect.”

The King and I

Hookstratten is a true child of Los Angeles. His father’s clients included Johnny Carson, Tom Brokaw and several top-shelf Los Angeles news anchors. His mother, Patricia Crowley, played the mom in the ’60s family comedy Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, among other TV and film roles. “All of our friends were clients or people from the entertainment business,” he says.

That included a certain hip-shaking southern entertainer. Hookstratten figures he was around 7 years old when he met Elvis Presley. “My parents brought him into my bedroom,” he recalls. “They knew it was important to have him meet us.”

Hookstratten knew early on that his future was in show business. After getting his law degree, he signed on with the holding company McAndrews and Forbes, serving as right-hand man to fabled financier Ronald Perelman. He then moved on to his father’s law firm, working with news, sports and entertainment clients and handling business affairs for Johnny Carson’s Carson Productions.

Hookstratten witnessed the obvious respect between his father and the entertainment titans and news chiefs he battled with on behalf of his clients. Even when negotiations got intense, and they often did, those adversaries were frequent guests at the Hookstratten home for cocktails and dinner. “Those people were his friends,” Hookstratten says of his dad.

Through his law work, Jon attained a certain comfort level with local TV execs that served him well as he embarked on his career’s next phase. Ed Wilson, then president of CBS Enterprises, knew Jon through his father and hired him in 1996 as senior VP of business affairs, with oversight of the division’s domestic distribution. When Wilson moved to NBC, Hookstratten was his first hire. And when Wilson was named network president at Fox, Hookstratten followed a short while later as executive VP of distribution.

Wilson recalls that he wanted someone with deep understanding of the television business and a unique perspective. “Jon is just an incredible team-builder,” says Wilson, now a co-owner in the digital studio New Form. “He’s extremely fair, and people like working for him.”

Hookstratten cites Wilson and Tony Vinciquerra, former Fox Networks CEO, as key figures in making him a complete television executive. “Ed makes you believe anything is possible, and Tony is the practical, feeton- the-ground person,” says Hookstratten. “The two guys balanced my life out.”

Balance is a word that comes up frequently when people discuss Hookstratten—a man who works for a powerful television network in Los Angeles but enjoys visiting station folks in small markets; whose idea of a flashy vacation is an RV road trip to a national park with his wife and children; and who never lets ego get in the way of a robust negotiation. “Old-school integrity,” is how one prominent Fox affiliate exec puts it.

“You rarely see Jon lose his cool,” says Raycom’s Rosser. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”

One might suspect a degree of entitlement from a kid who grew up around Hollywood royalty, but that does not seem to be the case. Says Hookstratten with a laugh: “My sister and I ended up being the most normal, boring people you can imagine.”

When the fox crews are all set at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park for the MLB All-Star Game on July 14, it will be something of a roundingthe- bases, full-circle moment for John Entz. The president/production and executive producer for Fox Sports was 7 when he attended his first baseball game, seeing Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” take on the Padres in San Diego.

“Seeing guys live that happened to be the best team in the world at the time was pretty memorable,” he says. “I still have the ticket, I think.”

Entz is bound to see some familiar faces at this week’s game. One of the big All-Star draws will be the revealing of the fan-voted “Franchise Four” squads (the greatest four players in each team’s history), along with the vote winners for the four greatest living veterans. With the game in Cincinnati—and controversial all-time hits champ Pete Rose part of the Fox talent crew—some of that old Machine’s finest should be represented.

“You always try to build in extra pieces [for the All-Star Game] that might draw in the more casual fan,” says Entz of the Franchise idea. “But the game on the field is the most important thing.”

The game has always been the thing for Entz, from when he played baseball growing up in Las Vegas and Arizona to setting the foundation for a stellar career in sports TV as video manager for the University of Arizona’s powerhouse basketball team. The UA coaches had connections at ESPN and helped get an interview for Entz in 1993. He traveled to Bristol…and didn’t make a great showing. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe I flew across the country and blew my chance for the one job I wanted all my life,’” he recalls. But ESPN did like what they saw, and a few months later, the call came. “I had just started training to work in the country’s first P.F. Chang’s, in Scottsdale, Ariz.,” Entz says. “I didn’t make it to the opening.”

Instead, Entz has helped engineer a slew of other prominent openings, as well as logging solid and award-winning time in the sports TV field. At ESPN, he helped produce SportsCenter and won an Emmy. Joining Fox in 1996, he produced the All-Star Game red carpet show and college football Bowl Championship Series pregame specials. Entz also had two experiences that stretched his range—as a producer on Season 2 of American Idol and running point for The Best Damn Sports Show Period.

“Idol was so different from anything I’d done before,” he says of helping judge early-round singers before they got to Simon, Paula and Randy. “It was pretty amazing to see from the inside what a No. 1 show looked like and how it was run.” As for BDSSP, Entz recalls, “The great part was it allowed you to do almost anything you could creatively.”

Entz put all his experience to best use as senior VP production for the then-launching MLB Network in 2008, hiring a staff and overseeing the look and presentation of studio programming and game coverage. That first summer, he conducted job interviews every 20 minutes. “I think I lost my voice saying the same things over and over,” he says. “But it was our goal to get a great group of people that collectively knew it wasn’t going to be easy, creating the systems and processes that would for the most part be in place for the rest of the time the network was on the air.”

He returned to Fox in 2011; Fox Sports president/COO Eric Shanks is happy to have him back. “John has an infectious enthusiasm for telling stories, and a great eye for hiring very good people in front of and behind the camera to tell those stories,” Shanks says of the 2012 B&C Next Wave of Leaders honoree. “And he’s a player-coach—everything he’s in charge of, he’s done at one time or another.”

Now he shares his sports passion with the next generation. Entz and his wife have three daughters, the oldest of whom plays soccer and went with her dad to Vancouver, B.C., to see the USA’s victory in the Women’s World Cup final on July 5. “It’s been a really great time to bond with her,” Entz says.

IFC late-night spoof Comedy Bang! Bang! returns July 9 and host/creator Scott Aukerman will have Michael Cera as his guest and welcome Kid Cudi, hip-hop star and actor, as his new sidekick.

But despite the impressive roster of celebs who have dropped by over the show’s first few seasons, he’s tending the flame for the ultimate guest, someone with a bit more availability lately: David Letterman. It was Letterman who first inspired Aukerman to take up comedy. His off-kilter reinvention of the talk show is the biggest influence on Bang! Bang!. But even though Letterman recently signed off as a latenight host, a hopeful Aukerman is, one might say, realistic about his possibilities of finding his idol across from him for a chat. “There is no chance in hell he would ever do it,” says Aukerman, who adds that Letterman is the biggest” influence on the show. “That is the great white whale of guests.”

From the Stage to the Screen

Much like Letterman’s evolving show, Comedy Bang! Bang! went through a few different versions on its way to television, first starting as a weekly showcase for stand-ups and sketch performers at Los Angeles’ UCB theater; it was then called “Comedy Death-Ray.”

A friend of Aukerman’s who worked as a DJ at a radio station told him they were looking for someone to do a show. It was there Aukerman established the format of what Comedy Bang! Bang! would become—one celebrity, plus another comedian playing a character, all set up as a fake talk show.

“There is something very interesting and unique about the reaction between a celebrity and a comedian playing a fake character,” he says. “I thought it would be really funny.”

Aukerman then turned it into a podcast as part of his Earwolf podcast network he cofounded in 2010—his wife and fellow comedian Kulap Vilaysack cohosts the film-centric “Who Charted?” podcast on Earwolf. IFC became interested in 2011 and turned it into a TV show.

Christine Lubrano, IFC senior VP of original programming, says that Aukerman and Comedy Bang! Bang! fit right in with the network’s off-kilter sensibilities. “[The guests] come to have fun in a way that you can’t do on a traditional talk show,” she says. “That environment is entirely created by Scott.”

That environment will change a bit with the departure of Aukerman’s sidekick, Reggie Watts, now bandleader for James Corden on CBS’ The Late Late Show. “I was first a little bummed,” says Aukerman. “I wanted the show to go on forever with the same people.” But he sees Cudi as a good replacement. “He doesn’t really have to do this show,” jokes Aukerman, who likes that Cudi brings a different style than Watts, who was known for his dry wit and deadpan responses. “He’s not the accomplished comedian Reggie Watts is,” says Aukerman, but his energy will bring something different.

Now Aukerman is hoping the show will have a different vibe when it returns, to go along with its new set and theme song. “When Reggie left I kind of viewed it as a real cool opportunity to almost reboot the show.”

A Comedic Turn

Like many comedians, Aukerman initially didn’t think he would able to hack it trying to make others laugh. “I had always grown up loving comedy but never really thought I could do it professionally,” he says. “It just seemed like this incredible hurdle to attempt.”

After a brief stint as a musical theater actor, he moved back to Los Angeles—he grew up in Orange County—to try writing. Through a mutual friend, Aukerman landed a spot on a comedy show (along with his friend and frequent collaborator B.J. Porter) that was being put on by Mary Lynn Rajskub. The second night he performed, Bob Odenkirk—who was busy with his HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show With Bob and David—was in the audience. This would eventually lead to Aukerman and Porter being hired as writers and occasional performers on the Odenkirk/David Cross sketch comedy series. “He sort of mentored me,” Aukerman says of Odenkirk.

Aukerman remembers those years on Mr. Show as hectic. “When you’re doing sketch comedy, it’s a lot like the show business that you dream about when you’re young,” he says, noting how there are people constantly wearing costumes. Remembering one specific moment, he says: “There was a mule, and five people dressed like Hitler, and one guy dressed like a Buddhist monk.”

When Aukerman was first hired, he figured he would be the quiet guy, but soon found his voice. “I became sort of a loudmouth,” he says. “They’re not only paying for your voice and your writing, they’re paying for your ideas and opinions.”

And now that Odenkirk and Cross are reuniting for a new sketch comedy series on Netflix, the old Mr. Show crew got back together for one more ride, though Aukerman isn’t sure that it is totally a good thing.

“I had forgotten how stressful it is to be in that situation,” he says with a laugh. “I started having bad dreams about work.”

When Bryant McBride and his team set out to create Burst, the goal of the mobile video and photo sharing company was not necessarily to be an avenue for media companies to deliver user-generated content on live TV. Rather, the origin of the company came in part from McBride’s mother.

She lives in Minnesota, and didn’t want her son to send her T-shirts and merchandise from sports leagues he worked with. She just wanted videos of her grandkids in Boston playing sports.

“That stayed with me for so long,” says McBride, 50, the CEO of Burst. “Then when the opportunity came to build a product down below that can serve the needs of families...that was appealing to me.”

Burst would go on to shift its focus to become a key crowdsourcing video tool for broadcasters while still keeping that familial spirit, just as McBride went from a college athlete and budding politician to a leader in entrepreneurship.

The company’s growing roster of customers includes The Weather Channel, CNBC, VH1 and the New England Sports Network

“I’ve always admired people who can rise from nothing, work hard and be a nice person at the same time and do whatever it takes work-wise to make their project successful, and Bryant’s certainly done all of that,” says Tom DiBenedetto, a minority owner of the Boston Red Sox and former president of A.S. Roma who currently serves as chair of the Burst board. “He refuses to lose. He’s one of the most competitive people you’ll ever meet.”

Dreams on Ice

McBride was born in Chicago but at the age of 5 moved to Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada, where they “don’t let you leave unless you play hockey.” He was recruited by West Point as the rare U.S.-born, Canadian-trained hockey player. What he didn’t realize at 18 was that he had the gene for entrepreneurship, and restrictions at the military made it hard for him to do his own thing, much less create it.

Before transferring to Trinity College, McBride served as the first African-American class president at West Point. He says his experience there was an “unbelievable anchor” to his career, recognizing that if he could survive being a plebe, his opportunities were limitless.

At Trinity, where he was again the first African-American class president, McBride played hockey, earning All-American honors as a defenseman and winning the national championship in each of his three years. With an interest in government and a major in political science, he earned a masters in public admininstration from Harvard, but soon felt frustrated by politics’ slow pace. He turned toward entrepreneurship, where he could “take something from nothing and build it.”

In 1992, he got a job with the NHL and was “set loose” on the league’s business side. As VP of business development, McBride helped grow the game in traditional ways, such as expanding broadcast rights, and non-traditional ways— providing the game to communities that didn’t previously have entry, to kids of color who couldn’t afford or access equipment or a rink or a team. “I took it as a challenge to break down some of those barriers,” McBride says.

He treasured his time at the NHL, he says, but “that’s when the entrepreneurial bug really bit.”

At the Forefront of Mobile Video Sharing

McBride founded and invested in several businesses through his Route 2 Digital holding company with partners Tracy Deforge and Paul Levy.

In 2011, the trio—seeing “all of that chaos in below-the-line sports,” meaning high school and down, and the money moving to mobile and video—built a tool that could connect families by giving them an efficient way to privately share media from their phone. Burst was born.

But, McBride says, “the plan you start with is rarely the plan you end with.” Burst eventually pivoted its focus to media companies.

“There’s a camera in everyone’s pocket— that’s either an existential threat or an existential opportunity,” McBride says. “We want to be at the forefront of that.”

Take NESN, for instance. McBride and company noticed fans at live sporting events taking photos and videos, and sending them to social networks or the ether. The regional sports network wanted to use that content, and figured Burst could help.

“We basically are giving them a toolset to be able to own assets,” McBride says. “They don’t want to cede ownership of all that video of the game around the game.”

On telecasts, NESN tells fans how to get their videos on TV. They shoot a clip—at home, at the stadium, anywhere—and click on NESN’s prompted URL, which gives it the rights. Burst instantly uploads and curates that media and delivers the best ones back to NESN to showcase on TV, the Jumbotron or online.

“You build products for yourself that solve problems for you and your family,” McBride says. “I just wanted my mom to be able to within seconds see what my kids were doing.”

Her son is doing quite a bit, too.

When Mark Ghuneim talks about how his career got started, his first job sounds a lot like the work that’s made him one of the country’s top social media experts—first at Wiredset, his start-up that created Trendrr, and more recently at Twitter, which acquired his company in 2013.

That first job description does, after all, involve second screens and using technology to build buzz among social influencers and young people. Only Ghuneim started work in 1980, and his role was VJ at the Private Eyes nightclub on West 21st Street in Manhattan, which in its heyday aired early music videos and attracted the likes of Madonna. “Hard as it is to remember, being a VJ in New York in the early 1980s was the forefront of technology,” Ghuneim recalls with a laugh.

Since then, this music and modern art lover has never moved out of the tech avant-garde, colleagues say. In the early 1990s, Ghuneim convinced his bosses at Sony to let him launch a variety of pioneering online efforts, including some of the first artist websites and streamed concerts. “At the time, Mark was one of only a handful of people in the world of media who really believed that the Internet was going to be big,” recalls Fred Graver, Twitter creative lead, TV.

That insight eventually propelled Ghuneim to the top digital job at Sony Music, running the online and emerging technologies group. But new tech trends convinced him to start his own digital services agency, Wiredset.

“It was a risky move, but I started to see the emergence of social media and knew that this was an important inflexion point,” Ghuneim recalls.

To capitalize on that, the company launched a social media analytics product in 2006 that was rebranded Trendrr in 2007.

Ghuneim began emerging as a major proponent of the power of social media. In 2009, Lisa Hsia, who is now executive VP of digital at Bravo and Oxygen Media at NBCUniversal, remembers hearing him speak at the New School.

“His talk about the power of Twitter and real-time social media really blew me away,” Hsia recalls. Those insights helped inspire Bravo’s launch of the first social TV offering in 2010, adds Hsia, who calls Ghuneim’s influence on the TV industry “huge.”

In September 2013, Twitter bought Trendrr. Ghuneim joined the company as part of a push to improve its products and simplify the way Twitter’s advertisers can tap the power of social media.

“In many ways we are still in the early days of what social media and TV are going to become,” and there remains a lot of work to be done to improve the ways TV companies use social media, explains Graver.

To that end, Ghuneim and his teams recently launched Curator, a free tool that enables users to easily incorporate tweets and vines into TV, Web and mobile content in real time.

“I like to think of it as a kind of dial-tone” for social media, providing a powerful set of tools to curate and syndicate ongoing conversations, Ghuneim says. “We want to make it dead simple to surface and use the power of social media [so TV companies] can focus on doing what they do best, producing engaging TV and narratives.”

When not evangelizing the power of social media, Ghuneim says he loves exploring photography, art and traveling with his wife, Mari Ghuneim, who last fall joined Turner’s truTV as VP of digital strategy and development.

But even at home, Ghuneim remains a curator. “My entire life has been one part collector, one part curator—and my wife would say one part Collyer brother,” he quips, referring to the legendary New York City siblings who were found dead among piles of books and other material they collected for decades. “I’m curating photo and art books, and before that toys and baseball cards and comic books,” Ghuneim says. “Luckily, we live in an old printing [building] with thick floors.”

Alec Berg, writer, director and executive producer of HBO’s Silicon Valley, was hooked on comedy from a young age.

“I was definitely a huge comedy nerd,” says Berg. “When other kids were listening to bands, I was listening to Cosby and Steve Martin and Bob Newhart and George Carlin.”

When Berg attended Harvard University, it became clear a career in the entertainment business was not far behind. Taking filmmaking classes and joining The Harvard Lampoon staff only affirmed his interest in writing.

While at the Lampoon, Berg met his longtime writing partner Jeff Schaffer (cocreator and executive producer of FXX’s The League). Berg and Schaffer moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and worked together as a team. Life in L.A. was not quite glamorous, as Berg describes his “flea-infested” apartment.

“I don’t know how I didn’t get scurvy or jaundice,” he recalls. “All I ate was 99-cent store-brand mac and cheese. Every once in a while I would get a can of peas or something like that so I could pretend I was having a green vegetable. “

After countless hours of writing and calling mentors for advice, Berg got his first break with Fox’s Great Scott!, starring Toby Maguire and run by Tom Gammill and Max Pross. “We wrote an episode, and I think it ended up being a 13-episode order,” he says. “ Then [the show] got cancelled while they were shooting the ninth episode, which happened to be ours.”

The Seinfeld Years

Following short stints at Herman’s Head and Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Berg landed on Seinfeld. Pross and Gammill, who moved on to Seinfeld following Great Scott!’s cancellation, recommended Berg as a writer.

“They gave me my first job, and my first good job,” Berg says. “I sort of owe them my entire career twice. They were the first people who gave me a break and got me in the door.”

Berg says Larry David had a profound effect on his comedy writing. “Stories in traditional sitcoms are not hilarious. They tell these stock stories and lay jokes on top of them,” he says. “Larry David’s entire method of storytelling is very different from that. The story itself, what happens, has to be funny. That’s the comedy, which is one of the reasons I think Seinfeld has endured the way it has.”

Beyond that, Berg took notice of the storytelling morality that David and Jerry Seinfeld cultivated on the series.

“It used be that characters learned and apologized and promised to do better. The whole Seinfeld morality is characters would do things that were self-serving and petty,” says Berg. “And then they would get caught doing that, and rather than apologize and learn anything, they would lie about it and cover it up and do something else that got them in more trouble. At the end of the episode, everything would blow up in their faces. There were no happy endings. There were no hugs. There was no learning.…People go their entire lives without learning anything—I don’t know why they have to learn something in 22 minutes.”

Tip of the Tech Iceberg

Following several years of writing films including The Cat in the Hat and EuroTrip and the full run of David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Berg’s longtime agent, Sue Naegle, who at the time was at HBO, asked him to look at a pilot.

“It was one of those situations with [Silicon Valley], where it laid out very nicely in my brain,” says Berg. “I met Mike [Judge], and he had exactly the same sort of thoughts and ideas I did for where we would go from there.”

Despite the challenge of making a show about people who spend most of their days on computers, Berg felt the tech world was ripe for comedy. “It’s such an obvious premise for a show,” he says. “The tech world is full of unbelievably awkward engineer-type people who all of the sudden have billions of dollars and are authorized to act on whatever weird whim they have.”

To Silicon Valley coexecutive producer Dan O’Keefe, who also worked with Berg on Seinfeld, he has succeeded.

“The most salient feature with him is he is harder on his own work than anyone that I’ve met in my life,” says O’Keefe. “In terms of relentlessly pushing for quality, it’s a real advantage when you have someone who is just completely willing to throw out his own stuff if it doesn’t work.”

Throughout it all, Berg recalls a lesson he learned from his four years on Seinfeld.

“Jerry Seinfeld was an enormously inspirational guy,” Berg says. “His whole thing was just never ever worry about the money.…Just worry about the comedy and worry about making it good, and the rest of that stuff will happen. Hopefully, I’ve ended up not being all caught up in the deal. I’m much more interested in just making good stuff, and the rest of it will take care of itself.”

While summer is typically the season to dial back slightly on the frenetic pace of television, it’s going to be a steamy few months for DuJuan McCoy. He’s the owner of WEVV Evansville (Ind.), whose summer plans include moving into a recently acquired building, hiring on-air talent and doing regular rehearsals leading up to a local news launch in early August—the station’s first full-blown newscasts since that operation was disbanded in 2001.

McCoy, 47, promises a unique entry to the news landscape in DMA No. 103. “We’re not trying to be who they are,” he says of his Raycom and Nexstar rivals in Evansville. “You don’t want to do it exactly the same way as the competition. We’re going to be doing a little bit of guerrilla warfare.”

Taking on well-entrenched competitors is a huge challenge, but McCoy is not one to back down. He’s one of the surprisingly few African-American TV station owners in the U.S. (Pluria Marshall Jr. and Armstrong Williams are also in that group), and he knows his success can lead the way for future minority owners. “I embrace the chance to be a role model,” McCoy says.

A Butler Bulldog

McCoy is a product of Indiana, growing up in Indianapolis. His mother was a hospital business manager and his father a State Farm insurance agent. McCoy studied at Butler University, where he captained the track team, and casually mentions still holding school sprint records. “I was more of a quick guy than a fast guy,” McCoy says. “I was quick getting out of the blocks.”

Indeed, shortly after graduating, he landed a job at WTTV-WTTK in his hometown, after director of sales Bernie Souers read an Indianapolis Star article about McCoy’s academic and athletic achievements. It was the first of a handful of times that someone presented McCoy with a promising opportunity. “I didn’t know I wanted to go into television,” he says.

After six years at the stations, McCoy moved on to a general sales manager job in Greenville, N.C., one of several GSM positions he ended up holding, culminating at Fox’s KRIV-KTXH Houston. But McCoy wanted to own, and enrolled in the NAB’s Broadcast Leadership Training program in 2007. “I knew how to run a TV station; I knew the operations side,” he says. “What I did not know was how to talk to investors about raising money to buy a television station.”

McCoy’s time in the program predates the tenure of Gordon Smith, NAB president and CEO. But Smith says he takes “special pride” in knowing McCoy’s ownership career was hatched there. “DuJuan is one of the bright young leaders in broadcasting,” says Smith. “He’s got the desire, the savvy and the commitment to localism that will help make a significant mark on our business.”

McCoy’s Bayou City Broadcasting, named for his new home base of Houston, was launched in 2007. Mc-Coy acquired a pair of small-market Texas stations for $3 million in 2008, improved their operations, and flipped them for around $20 million in 2012. He closed on WEVV late last year.

Evansville looks forward to another news outfit, says Mayor Lloyd Winnecke. “It’s huge for us to have another editorial voice in the Evansville landscape,” says Winnecke, who used to work in local TV. “DuJuan is very energetic and very visionary; we’re excited for him to be investing in the market.”

A CBS affiliate with Fox as a multicast, WEVV has the promotional might to successfully launch news. Its on-air team will be diverse, and the news brand will bear the slogan “Focus on Family and the Community.”

The father of three sons, McCoy is on the hunt for more stations. He says the paucity of African-American station owners is connected to a lack of African-Americans in management roles. He’s grateful for the handful of execs who opened doors for him. “Someone has to give you a chance,” McCoy says. “Someone gave me a chance.”

Ricardo Venegas figures he has spent half his career building companies and half restructuring them. In his current position as chief financial officer of One World Sports, he’s been fortunate to help build the independent network. It’s also given him a chance, during a recent media event, to play with the New York Cosmos, the famous soccer team that has been rebooted by One World’s ownership group and plays its games on the channel.

When he was 4 years old, Venegas was diagnosed with cancer and moved with his mother and brother from Ponce, P.R., to Syracuse, N.Y., where he was treated at the well-known pediatric hematology clinic at Upstate Medical Center.

The cancer recurred a year and half later, but it has been in remission since Venegas was 10. Soon after, he exhibited skills as a businessman, keeping careful track of his revenue and profits selling Christmas cards door-to-door as a youngster. He was also active in Junior Achievement in high school.

At Rochester Institute of Technology. he gave engineering a try before switching to the business school. “I gave my mother an opportunity to forever say ‘I told you so.’ She always thought I was going to be a businessman. And here I am,” says Venegas, who as president of RIT’s alumni association soon will present an honor to veteran ESPN exec and fellow alum Sean Bratches.

After graduating, Venegas did a short stint as a sales associate at a Radio Shack Computer Center before returning to Puerto Rico to work at his father’s construction and gravel business. “I moved a mountain my first six months in Puerto Rico,” he quips. Venegas wanted to run the company, but his dad “wasn’t retiring any time soon, so I came up here and decided to create my own path.”

In 1994, he went to work as a financial analyst for C-TEC, a cable company affiliated with RCN. His first project was buying Megacable in Mexico. The peso was devalued before the deal closed and Venegas negotiated a 40% reduction in the price. The company did a three-way spinoff and Venegas wound up at RCN, helping the company raise $5 billion to build out its network. Later, as treasurer, he oversaw a restructuring before leaving in 2004.

He became treasurer of newspaper publisher Journal Register Co., helping build the company through acquisitions until the print business faltered, necessitating another restructuring. Venegas moved to Spanish-language publisher ImpreMedia in 2007 as CFO. He helped the company expand its digital operation, but the recession hit its newspaper businesses. Venegas and the CEO figured the company could save money by training staffers to fill their roles. “I restructured myself out of a job,” he says.

Venegas returned to the cable business with Cloudburst TV, Bryan McGuirk’s enterprise that aimed to acquire cable systems at a time when the market was depressed. Though Cloudburst wound up getting outbid in its efforts, Venegas nonetheless impressed McGuirk.

“What Ricardo brought was just a combination of entrepreneurial skills and obviously financial skills and technical savvy,” says Mc-Guirk. “In a smaller company he played the financial leadership role, but from him I got much more in terms of strategic thinking. Because he understood the technology, he was able to apply cost curves that nobody had before.”

McGuirk expects Venegas to lead a company in the not-too-distant future: “He’s got that broad array of skills you look for in a top executive. He’s just a guy who makes things happen.”

Venegas moved on to Dial Global, which owned Westwood One, briefly serving as a consultant. That experience gave Venegas his first exposure to the content side of the business.

McGuirk recommended Venegas to Univision Deportes and ESPN Star veteran Sandy Brown, who was starting up One World Sports, now available in more than 30 million homes.

“We have a lot of blocking and tackling to get done with a start-up, so you need someone who’s organized and vigilant,” Brown says. “It’s always helpful when you’ve got a CFO who is very enthusiastic about your product.”

Venegas says he is very excited about being in the sports business. “This is another opportunity to help build a business, which is a lot more enjoyable than restructuring them,” he says.

Venegas has bruises to show for his love of sports. He plays soccer with high schoolers, which can be dangerous at his age, and in an over-30 league. His sons are getting into the game; he serves as their team’s assistant coach.

In his younger days, Venegas was a competitive sailor. He also loves auto racing (he recently drove in a six-hour endurance race with go-karts) and takes his kids to indoor tracks.

Venegas is involved in the BMW Car Club’s street survival program, which can save lives by teaching young drivers how to manage emergency situations. “If I can get across to just one of these kids how to behave more safely in their car, and it saves their life or someone else’s life, it’s worth it,” he says.

He’s also treasurer and a director of the Hispanic Federation, which provides grants to Latino nonprofit agencies. One program, Crear Futuros, helps student succeed at the City University of New York by providing mentors and tutoring. “Our board tries to support programs that have a local impact but that can scale nationally,” he says.

Wayward Pines showrunner Chad Hodge’s first big production was in his parents’ Highland Park, Ill., home.

Hodge, who spent much of his youth doing theater, put on his own version of Cats, directing his brothers and sisters in their basement turned newspaper covered trash heap.

The charismatic 37-year-old has since moved on to other entertainment pursuits, working on television series such as ABC’s Veritas: The Quest, The CW’s Runaway and NBC’s The Playboy Club.

Next up for him is Fox’s Wayward Pines, a 10-episode straight-to-series order based on the novels by Blake Crouch. In the run-up to the program’s global May 14 premiere in more than 126 countries, the network made the first episode of Wayward Pines available digitally from April 24-30.

In addition to showrunning, Hodge is an executive producer and writer on the series.

“I mean he is sort of what you hope for when you find somebody to be a writer in television,” says Darren Star, who worked with Hodge on Runaway. “I think he’s like a bit of a prodigy in that sense.”

John Hughes Land

Hodge remembers as a kid riding his bike about a block and a half from his house to watch director John Hughes film a scene from Weird Science.

“The stories John Hughes told about that time and about kids like that, that felt like my childhood and my adolescence for sure,” says Hodge, who refers to the Chicago suburbs he grew up in as “John Hughes Land.”

“My parents and the community and everyone was always very encouraging of the arts and of theater,” says Hodge. “And I never felt weird or an outsider for wanting to be into acting and theater and plays instead of sports, which I know a lot of kids in a lot of places have that difficulty.”

Hodge wanted to pursue acting until the summer before starting college when he worked for a talent agency in downtown Chicago.

He says that many of the agency’s clients were very vocal about their unhappiness with acting and the majority of them didn’t earn enough to make ends meet.

The experience freaked him out, prompting him to change his major at Northwestern University from theater to communication studies.

“I had this itch to write and I had an itch to produce and I had an itch to do a lot of other things,” he says.

After graduating from college, he packed his bags for Los Angeles with his sights set on writing.

He got his big break when he was asked to rewrite a pilot for NBC Saturday morning.

“It was like graduate school,” he says of working on All About Us. “It was amazing. I had a great time on that show. And I loved television and I loved the pace of it.”

Lost in the Woods

Wayward Pines, which focuses on the mysterious town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, fell into Hodge’s lap after Donald De Line, a longtime movie producer, gave Hodge an advanced copy of the first book in Crouch’s series.

“I read it in a day. I devoured it and I couldn’t believe how much I loved it,” says Hodge, who then agreed to write a script for the show on spec.

“I was really attracted to it because it’s so confined, so strange,” he says. “I had no idea where it was going and where it goes is this incredibly strange, beautiful place that’s very, very human.”

In Crouch’s books, the big reveal of what the town is comes at the end of the first book. This presented Hodge with a challenge.

“I was ready to do something different. I thought if I can make the question of ‘now what do we do?’ as interesting as ‘what is this place?’ I think we’ll have a new kind of TV show, a new kind of way to tell a story,” he says.

But Star says taking the hard road is something he has seen Hodge do before.

“I think what makes him a really good writer is he really he cares and thinks deeply about the characters he is writing and he doesn’t ever want to make easy choices with story,” says Star. “I think he’s a very smart guy. He wants to kind of write the stories that [are] unexpected; that go in unexpected places.”

Hodge has a number of other stories in the works, including a project with Star on beauty queen turned anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant. He also wrote the book for Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, a Universal Stage Productions and Goodspeed Musicals coproduction, which premiered at the Goodspeed Opera House in Sept. 2014 and is set to go on tour in fall 2016.

“To me, all good storytelling, no matter the genre, is the same skill set. It’s like making a cake,” says Hodge. “The foundation always requires the same basic ingredients. The difference is the icing. And I like using a lot of different kinds of icing.”

In the hunt for new new business, the increasingly lengthy “to-do” list of the broadcasting industry looks a lot like the résumé of Sam Matheny, the National Association of Broadcasters’ top technologist.

When Matheny was hired last July as executive VP and CTO to lead the association’s tech efforts, he not only brought extensive background in broadcasting and government affairs to the post. Matheny has also been involved in pioneering online, mobile and advanced broadcasting platforms since the 1990s. An avid aviator who got his pilot’s license in college, Matheny is well-equipped to help the broadcasting industry navigate a profitable flight path into the use of drones in newsgathering.

“It’s critically important for the NAB to stay on top of technology issues,” says NAB president and CEO Gordon Smith, adding that Matheny’s wide-ranging technical expertise makes him “the perfect fit” for the association. “Our role is not just advocacy in Washington, but also involves making sure our members understand trends in technology that keep us relevant and help us stay hyper-competitive.”

Matheny initially wanted to go into aviation, but switched gears and transferred to East Carolina University, where he majored in communications. “I figured that being a good communicator would serve me well no matter what I wanted to do,” he recalls.

While in college, he interned at WITN Greenville (N.C.) and got his first paid job at WNCT, where in his senior year he produced the market’s No. 1 weekend newscast. After graduating in 1993, Matheny jumped into tech with a job at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina in the Triangle Research Park.

Matheny specialized in data networks, supercomputing and web development, teaching himself HTML as the Internet was beginning to make an impact on academia. Those skills led to a job at Capitol Broadcasting’s Capitolnet Marketing Group, which was then making a pioneering push to launch websites for its stations.

From there, Matheny worked in a series of Capitol start-ups, including DTV Plus (delivering content and data to computers) and News Over Wireless, which built the first mobile phone app for a local TV station. Later, as VP of policy and innovation, he led groundbreaking social media initiatives and received a patent that allowed WRAL to deliver mobile broadcasts to the public bus system in Raleigh, N.C. “Capitol—under Jim Goodmon Sr. and his son Jimmy—are true innovation leaders in local broadcasting,” Smith says.

Since joining NAB, Matheny has worked to apply that background to help broadcasters capitalize on new technologies and translate complex technical issues into a language that government leaders can understand. “He speaks the language of a technology enthusiast without making it indecipherable for non-engineers,” says Smith, who adds Matheny has “an easygoing Southern style.…He’s our technology ambassador at the FCC and on Capitol Hill.”

To help the industry speed the pace of innovation, Matheny has set up a NAB digital officers committee of top digital execs in the industry. He also is deeply involved with the NAB Labs. Other top tech priorities include drones, big data, advanced advertising and working with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (Matheny is a board member) on the next-generation broadcast standard ATSC 3.0. He sees all of these initiatives as part of the effort to strengthen the future of local broadcasting.

“The technology will change, but the important thing is preserving the service broadcasters provide to local communities,” Matheny says.

When not taking deep dives into new technologies at work, Matheny loves piloting planes and duck hunting. A certified master diver, he regularly plunges into the deep blue sea with his wife and two sons. “If this technology thing doesn’t work out, you’ll find me out in some Caribbean island somewhere,” Matheny quips.

The 10th anniversary approaching, it’s time for New Orleans native Sandy Breland to reflect on Hurricane Katrina, how it changed her city and how it changed her. Such trying circumstances can bring out the best in people, and it was her leadership, then as WWL news director, that sent Breland on to much bigger things.

Breland proudly mentions how the New Orleans reporters played a critical role during those harrowing days of 2005, when residents were desperate for a little light in the darkness. “It’s really hard to believe it’s been 10 years,” she says. “In some ways, it feels like it happened yesterday. In other ways, it’s like a lifetime ago.”

Breland’s emergency planning enabled WWL to stay on the air through the storm and its aftermath—the one local TV station to do so. Her deft management and knowledge of the region helped keep viewers informed. And her first-class work amid dire conditions did not go unnoticed by the broadcast community.

“Sandy received such wonderful praise for her leadership and her ability,” says Paul McTear, Raycom president and CEO, who brought Breland on board as GM at WAFB Baton Rouge in 2008 and in January named her group VP. “She’s been a great leader for us from day one.”

Big Easy Upbringing

Breland speaks fondly of growing up in Metairie, La., of New Orleans’ celebrated food and music, of its beloved Saints. She had a neighbor she knew as “Mr. Jim” who was a photographer at WDSU, who spoke of the many adventures that came with working in television news. “I could tell he loved what he did,” she says. “I thought, that’s pretty cool—I might want to be a part of that.”

After graduating from Loyola University, Breland’s first job was at AM station WWL, then owned by the university. She switched to WWL TV in 1989 as a producer, then assignment editor, working her way up to news director. “I’ve always been a news junkie,” says Breland. “I have a natural curiosity. It’s one of those careers that picks you—you don’t pick it.”

With world-class entertainment and abundant crime and corruption, New Orleans is a news junkie’s dream. The events of late August 2005 were nothing short of a nightmare, but WWL was expertly prepared. It had built a massive 1,000-foot transmitter designed to withstand just about anything Mother Nature could whip up, the bunker-like base standing 15 feet above ground. As a backup, Breland had reached out to Louisiana State’s Manship School of Mass Communication in Baton Rouge well before the storm; when floodwaters prevented WWL staffers from entering the station in the French Quarter, they headed to LSU to broadcast.

Mikel Schaefer, then-WWL executive producer, says Breland was a rock-solid manager in the crisis but also knew when exhausted staffers needed a breather. “She was the glue that kept everybody moving in the right direction,” he says.

It would be some time before station staffers could even think about addressing their decimated homes and lives. Breland finally found a moment to reflect during the city’s famed Jazz Fest the following April. Bruce Springsteen played “My City of Ruins,” the chorus urging wounded souls to “Come on, rise up.” Breland says everyone at the fairgrounds—she, her husband, the police officers working the show—broke down in tears. “It was a powerful moment,” she says. “In some ways, it started the healing process.”

Breland departed WWL to be news director at KTVK Phoenix in 2006, and came back to Louisiana two years later to be general manager at Raycom’s WAFB, where she was promptly greeted by Hurricane Gustav. She put her newsgathering skills to work in learning the aspects of a job she was less familiar with. “I asked a lot of questions,” Breland says. “I knew what made a great reporter, and spent time with the account executives to find out what makes a great account executive.”

Breland came home to New Orleans in 2013 to be GM at upstart Fox affiliate WVUE. She’s reunited with many of her old WWL allies, including news director Schaefer and anchor/chief investigative reporter Lee Zurik. Having Breland running the station, says Zurik, is like having a second news director to bounce ideas off. “She’s the most strategic and organized person I know,” says Zurik. “A few people in this business have had a huge impact on my career and Sandy is one of them.”

Last month, Breland was a key figure in a blockbuster deal to produce and air Saints preseason games on Raycom stations in four states. It was something of a dream come true for the lifelong fan. Upped to a group VP position in January, with eight stations to oversee, Breland has her hands full as the Katrina anniversary coverage plan begins. Outside of work, she enjoys managing her two fantasy football teams, traveling with her family, including husband Dave McNamara, a TV producer, or simply staying close to home and enjoying the Big Easy’s endless entertainment options.

“It’s a great city,” Breland says. “It was a great city before Katrina, and it’s a great city now.”

When Ben Price worked at Xerox, his wife, Anthy, a film marketing exec, would bring home ad trade magazines. “I found them a lot more interesting than reading the financial insurance and office machine journals that I’d bring home,” says Price, now executive VP for ad sales at Discovery Communications.

He got a sales job at Turner Broadcasting, then moved to Discovery where he’s been for 25 years, building deep relationships in the Los Angeles ad community.

Price now splits his time between Los Angeles and New York, a far cry from Lake City, S.C., a small town nowhere near a lake or any other body of water. His grandfather was chief of police and his dad owned the funeral home. He was one of nine children, which colleagues say helped him grow up unflappable.

“He’s effortlessly good at what he does,” says Mike Sheldon, CEO of Deutsch North America. “There are not too many people that can have that many balls in the air and still make it look easy.”

Price’s family moved to Oceanside, Calif., when he was 9 (good timing because he met Anthy at 11, though they didn’t date till two years after he graduated from nearby San Diego State).

Xerox had recruited on campus and offered Price a position analyzing risky jobs. Later a Turner exec invited the Prices to a football game and asked if he’d be interested in media sales. “I said ‘Why not?’” Price recalls. “I’ve stayed with the business ever since.”

He’s made quite an impression over the years. “He represents stability with forward thinking. He is a fierce negotiator, really tough, which annoys me, but he always over delivers on our media and promotional deals,” says Stefanie Napoli, executive VP, worldwide media at Sony Pictures, who’s known Price for 26 years. She recalls Price arranging a special Mythbusters that looked at elements of Sony’s Green Hornet film.

“The first thought that comes to mind is integrity,” says Sheldon, who worked with Price on turning a Volkswagen into an underwater cage for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. “That comes from really understanding the client’s brand. You never feel like anything they’re doing will be at your expense.”

Discovery ad sales president Joe Abruzzese credits Price for building incredible external relationships. “Agencies and clients know he’s working 51% for them and we know internally Ben’s working 51% for us,” he says.

A lot of West Coast ad business comes from movie studios owned by other media companies. “Ben has to work harder because, when you think about it, all the money we get is really coming from one of our competitors,” Abruzzese says. “He’s got such great contacts. There’s no meetings we can’t get.”

Despite a challenging ad market, Price thinks this is a great time in the business. “It’s a pivotal time with so much being driven by tech data, analytics, the ability to target, measure ROI,” he says. “But none of that replaces the importance of relationships and trust.”

Monica Karo, CEO of OMD U.S., says she became very close with Price when her husband’s late best friend, Mark Goodman, who worked for Price, was diagnosed with non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“The two people that were by Mark’s side were Ben and my husband,” Karo says. A group of Goodman’s friends play golf in his memory a few times a year. “It’s not the best of circumstances but that’s when you see what somebody is like,” she says.

At the same time Goodman was succumbing to cancer, so was Price’s longtime assistant. More recently, one of Price’s brothers passed away. He volunteers and raises money for cancer research. “City of Hope is really important to me,” he says.

Also important are Price’s daughters. One is a producer working on Survivor, the other an NBC page working on Dateline. “Anthy and I watch and see their names pop up in the credits on these shows. It’s pretty exciting,” he says.

When Kim Godwin was in third grade, a teacher told her, “You really take initiative.” Like many a third grader, Godwin didn’t know what “initiative” meant. But, like anyone with initiative, she immediately looked it up in a dictionary.

A few decades hence, Godwin’s go-getter attitude has propelled her into an office at CBS Evening News as the primetime show’s senior broadcast producer. The Florida A&M grad was promoted to the position, from senior producer, at the end of last year.

Godwin’s resourceful approach of “just looking at what needs to be done and getting it done without being asked, without any drama,” is what made the former anchor decide she was more suited to the producing world.

In her early career, Godwin did a little bit of everything. During her senior year of college in Tallahassee, Fla., she put in a daily eight-hour volunteer shift at the local ABC affiliate, WTXL. She offered to do everything, from writing and editing stories to setting the rundown. Eventually Godwin talked her way into the control room, and “soon I was ordering graphics and talking to the director as if I really worked there,” she recalls.

A month after graduation, she did. WTXL’s news director offered Godwin a vacant executive producer slot, explaining to the then-20-year-old that he respected her work ethic.

She went on to a reporter-producer stint in West Palm Beach, Fla., followed by time behind the morning news anchor desk.

But she decided she preferred producing. “I wanted to call the shots,” says Godwin. “I wanted to be more involved in the editorial process, where it was decided what we were covering and how we were covering it.” From there she produced and directed local news across the country.

Following a “refreshing” few years as the interim director of her alma mater’s journalism school, the New York native came back to her home market as WCBS assistant news director. Godwin stayed in the position for a little under two years before being asked if she had ever thought about joining the network.

After almost eight years as CBS Evening News senior producer, Godwin last year was promoted by Evening News executive producer Steve Capus to the No. 2 position. Her 11-hour day consists of talking with producers and correspondents, editing and guiding scripts, trimming pieces, managing budgets and planning stories weeks in advance. “I like to call myself a Jill of all trades and a master of many,” said Godwin.

The broadcasting vet mines her local news skills daily and brings that perspective to the CBS newsroom. “When you’ve lived in those communities, you can speak to what people talk about and think about,” says Godwin. “You’ve been through it, you can reach back to an experience and use that as a point of reference.”

Capus also appreciates her local background. “It made her a better manager,” he says. “She has a terrific ability to spot a good story and is often one of the first people in our group to spot a trend.”

Going forward in her new position, Godwin hopes to do more stories like last October’s seven-part series on the National Guard-sponsored Challenge Academies, which use a military school approach to help high school dropouts get their diploma. “She was the driving force behind that [series],” says Capus. “Kim has a great ability to envision what a story is going to look like in the planning stage and in the final production.”

“These kinds of things are what we’re looking to do more of,” says Godwin. “It’s a lot like bringing 60 Minutes-type stories to our 30-minute broadcast whenever we can. [We want] people to feel like they walk away from our newscast and they’re informed.”

That’s why as news hit recently that the U.S. was raising its embargo on Cuba, CBS Evening News was in the Caribbean by primetime. “When stories are important like that, when historic moments are made, we want to make sure we’re on top of it,” Godwin says.

When The CW presented Jennie Snyder Urman with Jane the Virgin in January 2013, she didn’t quite know what to think.

“They just told me the log line, that they were interested in it, and I was like ‘I don’t know about that. That sounds too crazy for me,’” says Urman, who was asked to adapt Jane from the Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen as part of her overall development deal with CBS Television Studios, the production arm of CW parent CBS Corp. “A girl gets accidentally artificially inseminated being the log line?”

Urman spent that weekend walking around her neighborhood, mulling the idea over. And that’s when, as she puts it, “It just started to emerge a little bit as a fairy tale, and I started to think that my initial inspiration was this ordinary, hard-working girl who loves telenovelas, who’s life suddenly becomes one.”

Jane the Virgin’s success has been somewhat of a fairy tale for both the network and Urman, who developed the series and also serves as executive producer and writer.

The critically acclaimed freshman series, which is produced by CBS Television Studios and Warner Bros. Television in association with Electus, nabbed The CW’s first Golden Globe nominations, and star Gina Rodriguez won the net’s first Globe for best actress in a comedy series in January.

“I’ve been on the other side of both success critically and ratings-wise,” says Urman. “So I definitely did not expect it to be as well received as it was. It was pretty amazing.”

When Urman attended Princeton, she split her time between school and New York City, where she pursued acting. But she came to feel she wasn’t “thick-skinned enough or perhaps talented enough or wanted it enough as a career,” she says. “So I thought about academia, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do after college.”

Her good friend Victoria Webster suggested that she and Urman try writing for TV. The duo wrote a frenzied series of scripts and packed their bags for Los Angeles, landing on the West Coast on Sept. 10, 2001.

“Yeah it was really a pretty awful time to move away from New York and all,” says Urman of arriving in L.A. the day before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. “It was very disconcerting.”

Webster (who has since left TV behind) and Urman eventually nabbed a TV gig as writers on Hope & Faith, where Urman spent three years.

Urman took to the craft of writing early on. “I [love] the way I can sit at home and work on writing by myself,” she says. “And with acting I always felt like I was at the mercy of someone else who had to choose me in order to do it.”

Glenn Geller, executive VP, current programming, CBS Network Television Entertainment Group, who has worked with Urman since she came on board The CW’s 90210 reboot, describes her as a tireless worker at her craft.

“She is such a gifted, talented writer, and her work ethic is kind of barnone,” says Geller.

Urman wears many hats on Jane—EP, showrunner, writer—and she particularly likes that the show allows her to explore relationships and write complex women.

“I have so many interesting, accomplished, wonderful women in my life...and I want to see more of them on screen,” says Urman, who has two children with husband and cinematographer Jamie Urman. “And I want my daughter and my son to watch more of them as they grow up.”

Urman will continue crafting those kinds of characters; in January, The CW ordered a second season of the show. “I’m a huge fan of Jennie. I’m looking forward to many seasons of Jane,” says Geller. “I’m looking forward to the next show that Jennie will create for us. This is really just the beginning.”

Urman attributes Jane’s success to star Rodriguez.

“There would just be no chance it would work if you didn’t have her at the center grounding everything and as the emotional through-line that the audience can hook into and who you really root for,” says Urman.

One of Urman’s first major tastes of creating came in seventh and eighth grade when she was pulled out of class and assigned to write and put on a play for her school about the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

“It was probably excruciating for everyone both involved and watching,” says Urman of the production, which she estimates approached the five-hour mark in length. “But I really did love it.”

She credits reading and theater with keeping her focused during her turbulent teen years.

The relationship Urman had with her parents growing up also played an important role in shaping who she is.

“I am very close to my mother [and my father], but our relationship during my teens was very rocky, and the difficulty of navigating that terrain has always stayed with me,” she says.  “Growing up, I defined myself largely in comparison/contrast to her.”

That mother/daughter relationship, no matter how rocky, is a major through-line in Urman’s work, especially in Jane.

“I just thought I want to create a world where you could have really high stakes and really ‘holy s—t’ moments but at the same time if I could balance that with real grounded human emotion and a character that you root for, I thought that could feel different,” says Urman.

As the season finale of Jane approaches, Urman stopped short of any big reveals but does say, “everybody in our show has twists and turns and secrets and they’re all kind of going to come to a boil by episode 22 and I’m excited for that.”

Sometimes, the best work experience can come from being at home. That is certainly true for Karey Burke, executive VP of programming and development for ABC Family. Burke, who is tasked with developing new shows for the millennial- targeted network, can look no further than her five kids—all between ages 11 and 20—for inspiration.

Burke remembers when she was meeting with network president Tom Ascheim about the role, which she took last October, and recalled him asking her how “in touch was she with her inner 13-year-old.” She jokes that she had just listened to a Taylor Swift song in her car on the way to the meeting.

“My hobbies are hanging out with teenagers, which makes me uniquely qualified for this job,” says Burke.

Under Burke, ABC Family is heading outside of its comfort zone with new series such as the procedural drama Stitchers and a pair of unscripted offerings in My Transparent Life and Job Or No Job.

However, Burke would caution against proclaiming this is some radical new direction for the network. “We’re opening the aperture of our focus a little bit wider to include more points of view while remaining very focused on a millennial audience,” says Burke, who explains she is looking to attract more male viewers.

Adds Ascheim: “We wanted to expand the look of our air in keeping with the taste of our audience.”

ABC Family is among the most active in social media; Burke argues it’s “imperative” that ABC Family live in that space. Pretty Little Liars, for instance, is one of Snapchat’s fastest-growing brands (the network has only been on it since January) and is the most-followed scripted series on Instagram. PLL also accounts for the top five most-tweeted scripted telecasts in TV history. “Their viewing experience does not just happen on a linear channel,” says Burke. “They…demand that engagement.”

Burke came to ABC Family after more than a decade on the studio side of the industry—which itself followed a very successful tenure with NBC. Burke says having experience on both sides of the aisle has been paramount to her decision-making in her new gig.

“There are a million decisions that go into the making of a TV show,” she says, noting she has much more empathy for how long it takes to create a show from start to finish. “Until you have really done it, it’s hard to understand the scope of that.”

Ascheim would say that dual experience was among the many that led him to seek her out to fill the very large shoes of longtime programming head Kate Juergens, who exited a few months prior following a 10-year tenure. “I was hoping we would have someone who is a buyer with the mentality of a seller,” says Ascheim. “She has spent a lot of time in all pieces of the landscape.”

Burke is enjoying some of the freedom of working at a cable network as opposed to one of the Big Four broadcasters. “In broadcast television there is demand to be all things to all people,” she says, noting that at ABC Family they don’t have to worry about drawing very large number of viewers. Instead, she can focus on a particular audience.

That ideal is a far cry from Burke’s days at NBC, where she helped shepherd hits such as ER, Friends, The West Wing and Will & Grace in a tenure that lasted from 1988-2003 (with a three-year sabbatical at ABC Productions in between).

Burke began at NBC Productions straight out of UCLA as an intern, even if that wasn’t initially what she wanted. “I wanted to be in the newsroom, but they didn’t take UCLA interns,” she says. “I was kind of disgruntled about it until I realized where I was.” NBC Productions, the brainchild of former NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff, was one of the first instances of a network having an in-house studio, developing hits such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Saved By the Bell.

“I realized very quickly I had this very privileged seat,” Burke says.

One notable example of how networks are revamping their operations in response to a rapidly changing media landscape—and the ever-present need to bring the millennial generation in—can be found in Atlanta, where Jeremy Legg has spent the better part of a year in his latest post as head of technology strategy and product monetization for Turner Broadcasting System.

“As digital has become a bigger and bigger part of the business, they needed someone in the technology organization who sits between the deal people, the sales people and the content people to help glue this all together,” says Legg of his charter.

This attitude marks a major change from the past, when tech teams spent a lot of money and had little input in the strategies designed to boost revenue. “The industry is changing faster than I’ve ever seen it,” says Legg’s boss, Pascal Desroches, TBS executive VP and chief financial officer. “To stay competitive we have to evolve the technical capabilities we have, and Jeremy is a natural fit to help us marry technology and strategy.”

To this unconventional job description, Legg brings a résumé that until recently would have been considered unusual for a senior tech executive. He didn’t study tech or business at Brown, where he majored in political science. Instead, he learned how to write code and picked up the essentials of finance while working as a consultant and later working for Oracle. “Ironically, that was when I learned the most about financials,” he jokes. “If you are writing code for financial systems, the debits and credits have to balance.”

Legg then landed at AOL, where he ended up running the business affairs and business development group, before moving to Turner in the affiliate distribution group. Here, he was involved in a number of groundbreaking digital agreements, including the first TV Everywhere deal between Comcast and Time Warner in 2009.

“I look upon my arrival in this current job as the culmination of a series of seemingly random events that now appear strategic,” Legg says, with characteristic self-deprecating humor.

Married to Technology

Others make the more serious point that his background will help Turner deploy new technologies for new businesses. “He’s one of the few people around who is equally comfortable having a discussion about both the strategic direction of the business and the technology we need to develop in the future,” says Desroches.

In those efforts, Legg oversees a team of about 800 working in areas such as linear and digital advertising systems, the Web-hosting infrastructure, cloud-based services, app and website development, content management systems, video streaming, data management and other areas. Separately managed tech teams handle broadcast and satellite operations.

Current top priorities include efforts to deploy technologies that will bring some of the advantages of digital to television, with greater personalization, improved discovery and the implementation of data management systems so that content and ads can be more directly targeted to consumers.

With rapid changes in the air, getting all the various industry players to work together on new business models, such as TV Everywhere or sharing more data, also remains a challenge. “There is a lot of fear right now,” he says. “The industry can deal with that by building the walls around each of us a little higher or by dropping our swords and figuring out how to address consumer needs.”

That focus on basics carries over into his home life. Legg is careful to plan his business trips around his kids’ sports schedule and loves joining his family on the slopes. “Skiing is part of the plan my wife and I have to keep our kids coming to visit us when they get older because it’s too expensive to do on their own,” he says.

Before she had Bates Motel or Parenthood or Friday Night Lights on her résumé, Kerry Ehrin had the “Show Club.”

Growing up in Woodland Hills, Calif., Ehrin and her sister would produce plays in their driveway. Ehrin would write scripts from different fairy tales—Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan—and the sisters would gather kids in the neighborhood to act them out.

Her flair for storytelling didn’t end at the street. Ehrin begged her teachers to let her put on a play; in eighth grade, she directed A Christmas Carol. “One of nuns said, ‘I don’t think any other kid in school could have gotten kids to listen to them,’” Ehrin recalls.

Fast-forward a few decades, and Ehrin, 54, has a whole staff of writers listening to her as cocreator and executive producer of Bates Motel, set to return for a third season on A&E March 9.

While she never expected to be running her own TV show, there was really no doubt Ehrin would have a career in writing. A voracious reader at a young age, she majored in English at UCLA and wrote her thesis on Lewis Carroll. Her boyfriend’s dad, a writer, suggested she try writing a script and helped her find an agent. Ehrin quickly earned a job writing for the acclaimed late-’80s Bruce Willis-Cybill Shepherd ABC dramedy, Moonlighting, which led to a stint on The Wonder Years.

Yet work stalled in the ’90s. Ehrin penned some movie scripts and tried developing work of her own. During pitches, she would get nervous. She just needed the right show, with the right characters and working environment.

That came in a trio of Jason Katims-helmed series: Boston Public, Friday Night Lights and Parenthood. The shows were all character-driven, with an emphasis on emotion and realism. After spending years trying to shape her words into what was on TV, Ehrin felt liberated in Katims’ writers’ rooms. “I could let my voice breathe,” she says.

Katims says Ehrin has an “uncanny ability” to find herself in her writing. “She’s able to get underneath the skin of her characters and find their vulnerabilities and their flaws and all the qualities that make them fleshed-out human beings,” he says.

Given that ability, Ehrin was initially a bit reluctant to craft a prequel to Psycho and live in that dark world. But driving home from her first meeting, she started wondering about the woman who bore Norman Bates. The series would naturally have some elements of horror; that didn’t mean it couldn’t still be propelled by character.

It was an adjustment at first. Ehrin went from the relatively happy world of Parenthood and Friday Night Lights to plotting rape and murder in the Bates Motel pilot. “I honestly felt like I was doing college abroad,” she says. “I felt like I had gone to a foreign country.”

Even though the show “is ostensibly about a kid who’s growing up to be a serial killer,” says cocreator and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, Ehrin fills it with humor and humanity. “She really infuses the show with this truthfulness, this insightfulness, because she can emotionally connect herself so well to every character she writes,” Cuse says. “Getting the audience to feel something is the hardest thing to achieve.”

But for someone so adept at finding characters’ voices, Ehrin struggled with her own when it came to talking to the press during panels and conferences. “The wonderful thing about working in a writers’ room is that it’s an incubator, where you’re in fantasy land,” Ehrin says. In time, she learned to embrace her public speaking obligations as well as all the other non-writing responsibilities of showrunning.

Ehrin says she did not expect to enjoy working with the actors as much as she does. During past series, she was not on set much, instead spending time raising her three kids, seeing them perform in plays at a local community theater. “Getting to live in the fantasy world with the actors, being on set…it’s like playing,” she says. “It reminds me so much of being a little kid.”

Most people who major in applied math and statistics wind up working as actuaries. Calculating life expectancies sounded like a painful life to Howard Shimmel, so he found a way to get into the TV business. Now he’s Turner Broadcasting’s chief research officer, with a reputation for generating fresh ideas.

“He’s an innovative researcher and comes up with some neat techniques,” says Jed Meyer, U.S. research director for Omnicom Media Group’s Annalect unit, who works with Turner as a client and worked with Shimmel at Nielsen.

Among recent examples of his innovations at Turner are the creation of Targeting Now and ROI Now, the kind of data-based products that are widely popular with advertisers today.

Shimmel’s avoided an actuarial fate because his mother’s first cousin worked at ad agency Young & Rubicam as a spot TV buyer. The cousin helped Shimmel get a job at Nielsen, which seemed a less painful option.

He began working in local TV, soon moving to the young but growing cable business. In 1986 he joined MTV Networks as director of ad research. “Those were fun times. MTV was a young, crazy company,” Shimmel recalls.

He became an entrepreneur as president of Symmetrical Research, a company that early on incorporated credit card purchase data into its research, before returning to Nielsen, where he worked on fusing third-party data with Nielsen TV ratings. He also launched Nielsen’s media analytic business, consulting with companies like Turner, ESPN and CBS.

“He’s commercially savvy. He understands the business problems that research and data analytics are trying to solve and he’s good at applying the heavy thinking to the business problems rather than to the research for the research’s sake,” says Steve Hasker, global president of Nielsen.

Hasker wasn’t thrilled Shimmel left, but ties to the company remain. “He’s a very important client of ours. He’s also a very important sort of advisor to us because he understands exactly what we do and how we do it and being on the client and industry side,” he says. “He has a unique perspective on where our data and our insights are helpful and where they need to be improved.”

Jack Wakshlag, who retired as Turner’s chief research officer last year, hired Shimmel to run ad sales and sports research. “I interviewed a lot of people, and I thought Howard had a really good combination of substance and experience and sales savvy,” Wakshlag says. He praised Shimmel for being willing to try new things and following through on good ideas, such as getting the Media Ratings Council to verify Turner’s CNN All Screen measurement methodology.

“I can’t think of more of a fun time to be on the media side of this business than today, dealing with consumer change, dealing with market fragmentation, dealing with a place where some of the measurement tools are not as precise as we need,” Shimmel says.

“We’re using that data to optimize the placement of spots,” he says. “At the end of the day what the client is going to get is more GRPs against the people they care about rather than thinking about age-sex demographics, which I think everybody pretty well acknowledges now are a bad surrogate for the people [the client] cares about.”

Turner president of ad sales Donna Speciale says Shimmel has great rapport with agencies. “All of a sudden research is hot, and everyone wants Howard in the meetings.” she says. At Turner, “research is much more client-focused. The goal for us long-term is pushing to see if we can lead the industry and figure out what that next currency is.”

What Shimmel likes to do in his free time might be a bit surprising. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at me but I’m a big jam band fan,” he says, labeling Phish and Neil Young as musical acts he likes to catch. “I’m lucky enough that I have two kids that live in Boulder, Colo.,” he says. “They love it that I fly out to Boulder and take them to concerts, so that works well.”

It was love at first sight when 9-year-old Thomas Carelli stepped inside his own kind of magic kingdom—Madison Square Garden—in 1970 and got his first taste of pro basketball, and the Cincinnati Royals. “I was mesmerized,” Carelli recalls. “I really loved basketball, loved the NBA.”

Several decades and countless games later, Carelli is living the dream with a front-row seat for the league he fell hard for as a kid. He’s celebrating his 25th year working for the NBA broadcasting team, including the last seven as senior VP of broadcasting.

“To say that I lucked out is an understatement,” Carelli says. “The first two years here, I met this spectacular woman and we’ve been married for 22½ years and have three fantastic kids. And, as I explain to my kids, ‘Daddy’s got to go to work now, I’m going downstairs to watch the game on TV, that’s what Daddy does.’ It’s a little more than that, but yeah, I’m pretty damn lucky.”

Carelli also is pretty damn busy these days gearing up for the NBA’s marquee midseason production, All-Star Weekend, airing Feb. 13-15 from New York. Carelli met his wife, Toni Amendolia, at the 1991 All-Star Weekend in Charlotte, N.C., when she was promotions director for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Each All-Star extravaganza presents challenges, Carelli says, and this year’s twist is it will be held at two NBA venues, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. TNT will broadcast events from both arenas, including the All-Star Game at the Garden Sunday night (8:30 p.m. ET). ESPN will carry the Celebrity Game from the Garden on Friday night (see related story). NBA TV will offer live programming through the weekend.

The NBA and its partner networks already know the basic game plan, having done a two-site All-Star production in Dallas in 2010. “You divide your assets between two venues, which is challenging, but it also presents opportunities for people to expand their roles,” Carelli says. “Our team and the people we work with at Turner and ESPN are very experienced, and we’ve worked together a long time. It’s a great team effort, three companies working together. It’s sort of amazing that it goes so smoothly.”

Carelli’s path to the NBA began as a sophomore history major at Boston College; he was planning to go to law school when he discovered BC radio station WZBC. He called BC football and basketball play-by-play for two years, then after graduation in 1984 landed a job at WRKO-AM in Boston, producing Celtics games. He left for New York when the NBA came calling in 1990, ascending to his current post in 2008. Carelli is the NBA’s primary contact for the league’s national broadcast partners (TNT, ESPN and ABC) and all 30 teams’ local broadcasters and regional sports nets on matters including scheduling, production, promotion, content, sales and marketing.

Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle has known Carelli since Carlisle was a rookie player with the Celtics in 1984. Carlisle, head of the NBA Coaches Association, has worked with Carelli on issues such as getting broadcasters access to coaches during games. “The thing that’s great about Tom is he’s a transparent guy, he’s good-hearted and he wants the best for the coaches and he wants the best for the NBA,” Carlisle says. “We’re always able to work through things and get things right.”

Away from work, Carelli coaches his twin 10-year-old boys’ basketball team. Carelli and his wife also have a 12-yearold daughter with autism, which, he says, is “happily, a full-time job.” They have received support from the NBA on autism by, among other things, encouraging broadcasters to wear the Autism Speaks lapel pin to promote World Autism Awareness Day, April 2. Carelli is grateful to the past NBA commissioner David Stern and current leader Adam Silver for embracing the cause. “They’ve been extraordinary,” Carelli says. “The support they’ve shown myself and my family has been remarkable.”

As the showrunner of Criminal Minds, Erica Messer guides one of CBS’ core drama franchises. But wild horses almost dragged her into a news career.

Messer grew up in Maryland, near Assateague Island, a federally protected seashore populated by feral ponies and long a target of development-mad state officials. As an undergrad in the mid-’90s at Salisbury University, Messer made several short documentaries about Assateague and overdevelopment in Worcester County, Md.

Driven by her student-documentary experience, she almost accepted a job at 48 Hours after graduation, but decided that New York felt too close to home. So she headed to L.A., still intent on working in TV. She landed as an assistant in drama development at X-Files-era Fox.

“I’m reading these scripts, and I realize I don’t want to be giving notes on these scripts,” she says. “I want to be giving these scripts to the network.”

She joined Party of Five as an assistant, going on to write for Alias, The OC and Charmed. She joined the staff of Criminal Minds for its first season in 2005, then took the helm in 2011 after the exit of original showrunner Ed Bernero. Now Messer prides herself on running a series that, for writers, serves as the kind of supportive setting that, she says, she learned from watching Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman running the staff on Party of Five.

“I want to be able to provide that same environment here,” she says. “I want people who come in these doors to say it’s a really good place to work, it’s a really good camp.”

It’s also a really good ratings generator. In its 10th season, Criminal Minds is currently CBS’ second-highest-rated series in Nielsen live-plus-seven ratings, averaging a 3.9 through Jan. 4, behind only The Big Bang Theory. In a season in which CBS has seen its demo ratings fall even as it continues to hold the lead among broadcasters in total viewers, Criminal Minds is as important to the network as ever.

Not that the show lacks critics. Criminal Minds has drawn occasional fire for its emphasis on violent crime. But Messer contends that the show focuses on “the heroes of the story”—the law enforcement agents who track down violent criminals. (Messer’s brother is a cop in Florida.) But while she has shaped the content of the show, it has also shaped her.

“I write to my fears a lot as a mom with kids,” she says. “I make sure whenever I go out that I park near a light of some sort, or if I’m with the kids, we’re as close to the door as we can be.” That impulse to worry even during the most mundane moments is part instinct, she says. “But I don’t know that I would have that if it wasn’t for this show.”

Scary, yes, but scary stories told well are as popular as ever. CBS may be banking on that as it mulls a Criminal Minds spinoff created by Messer that would focus on a team that investigates crimes committed against Americans abroad. An imbedded pilot for the spinoff, which will air as an episode of Criminal Minds, shoots in February.

While there is no word yet whether the spinoff will go to series, network executives are hopeful.

“I have tremendous confidence in her,” CBS Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler says of Messer. “I don’t like getting out ahead of myself, but I can say that in terms of how she’s built the show, the amount of thought and prep and research she’s brought into the development process, it’s been with surgical precision, and she’s really impressed us.”

If the spinoff takes, Messer plans to run both shows. She is not naïve about how much work that will take.

“I believe in hiring good people who love what they do, and once you do that, everything falls into place,” she says. As for what she hopes will be the Criminal Minds mothership, “I would never do anything to hurt this show, and I would never leave it,” she says. “I’ve been with it for 10 years. It’s like a third child to me.”

A sign on Byron Harmon’s office wall says: “The bad news is, time flies. The good news is, you’re the pilot.” If ever anyone has shown a knack for getting more out of the given day than any human can reasonably expect to, it’s the WNYW New York news director. An author, playwright, film producer and soon-to-be ultra-marathoner, Harmon is happiest when he’s mega-tasking. “I try to use almost every minute of the day to do something,” he says. “It’s rare I’m not doing anything.”

It’s also rare that one lands their first news director job in the No. 1 market. But that’s how it works for Byron Harmon. “He knows news, he’s opened bureaus and managed large groups of people,” says Lew Leone, VP/general manager of WNYW-WWOR. “Byron is a guy who gets things done.”

Raised in rural Louisiana, Harmon joined the army to pay for college, and learned to relate to people from all cultures. His roommates at Fort Riley, he says, included a neo-Nazi, a guy from the Appalachians who’d never known a black person, and a Satanism devotee. Making matters more complicated, Harmon was in a Black Nationalist phase. “Over time, we started having interesting conversations about race, class, identity,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I respected them, but I understood how they became that way.”

Harmon spent two years in Germany, and was counting the days until his release when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Harmon—who scouted bomb targets—was needed in Iraq. Eight months later, he was free, and off to college. He took a communications class, and realized his military training—monitoring several radios, making decisions with senior officers breathing down his neck—might work in the TV world. He rose quickly, from a “glorified PA” at WBRZ Baton Rouge, to producer at KJRH Tulsa, and on to major markets.

Back on the East Coast, Katherine Green, then news director at WFLA Tampa, kept notes on all the producers nationwide who caught her eye. Harmon’s work, full of emotion and energy, got him in her giant notebook. When Green became news director at WBAL Baltimore, she enticed Harmon to join her. About a year in, Harmon had an offer to work at WCBS New York. He told Green that God told him to take the job.

“She said, ‘God gave you some bad advice,’” recalls Harmon with a laugh.

Many years later, Green brought Harmon on at CNN International. “In a business filled with aggressive and assertive, Type-A personalities, he’s one who is thoughtful,” says Green.

The learning curve in international news is massive, but Harmon soaked it up. “Byron was never afraid to say, ‘What’s the thinking behind that, how does that come together?’” says Tony Maddox, CNN International executive VP and managing director.

But the globe-hopping flights were constant, and a near breakdown, he says, prompted his resignation. Harmon unplugged from the media world—and the world at large—for months, and was watching a special on solitary confinement when he says he saw bits of himself in the inmates. “I said, ‘I have to get back into television,’” Harmon says.

He landed at WNYW in 2012, and a year later was named news director. Good Day New York is up 23% since then, and he’s overseen the launch of Fox Docs, the behind-the-scenes news franchise Big Idea, and freewheeling Friday Night Live.

The consummate polymath, Harmon has authored several novels and a memoir, fittingly titled God Gave Me Some Bad Advice, along with a play. A murder mystery is set for a May publication. By then, with any luck, Harmon will have run a 50-mile ultra-marathon. He is skipping those 26.1-mile endurance tests altogether, he says, because “everybody does marathons.”

Harmon isn’t one to stay put for too long, but he’s enjoying his time at Fox 5. “Maybe some great adventure will come along,” he says. “But right now, I’m in a great space.”

For the past three years, the most-watched show in primetime has been NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which is coming off another strong season averaging over 21 million viewers in 2014, setting it up to remain No. 1 yet again.

While much of that credit goes to the insatiable appetite for football, many media watchers cite NBC’s stellar game coverage, a quality that can be timed back to the day ten years ago, when former NBC Sports head Dick Ebersol poached producer Fred Gaudelli from ESPN.

“There is nobody like him in television and likely never will be again,” says SNF booth analyst Chris Collinsworth.

Top of His Game

Gaudelli will tell you that SNF has risen to the top because, like most great teams, he and his staff are never satisfied. “There isn’t anything we’ve done that can’t be improved upon,” he says. “Everybody shares that belief.”

Being the top show on TV means more than just football fans are watching, a truth that isn’t lost on Gaudelli. “You want to make sure that while you’re not going to talk down to the football fans, you’re not speaking a language that only the coaching profession can understand,” he says, adding that a lot the SNF broadcasts focus on the personalities and the stories. “We can do X’s and O’s, but that’s not why we became the No. 1 show.”

And like a good quarterback, the tireless Guadelli leads by example.

“There isn’t one part of our broadcast that doesn’t have Fred’s direct involvement,” says Collinsworth. “I’m not sure he ever sleeps.”

Gaudelli is now also set to helm his fifth career Super Bowl as NBC gets the honors next month at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

The TV pro is well versed in the hoopla that surrounds the event, and believes his philosophy has not changed much since his first go-round—Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003. To Gaudelli, it’s all about prep, using the right equipment for the right reasons, and remembering that despite the hype, it’s still about the play and the history of the game.

“We really try to keep it simple,” he says. “At the end of the day you’re going to be judged on how you cover the game, but you want to make it feel special.”

In Arizona, Gaudelli will utilize new 4K technology. He says NBC is planning on having as many as six 4K cameras that will be positioned in areas such as the goal line and down both sidelines. “We want it to look like the spectacle that the Super Bowl is.”

Calling Career Audibles

While Gaudelli has enjoyed a long and fruitful career in the production truck, he originally envisioned himself carrying the ball. “I always wanted to be a player,” he remembers. But like many who aren’t paid to play sports for a living, he gave up that dream during his teen years, instead focusing on becoming a broadcaster; that dream too was dashed: “I realized that I just didn’t have a great voice,” he says.

But while interning at the former Metro- Media Channel 5 in New York during college, he found his true calling, doing PA work on Sports Extra. “I thought this could be a better road for me,” he says.

But Gaudelli’s first real break came in that most auspicious of spots: the ESPN mailroom. He was working at a local radio station in New Rochelle, N.Y. shortly after graduation from Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus in 1982; the station’s owner—who happened to be friends with an executive at ESPN—set up an interview. Gaudelli eventually vaulted from the mailroom to remote production as an entrylevel PA, remaining, and rising, at ESPN until 2001, gaining invaluable experience through a variety of positions, most notably producing ESPN’s Sunday Night Football telecasts for 10 years. Following a move to ABC to helm Monday Night Football until the franchise moved to ESPN, Gaudelli was hired by NBC when the network regained NFL rights beginning in 2006.

Spending multiple years with two sports powerhouses in ESPN and NBC afforded Gaudelli the opportunity to work under some of TV’s best sports executives, with NBC’s Dick Ebersol and ESPN’s Bill Fitts standing out.

“He got everything done through relationships,” Gaudelli says of Ebersol; Gaudelli also appreciated the legendary exec’s hands-off approach. “When he hired me, he really let me do my job.”

And Fitts gave Guardelli a treasured piece of advice. He remembers Fitts telling him to “throw out every note from any previous show,” so he could start every new telecast with a blank slate. He plans to do just that next month in Arizona.

And after all the confetti’s done flying? Gaudelli heads into his own offseason, where he hopes to catch up on all the things he missed over the past five months. “I like to see all the movies I missed from August-February.”

Sandy Frank has been selling shows into syndication since before syndication even existed.

At just 21, he sold Pantomime Quiz, hosted by Mike Stokey, to NBC, where it aired in 1952 as part of the show’s long life that included runs on all three major networks.

“I felt very confident that I could sell anything. I had a lot of gumption and I always felt I could do the impossible,” says Frank, now 85 and still working hard.

“Sandy was one of the people who pioneered the independent sale of products,” says Dave Kenin, former president of CBS Sports and former executive VP of Crown Media. “It was very competitive, and for an independent seller to get out and clear markets and sell products, it took a special breed of cat.”

Through the years, Frank has been behind the sale of some of TV’s earliest franchises, including Name That Tune, Lassie, The Parent Game and The Dating Game. The FCC’s institution of the prime access rule in 1971, which prevented station affiliates from airing network-produced programming in the hour prior to primetime, was a golden opportunity for Frank.

“I was the first distributor to have three shows on in prime access during the same season: Treasure Hunt, The Bobby Vinton Show and Name That Tune. I became the king of syndication,” says Frank. He also had some hard and fast rules to doing business, says Tom Battista, former executive VP, CBS TV Stations, and president of Sandy Frank Entertainment.

“Rule 1 was never pitch to someone who can’t give you an order. The program director or sales guys could and should be in the meeting, but you had to have the decision-maker in the room,” says Battista. “Rule 2 was to never, ever pitch a program over the phone. You’ve got to press the flesh, Sandy would say. And rule 3 was to be well-researched in the particular market you were pitching.”

While traveling the world buying and selling shows, Frank had some singular experiences.

In April 1977, Frank attended MIP in Cannes, France, where he first encountered the Japanese animated sci-fi show Gatchaman. After seeing the success of Star Wars in May 1977, Frank committed to distributing the series in the U.S., adapting it to Battle of the Planets. Sandy Frank Entertainment also had been distributing and dubbing Japanese Daiei monster films since the mid-’60s, which later were lampooned by Comedy Central’s Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Also in 1977, Frank read Israeli prime minister Menachen Begin’s autobiography, Revolt, and optioned the rights for $100,000, with the intention of producing and distributing a movie based on it. The movie never got made, but Frank ended up helping Barbara Walters land her historic interview with Begin and Egyptian prime minister Anwar Sadat.

He also acquired the rights to Sadat’s autobiography for $100,0000, and appeared on a broadcast to the Egyptian nation announcing that he was making a movie based on Sadat’s life. That project became a miniseries, produced by Columbia Pictures and starring Louis Gossett, Jr. as Sadat. Because Gossett was much darker skinned than Sadat, the Egyptian government disliked the project. It banned sales of Coca-Cola, then the parent company of Columbia.

Frank also worked with Columbia Pictures on another project, Lie Detector, for which he put up the money to produce 150 episodes at $135,000 per week. Frank managed to raise the capital and get the show sold, but Lie Detector failed to score ratings. As a courtesy to his station customers, he pulled the show with the intention of replacing it a few months later with Name That Tune.

In the meantime, however, a new show was being shopped by the upstart King brothers: Wheel of Fortune. Stations bought that show to replace Lie Detector and never looked back.

“I gave up the most valuable thing in syndication— prime-access time periods,” says Frank.

That was disappointing, but it didn’t slow the man down. Today, Frank is preparing to attend his 51st NATPE show. In 1964, he launched the NATPE distributors’ hospitality suite at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York City.

At the time, distributors weren’t allowed to attend NATPE, which started in 1963 and stands for the National Association of Television Program Executives. Frank circumvented the rules by booking a suite at the hotel and inviting the meeting’s 71 program directors to come to his suite, enjoy some refreshments and screen his two shows: Buckaroo 500 and You Asked For It.

This year, Frank is pitching several programs and packages to buyers: half-hour game show Face the Music, a format that Frank produced and sold from 1979-82; half-hour docudrama Burden of Proof; unscripted half-hour Strike it Close; docudrama half-hour If Not Now… When; and the Duke Racing catalog, which features 150 episodes covering a variety of auto races.

“Sandy’s chief characteristic is intensity,” says Kenin. “He’s never willing to take no for an answer.”

When David Wisnia took over business operations at TVGN in April, he had a plan.

“I wanted to make sure that we were a network that wasn’t just predicated on hits alone—that we were well-diversified in all areas and all facets of our business,” says Wisnia, who is president of business operations at the network.

Under Wisnia’s watch, TVGN has seen a number of gains, including financial growth in the triple-digits (percentage-wise) over the last 10 months, as well as the addition of more than 40 new advertisers. The net has also seen a 47% improvement in HD penetration year-over-year and has made an international distribution deal with Banijay and a domestic digital pact with CBS Interactive that allows for EST distribution, a first for the network.

Wisnia, who works closely with TVGN entertainment and media president Brad Schwartz, was tasked with helping to move the network past its image as a TV listing channel to a stand-alone general entertainment brand. On Jan. 14, the network will formally leave TV Guide behind when it transforms into Pop, which aims to celebrate the fun of being a TV and film fan.

“David’s guiding hand is already evident in the tremendous momentum that TVGN has generated during the past year,” says Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate CEO. “As the network begins the New Year as the rebranded Pop, his vision, guidance and planning will continue to play an important role in its success.”

The revamp has been in the works since CBS bought a 50% stake in TVGN in 2013. Lionsgate holds the other half-stake. That partnership, Wisnia says, gives the network access to properties most nets don’t have.

“If you go back to the history of TV Guide, it has tremendous brand recognition,” says Wisnia. “It was a tremendous network. That being said, it’s not reflective of who we are today, and even more importantly, who we plan to be tomorrow and in the future going forward.”

Attorney at Law

Born in Chile, Wisnia moved to the U.S. when he was 2½ so his father could attend UCLA medical school.

The exec says he grew up enchanted by Hollywood but decided to pursue a law degree while he was in junior high and high school. After law school, he spent his first few years practicing at Fox. But Wisnia’s thirst for knowledge soon led him to approach David Sternberg, then senior VP and general manager of Fox Sports International, about learning the business side of the industry.

Wisnia left Fox for Star TV in 2007 to head North American operations of the Hong Kong-based News Corp. unit.

“He did an unbelievable job there,” says Laureen Ong, who was then CEO of Star and now works as a consultant and board member of WWE Entertainment and of Mary Baldwin College. “He was able to get deals done that everybody said were impossible.”

The new father—Wisnia has a 2-month-old son with his fiancée, Claudia Teran, Fox Sports general counsel— joined CBS in 2011 and has been on TVGN’s board since CBS’ purchase.

“David’s business acumen, operational leadership and strategic vision make him a terrific executive,” says Leslie Moonves, president and CEO, CBS Corp. “Previously, he made valuable contributions across several areas of CBS, and now he’s playing a key role in helping TVGN reach its full business potential, especially as they gear up for the network’s rebrand to Pop next year.”

Pop has already announced its initial programming slate with series including Rock the Boat: New Kids on the Block, Schitt’s Creek and Unusually Thicke.

Wisnia attributes much of Pop’s success—and potential—to his teammates. “Backed by the power of CBS and Lionsgate, and coupled with the talented team we have, the sky is the limit for Pop,” says Wisnia.

Growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Hart of Dixie creator and executive producer Leila Gerstein had dreams outside of show business.

“I grew up wanting to be a veterinarian. I was an animal sciences major in the agriculture school for a year and a half,” she says. “I never was a writer growing up. I never kept a diary. I never kept a journal.”

That dream came to an abrupt end in one particular class. “I had a come-to-Jesus moment when we had to dissect sheep,” she says.

It wasn’t until she caught the theatre bug that writing became a part of her life, when she attended theatre school after college. She began writing to fill the time between acting, tutoring SATs and serving coffee.

After getting a few plays produced, she decided to take the path some of her friends had taken in TV and moved to L.A. to write.

“I was broke, and I really hated being an SAT tutor,” Gerstein recalls. “I kind of impulsively moved to L.A. and tried to become a writer. It took a while.”

Her break into the TV industry came after she read a personal essay at an Upright Citizens Brigade performance, describing her love affair with New York Mets third baseman Robin Ventura.

“It was this personal essay about how I had had this terrible break-up, and when my heart was broken and I was at my lowest place, I fell in love with the New York Mets and Robin Ventura…and became obsessed,” Gerstein says. “And [about] how that led me out of my heartbreak.”

Oxygen executives attending the show were impressed enough to hire her to write a pilot based on the story, as well as two TV movies.

From there, Gerstein landed on writing staffs for teen-centric fare Life As We Know It and The O.C., which she followed up with producing stops on Eli Stone and Gossip Girl.

Inspiration for BlueBell, the southern setting for her CW series Hart of Dixie—about a New York doctor (Rachel Bilson) who ends up practicing in a small Gulf Coast town—came from her time balancing writing at Gossip Girl and raising her newborn girl.

Gerstein was looking for headspace far away from Gossip Girl in the Upper East Side and her screaming baby. “I think I said in the pitch it’s a place where you drink mint julep while your feet dangle off the dock in the water, and the men are hot and there’s romance and when you’re sick people bring you soup,” Gerstein says.

In a stroke of luck, The CW called to ask if Hart of Dixie (season 4 premieres Dec. 15) could be a medical show and not a legal procedural as intended.

“The show has so much heart as a medical show,” Gerstein says. “Instead of this woman working against the town, she had to come in and be part of the town. It quickly became a show about people who are quirky characters, and a romantic comedy.”

Hart of Dixie executive producer Len Goldstein admires Gerstein’s unique comedic view.

“She has an amazing ability to tell stories through a comedic lens, but to also engage the audience emotionally with the lives of her characters,” says Goldstein. “I think the incredibly impressive thing is that she’s been able to sustain a series that doesn’t rely on a person solving crimes or melodramatic soap turns by having a unique blend of strong characters and relationships that’s united by her voice and tone.”

Gerstein considers her greatest success as a showrunner to be the closeness among cast and crew. After wrapping the third season, everybody went to a pizza place across from the Warner Bros. lot. One of the camera guys put on a song featured in the finale and everyone started to dance and sing.

“What I had set out to do was to create a world I wanted to go to in my brain and was like a small town that was a community and a family,” she says. “Kind of by the last episode we had actually created that in the crew and in the cast. We were this community. We were this family. We were this small town.”

Dean Kaplan, executive VP, sales strategy, planning and administration at CBS, is a numbers guy.

“He’s probably one of the few guys I can say that’s better in math than I am,” says Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, who was a buyer when Kaplan called on him as an account exec for CBS.

“That’s probably one of the hardest jobs at any network,” Scanzoni says. It involves forecasting the marketplace, assessing the network’s position relative to the competition and devising a pricing strategy that optimizes the value of its inventory. It’s even harder at CBS, which has been a leader in the marketplace. “If the lead horse pushes price too hard, he feeds money to his competitors and ultimately winds up being the guy that holds the bag,” Scanzoni says. “It’s a tough job and I think he’s done a wonderful job at it.”

To Jo Ann Ross, president of ad sales at CBS, Kaplan is more than a numbers guy. “He’s extremely loyal. He has your back. You know when you ask him to do something, when it comes back it’s going to be correct and it’s going to be more than you asked for.”

In staff meetings, Kaplan is Ross’ straight man, dryly agreeing with whatever she says. But when preparing for presentations, Kaplan comes up with the hardest questions, questions that frequently get asked.

Growing up, Kaplan knew he didn’t want be a doctor like his father who made house calls in Great Neck, Long Island. Now he’s proud of his own son, who is in Pittsburgh University Medical School. Kaplan did the morning show at the college radio station at Bucknell University (another renowned Bucknell alum: CBS CEO Leslie Moonves) and decided he probably couldn’t make it as a DJ, but could go into advertising. He landed a job in the media department at Foote Cone & Belding, where one guy, Walter Bowe bought network television. “All Walter did all day was negotiate with the three networks, watch TV and estimate shares. I would spend all my time in Walter’s office and do extra work for him,” Kaplan says. “I just decided I wanted to do what Walter does.”

After several years as a broadcast buyer, Kaplan decided he wanted to sell television. He admired the way CBS did business, found an opening there and got a job as an account executive in 1981.

Ross joined CBS in 1992 as head of Olympics sales and she says Kaplan was the first to greet her. He also had the gumption to pitch himself as her director of Olympics sales, and he got the job despite his quiet nature. “My career took a different direction from there and I haven’t looked back since,” he says. When CBS lost the Olympics, Kaplan moved into sales planning.

The move made sense. “For a sales guy, his grasp of the numbers was always impressive,” says Fox News exec VP for ad sales Paul Rittenberg, who claims the distinction of having worked for Kaplan and having Ross work for him. “He always took time to teach people. It isn’t rocket science, but there are things sales people should know.”

Kaplan thinks his background as a buyer and seller of TV gives him an edge in planning. The job has changed as cable, the DVR and digital have altered the media landscape and Kaplan says he’s proud to have helped usher in C3 and C7 as ad sales currencies. “It is always change and crazy-challenging, which is good. You really wouldn’t want to do the same thing year after year,” he says. “I’m not sure what it will look like five years from now, but it won’t look like today.”

He’s also proud of the people who started in planning that have moved into sales jobs. “I made a difference in these people’s lives,” he says.

Kaplan likes to travel with his wife Marilyn, who comes from Lyon, France, but even that’s getting harder. “I can’t remember the last time I took two weeks off,” he says.

Les Vann knew he would be facing a stiff challenge this past summer while in the running for the WISH Indianapolis general manager job. The LIN station was years removed from its marketleader standing. The position got a whole lot more challenging when WISH then lost its affiliation.

Vann was on vacation in Ireland when he heard about CBS pulling WISH’s affiliation, and whipped off a quick email to LIN VP of television Jay Howell. The message? He was now doubly interested in the job.

Making WISH—or any station— work without network entertainment and news, not to mention big-time sports, is a mighty difficult chore. But Vann moved to Indianapolis knowing precisely what he was getting himself into. “This heavy a lift is not for everybody,” he says. “It is for me.”

A tiny handful of stations has succeeded following a network split. Many more have seen just how hard it is to draw viewers without true tentpole programming. “It is a heckuva challenge,” says Sandy DiPasquale, who hired Vann to run WKRC Cincinnati when he was president/CEO of Newport Television. “If anyone has the right attitude and can hold a staff together and motivate them, it’s Les. He’s probably the perfect guy for this.”

Hankering for Anchoring

Indianapolis was attractive to Vann for a number of reasons, including his Midwestern roots. His father worked at the post office in Springfield, Ill., and his mother was a nurse, assisting in the delivery of thousands of babies. As a boy, Vann played baseball, football and basketball. “My whole neighborhood, our entire recreational life, was centered around sports,” he says.

Baseball was his favorite; Vann fondly recalls listening to Cardinals radio broadcasts in the backyard with his father Bill. So it made sense that Vann sought a career in sportscasting, until a professor steered him in another direction. Working in sports might turn you off sports as a hobby, advised the professor. And there are way more jobs in news.

Vann worked his way up at WICS Springfield: photographer, writer, producer, assignment editor, even anchor. “I thought I was pretty good [on the air],” says Vann. “When I look at the tapes, I’m not so sure.”

He eventually made news director, then got his first GM job at WICD Champaign in 1994. The station was acquired that year for $3.5 million, he says, and was sold for $21 million five years later.

Subsequent GM jobs followed before Vann landed at WKRC in 2008, and proceeded to move the station ahead of longtime leader WCPO. “There was a sense of calm, of confidence at the station, and I attribute that all to Les,” DiPasquale says.

Vann resigned when Sinclair acquired WKRC late in 2012, and landed at LIN’s duopoly in Savannah a month later. Howell picked up on Vann’s knack for community when the two went out to dinner, and half of the restaurant’s guests seemed to be friends with the new GM. “He got those stations rocking in a very short time,” adds Howell.

Rebuilding Indianapolis will take way more time and money. The “countdown clock,” as Vann puts it, is set for Jan. 1, when WISH goes independent. WISH will add 20 hours of news per week. It is playing up its heritage in Indianapolis in promos and a 60-minute special.

As if relaunching a station isn’t a tall enough order, Vann had been dealing with his father’s failing health. Bill passed away Nov. 13; Les’ out-of-office email said he was “laying to rest the Greatest of the Greatest Generation.”

Vann got his work ethic and optimism from his father. Perhaps inadvertently, Bill also showed his son the value of doing what you love for a living. “My dad did not particularly enjoy going to work every day,” says Vann. “I’ve enjoyed every day, even the bad days. This is a great business to be in.”

It's often said that the job of any company president is to take a 10,000-ft. view of the business. Turner Sports president Lenny Daniels takes that idea literally.

An outdoor enthusiast, Daniels is a licensed private pilot, though he admits life has made him a bit more grounded of late. “I don’t fly as much now that I have kids,” he says, adding that he’s traded some of his blue-sky views for the water, taking his two children out on his boat. “I used to fly all the time.”

When Daniels is on solid ground, he runs the sports arena he inherited from David Levy in July, after Levy moved up to Turner Broadcasting president.

“He displays leadership that, honestly, we need in this organization,” says Levy of his successor.

Having been with Turner since 1995, Daniels knows better than most the importance of the NBA. Turner Sports has been a rights holder for the league since 1988 and NBA on TNT is the network’s longest-running program. Given live sports’ value and today’s timeshifted realities, keeping the league was a top priority. In one of his first major undertakings, Daniels helped lock in a nine-year renewal with the NBA that will keep pro basketball on TNT well through the next decade.

Daniels admits that even before he was named president, he was already hard at work in negotiations with Bill Koenig, NBA president of global media distribution. Turner first approached the league about a new deal in February during All-Star Weekend in New Orleans, a few weeks after Adam Silver took over as commissioner. “We really did take the lead with the NBA constantly throughout the whole thing,” Daniels says, noting it took a lot of nights and weekends spent to get the new contract done.

Levy credits Daniels for doing much of the legwork during the eight-monthlong negotiation, saying, “He was really the point person for me.”

Daniels’ on-court success extends past the pro game: He also masterminded Turner’s “Teamcast” of last spring’s NCAA men’s basketball Final Four. For the two national semifinal contests, Turner aired three different versions of both games—a national telecast on TBS and separate broadcasts on truTV and TNT that were specifically geared toward each participating college team.

Daniels wanted to give hometown fans the best experience possible for Turner’s Final Four debut. “If you really are a Duke fan, for example, you may want to watch and listen to your telecast that’s very slanted one way,” he says.

However, Daniels wanted viewers to get the full experience no matter which channel they were watching. “We don’t want to create something that makes you turn to a lesser experience,” he says.

Turner will have the Final Four again in 2015, and Daniels is optimistic about another Teamcast. “We are planning on it, but we haven’t committed to it officially,” he says. Turner ended up averaging 14 million viewers for its two Final Four games across TBS, TNT and truTV.

Beyond the hardwood, Daniels was also a key player in Turner’s acquisition of popular website Bleacher Report and the net’s rights extension with Major League Baseball—no surprise for a man who was trained to look at all aspects of the game. The exec got his start doing graphics for the 10 p.m. news at WTVJ in Miami. “I always wanted to work in TV production,” he says.

When Daniels first took his talents to South Beach, the station was an affiliate of CBS. In 1987 WTVJ was acquired by NBC—an event that would have a major impact on Daniels’ career.

When NBC broadcast the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Daniels went oversees to do graphics for rowing and kayaking. He was asked back in 1992 for the Barcelona Games before leaving for ESPN for three years to direct SportsCenter and NFL Primetime. Daniels eventually returned to NBC on a freelance basis to direct Olympics coverage in 2000 and 2002. The experience helped him understand sport’s place in an all-too complicated world.

“At the end of the day, your lead story is how many points somebody scored,” he says. “It isn’t the 6 p.m. news, where it’s how many people got killed.”

At the age of 7, Alpha House creator Garry Trudeau was already in the business of entertaining people. The young entrepreneur organized a neighborhood playhouse in Saranac Lake, N.Y., which he ran until he left town for college.

“I never had the slightest interest in performing,” says Trudeau of his community theatre. “I just wanted to put on a show.”

Trudeau has been doing just that—in one form or another—ever since. First with Doonesbury, the Pulitzer Prizewinning syndicated strip he created while attending Yale, and most recently with sitcom Alpha House, the first original series from Amazon Studios, the e-commerce site’s production arm.

Alpha House follows four Republican congressmen who live in the same house on Capitol Hill. The political comedy’s 10-episode second season bowed on the site Oct. 24.

The idea came to Trudeau after he read a 2007 New York Times piece about the frat-like abode of Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), Sen. Richard J. Durbin (DIll.), Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.).

But by the time he started shopping the series—he thought the concept lent itself to a sitcom from the get-go—it was too late in the 2008 production cycle. The material then sat on the shelf until 2012, when Trudeau told his longtime friend and Alpha House executive producer Jonathan Alter about the project while the duo took their quadrennial trip to the New Hampshire primary.

“I started to see if I could sell it,” says Alter, who first met Trudeau while profiling him for Newsweek. “And I had heard that Amazon was going into the original content business.”

Trudeau had major misgivings about Amazon, though. “My idea of streaming television pretty much began and ended with low-end productions on YouTube,” he says. “And so I really wasn’t very interested. I just didn’t see the potential.”

Trudeau says Amazon told him they wanted the project to be HBO quality and were willing to put in the resources necessary to make it successful. Trudeau had an earlier foray with HBO, having created the network’s seminal political miniseries, Tanner ’88.

Trudeau wears multiple hats for Alpha House, serving as showrunner, director, producer and writer. As in many cases, streaming’s gain has been newspapers’ loss, with Trudeau needing to put his daily Doonesbury strip on hold as a result; he still writes the Sunday edition in his spare time.

“I worked by myself for decades, and I never had a full-time employee,” says Trudeau, who has three children with his wife, journalist Jane Pauley. “Now I have 120 teammates. So, it’s a very different world that I’m in right now.”

Perhaps, but it’s a world he’s quickly been able to embrace. “He’s a guy who’s so talented that even though he’s worked alone for 40 years, he turned out to be a natural manager of people and leader of our show,” says Alter, who cites producers Elliot Webb and Antoine Douaihy as major players in the Alpha House team. “The tone of the show is set at the top, and Garry’s decency, sense of perspective, attention to detail, focus and work ethic all flow down through our production.”

While Amazon has yet to order a third season of Alpha House, Trudeau says he would sign on “in a heartbeat.”

“If this looks like fun, it is, and particularly after a second season,” he says. “The cast and the company becomes very close and very tight.”

Alter attributes the tight-knit company largely to Trudeau because “people really like working for him and do their absolute best work because he is motivating them to do so to live up to the very high standard that he sets.”

“I’m surprised to find myself still doing it,” says Trudeau.

“I think when I finished up the first season I went right back to the strip, I imagined it to be a grand adventure that was over. And now I see that there’s the possibility of a long haul,” he adds. “And it thrills me, because there’s nothing more fun than making this kind of television.”

Trudeau didn’t expect Doonesbury to last either, thinking the strip was a “one-off.” His father, Dr. Francis B. Trudeau, Jr., was even more of a skeptic.

“He kept asking me what I would be doing after the strip,” he says of his dad, who was a physician. “He couldn’t imagine that that was an actual career. He actually couldn’t really quite grasp that it was a job.”

Trudeau comes from a long line of medical professionals. His great grandfather Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau founded the country’s first fresh-air tuberculosis sanitarium in North America and his grandfather, Dr. Francis B. Trudeau, was a physician as well.

“[The sanitarium] was a pretty long shadow for me to grow up under,” says Trudeau. “I can’t say that I felt any particular pressure to go into medicine because my father had and kind of resolved that his son would be able to make his own choices and live his own life.”

The cartoonist and writer worked one summer in the sanitarium laboratory but the experience “didn’t take,” and he moved on to other pursuits.

In addition to art and theatre, Trudeau has long had an interest in politics, which has long been reflected in Doonesbury and was the seed of Alpha House, as it had also lent the structure for his first such series, Tanner ’88.

The HBO series, directed by Robert Altman, followed Jack Tanner, a U.S. representative from Michigan who was vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. The miniseries was a documentary-style scripted comedy that Trudeau describes as “kind of guerrilla filmmaking.” The script, he says, was only a road map.

With Alpha House, Trudeau’s writing is much more. “He wants you to do [the script] his way most of the time,” says Alter, who adds that Trudeau does take suggestions.

Trudeau tries to keep his personal politics out of the series, saying that he made the four main characters in Alpha House Republicans because he narratively thought the GOP was going through more interesting changes with the rise of the Tea Party in contrast to the more moderate conservatives from preceding years.

But Alter says that some of the qualities found in Trudeau’s writing do translate to his personal life.

“He is just an enormously warm and convivial guy,” says Alter. “The same quality that you find in Doonesbury and in Alpha House applies to him personally, which is that he combines heart and bite. He is an idealist and he explained to me in that first interview in 1990 that to be a good satirist you have to believe in something. You can’t really be a cynic.”

This idealistic approach coupled with his way with words has helped long cemented Trudeau’s place as a creative force.

“A hundred years from now, when people want to know about the latter part of the 20th Century in American politics, they’re going to be reading Doonesbury,” says Alter. “So Garry Trudeau’s place in history is already secure.”

“I think it’s a huge win for television, and particularly online television, that he’s bringing his talent to this new medium,” Alter says.

One of the first things Tim Kiely did when he began producing TNT’s Inside the NBA in 1995 was turn off the prompter.

After an admittedly bad show, longtime host Ernie Johnson threw and shattered his coffee mug in the studio out of frustration. The next morning, sitting on Johnson’s desk, courtesy of Kiely, was a new mug emblazoned with the words, “Postal Worker Needed.”

Five Emmys and nearly two decades later, Kiely and Inside the NBA continue to deliver. Kiely, now 54, had a vision for Inside, which returned Oct. 28 for the start of the 2014-15 NBA season. Teasing, pranks and jokes are just as integral as the analysis. Kiely likens it to needling friends at a sports bar. When Charles Barkley mispronounces a word or Kenny Smith contradicts himself, the nature of the show is not to ignore the gaffes so much as embrace them.

“That’s the heart of the show,” says Kiely, now the VP of production and executive producer at Turner Sports. “We will point out mistakes and make fun of them.”

Johnson says the loose, improvised style of the show might scare other producers. “The show kind of takes its personality from Tim, because he feels comfortable having it be a spontaneous, off-the-cuff, unrehearsed show,” Johnson says.

Kiely implemented two rules for the show. Rule 1: Never look at the cameras.

After stints at WTAE-TV Pittsburgh and ESPN, Kiely landed at Turner in 1995 with the freedom to experiment. “For him, no approach is out of bounds,” says Craig Barry, senior VP of production and executive creative director at Turner Sports. “No idea is a bad idea. The execution of the show is a direct reflection of him.”

Kiely drew inspiration from freeform talk shows The Sports Writers on TV and The McLaughlin Group in addition to his experience playing football in high school and in college at Columbia. “Having been an athlete, I wanted to recreate what the locker room was like without curse words,” he says.

Kiely, who also produces Turner’s studio shows for the MLB Playoffs, NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the PGA Championships and NASCAR, has been around professional athletes his whole life. His father did PR for the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. As a 14-year-old ball boy, Kiely was handed a list of the players being cut each Monday and had to tell each of them to report to Coach Noll’s office. Kiely saw first-hand that pro athletes were just regular people with feelings.

So in the studio, Kiely strives to put the athletes at ease. He recognizes how they see cameras: as a red flag, a signal to be careful with what they say or do. He wants his analysts to be comfortable, not worried about where to look.

“I want them to talk to each other,” Kiely says. “Once you look at cameras, you lose the conversation.”

“The guys point-blank trust him emphatically,” Barry says. “If he says it’ll be good TV this way or it’ll work, they’ll do it. They want to do it.”

If the athletes seem to go off-script, it’s because there isn’t one — thanks to rule 2: No on-air analysts in the rundown meetings. “I want them un-rehearsed and spontaneous,” Kiely says.

Of course, there’s also another reason for that. “We spend more time in those meetings figuring out how we can torture those guys than the X’s and O’s of basketball,” Kiely admits.

There was the time they shut Barkley out of the studio by turning it into a champions club at halftime (since Barkley famously never won an NBA title). And the time when Smith, returning from paternity leave, competed with Barkley in an impromptu diaper changing contest.

The pranks add to the familial atmosphere. “It’s just like the four of us are sitting in the living room,” Johnson says.

But make no mistake — in this living room, Kiely controls the remote.

“When you ride a horse, the horse can tell if he’s being ridden or if he’s in charge,” Johnson says. “The horse never has any doubt that Tim’s in charge.”

Like musicians and math wizzes, top technologists often start young. Fox Broadcasting president of digital David Wertheimer started coding computers at the age of 10, right after his school bought an Apple computer in the late 1970s. A few years later, he even insisted that his mother arrange a meeting with Steve Jobs when he visited her at Stanford University, where she was finishing up a stint as a visiting law professor.

“Apple had a little office in Cupertino, Calif., and Steve Jobs met us at the door before showing us around,” recalls Wertheimer, who went on to start his own Internet services company by the age of 15 and began working with his childhood hero Jobs at the NeXT computer co mpany as his first job out of college.

But Wertheimer was also an avid TV viewer who appreciated the power of programming. “I was always taking apart and fixing computers and electronic gadgets, but as a kid I quickly understood the importance of content,” he recalls. “Technology was nothing without the content. Turn the TV off, it’s just a box. It doesn’t entertain you. So I was always fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between technology and content.”

That perspective is not only central to Wertheimer’s strategies since being named president of digital at Fox Broadcasting in 2011; it is also a prime directive at major media companies trying to speed up the pace of innovation so they can monetize their popular television programming on a variety of newer digital platforms.

“David has helped lead the company’s evaluation of how network programming is consumed, and valued, across digital platforms,” says Joe Earley, Fox Television Group COO, who applauds Wertheimer’s efforts in creating the popular FoxNow app and his team’s work in helping analyze cross-platform media consumption.

This is particularly important for Fox, Earley adds, because “Fox has always appealed to younger adults….As we become a cross-platform network of the future, digital evolution—from both the consumer and business points of view—will be key.”

In that task, Wertheimer brings extensive experience in navigating the convergence of content and technology. After leaving NeXT, Wertheimer joined Oracle in 1993 as part of a pioneering effort to build alliances with media companies and producers for the online distribution of content. In 1995, he became the president of digital at Paramount, where he launched the first website tied to a movie and was involved in a number of other groundbreaking efforts.

He was also the founder of Wire-Break Entertainment, an early producer of original online content and in 2007 became the CEO and executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, where he helped executives at many major media companies understand the tectonic tech trends that were transforming their business.

Those contacts led to his current post, where Wertheimer has been encouraged to bring a more “Silicon Valley” style of management to Fox’s digital operations so the company can quickly embrace technological changes. “I like to think we are running a start-up in the middle of an incredibly dynamic larger business that has a very entrepreneurial culture,” Wertheimer says.

That approach has helped them dramatically expand digital operations, with over 15 million downloads of the FoxNow app and close to 300 million likes or followers on Facebook, Twitter and various social media platforms.

But keeping close tabs on emerging technologies and startups continues to be a major part of Wertheimer’s efforts. “He serves as valuable counsel to senior management on many of the frontier topics facing our industry,” says Earley.

Along the way, his tech work also led him to his wife, who was working at Entertainment Tonight while he was president of Paramount Digital Entertainment in the late 1990s. “She was way out of my league,” Wertheimer says with a laugh. “But one of the things I learned from Steve Jobs is that nothing is impossible if you have a vision for it and she became my wife and the mother of my amazing children.”

A vacant school building sits next door to AwesomenessTV’s office in West Los Angeles. CEO and founder Brian Robbins would like to take it over. His company has already expanded into an annex across the street, and in September moved competitor Big Frame, acquired this year, into a space adjacent to the main office, taking down the wall in between. But AwesomenessTV is a digital content company targeting teens and tweens—so adding a school building to its campus makes particular sense.

“We could shoot in there,” Robbins says. “We shoot a lot of school stuff.”

Founded in July 2012, AwesomenessTV has its hands in multiple pots—YouTube channels, talent representation, traditional television and film production. A subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation since last year (having been sold for $33 million before its first birthday), AwesomenessTV was launched as part of YouTube’s $100 million original channels initiative, meant to foster new content on the site.

But AwesomenessTV can be viewed as an extension of work Robbins has been doing since costarring on the late-’80s, early-’90s ABC sitcom Head of the Class.

School Days

The son of a character actor, Robbins began getting guest-star roles in his late teens on series such as Trapper John, M.D., The Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes. Then on Head of the Class he played motorcycle-riding bad boy Eric Mardian throughout the show’s five-season run, beginning in 1986.

“I knew after a few years of Head of the Class that I did not want to do this for the rest of my life,” Robbins says of acting. “The director, the producers, the writers, those are the guys who had all the power.”

Robbins wanted that power, and began pumping the Head of the Class creative team for advice. He and fellow cast member Dan Schneider took a crack at writing an episode of the show. Two weeks later they were filming that episode.

After Head of the Class, Robbins began working as a writer, director and producer in TV and film. With a few exceptions such as executive producing HBO’s Arli$$, Robbins’ résumé reads like a history of teen and tween entertainment: Smallville, One Tree Hill and What I Like About You for the WB and The CW and Sonny With a Chance for Disney Channel; he also collaborated with Schneider to create All That and Kenan & Kel for Nickelodeon. And he directed feature films Varsity Blues and The Perfect Score.

In 2009, Robbins’ reps at UTA set up a meeting between him and Lucas Cruikshank, a teenager whose YouTube channel was the first on the site to amass more than one million followers. Cruikshank was famous for playing a character named Fred, a young boy who talked in an exceptionally high-pitched voice. Robbins had never heard of him. After the meeting he went home and asked his children, then 10 and 11, and their friends if they had ever heard of Fred. The kids quoted the character’s lines and mimicked his voice as they escorted Robbins to the computer to introduce him to the source material.

“There was this complete alternative universe going on that I really wasn’t aware of in my own house,” Robbins says.

Alternate Realities

A day later, Robbins had decided that he would produce and finance Fred: The Movie, which Nickelodeon would buy, leading to the network’s series Fred: The Show. It also laid the groundwork for AwesomenessTV. Kids, Robbins says, no longer watch linear television and have been abandoned by the theatrical movie business. In digital, he saw a chance to capture a huge underserved audience. When DreamWorks Animation bought AwesomenessTV, Robbins’ instincts appeared to be confirmed.

“He identified an incredibly valuable white space, 12-to-24-year-olds, particularly women,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation founder and CEO, says of Robbins. “He, having seen that opportunity, went about creating content. He’s a storyteller, Brian. He has just done an incredible job of being a magnet for talent and of building out arguably one of the fastestgrowing and most valuable brands in that ecosystem, and he’s only just getting started.”

In April, AwesomenessTV acquired digitalcontent company Big Frame for $15 million. Big Frame’s channels reach more than 70 million subscribers combined. But AwesomenessTV bought the company for its talentmanagement division. Robbins emphasizes the importance of the company maintaining a close relationship with its talent. He describes how he recently gave a late-night pep-talk over the phone to one of AwesomenessTV’s biggest stars, Cameron Dallas, who was about to begin shooting his first feature-length film, which is being produced by AwesomenessTV. Dallas is 20 years old and has 5.9 million followers on video-sharing service Vine.

“I am able to relate to talent,” Robbins says. “That is probably the biggest bonus that being a bad child actor gave me.”

A local television executive’s career typically involves hopscotching the nation for bigger gigs, each time uprooting the family, finding a new home, learning the local custom. That’s not been the case for Chris Wayland—until now. The Bostonian has spent his entire career in Massachusetts, including a long run as general manager of WHDH-WLVI, until his recent promotion to executive VP/ general manager of Sunbeam Television.

That means a move to Miami for the former professional hockey player and coach. “I love where I live, so there are some mixed emotions,” Wayland says. “I love winter, I love hockey, I look forward to the NHL season. We ski a lot as a family. I guess we’ll have to take up boating or something.”

Wayland is psyched for the opportunity, which came when Robert Leider retired. For Ed Ansin, Sunbeam owner, Wayland was an easy pick. “Chris is an excellent manager, he’s very intelligent, he knows the business and he knows the company,” says Ansin. “All of that made him an obvious choice.”

Ice, Ice Baby

Raised in Winthrop, Mass., (“Home of Mike Eruzione!” Wayland enthuses about the 1980 Olympics “Miracle on Ice” star), the Sunbeam chief took a shot at a career in the game. After playing at Elmira College in Western New York, where he describes himself as a risk-averse “stay at home” defenseman, he secured a spot with the minor league Nashville Knights.

It was a local TV connection that helped Wayland get to Nashville. His father Ron was head of the New England Broadcasting Association, and knew Dan Rea, a political reporter at WBZ. Rea dabbled in placing hockey players with pro teams, and helped Wayland land with the Knights in 1994.

His coach there was Nick Fotiu, a notorious tough guy during his NHL career with the Rangers. Fotiu says Wayland had NHL smarts and hustle. “He was a real hard worker and a nice, funny kid,” says Fotiu. “Chris had a good head on his shoulders, and always showed up ready to work.”

Wayland’s time in the rough and tumble league taught him a valuable lesson: He didn’t want to be broke anymore. Shifting to radio after a season, he sold airtime on Cape Cod, and joined WLVI two years later.

He later slid over to WHDH, but those hockey dreams die hard. Wayland talked his way into an assistant coach position with the Harvard squad in 2000. After one season, his future plans became clear. “I love to lead and teach and inspire people,” Wayland says. “I realized I could do all those things in the broadcast industry, and make a lot more money.”

Wayland was promoted to general sales manager at WHDH in 2007, and general manager a short while later. His coaching lessons greatly help with station management. “I try to hire as many passionate, dedicated, competitive people as possible,” he says. “I try to get them to operate at the highest level possible, and get them moving in the same direction.”

Boston is a brutally competitive market, where the TV outlets include network owned, a Hearst TV flagship and top notch cable channels dedicated to news and sports. A highly wired populace makes it that much harder to draw viewers to television, unless it’s the Red Sox. Wayland loves scanning the ratings each morning to see who won the previous day. He brings that competitive fire to Miami, where he oversees crackerjack Fox affiliate WSVN in addition to WHDH-WLVI.

“Somewhere in the world, someone is No. 1—the Alabama of TV stations,” he says of the elite college football program. “That’s my goal—to make us operate at the level that is the best in the country.”

Wayland’s family will eventually make its way to Miami too. His four daughters should have no problem adjusting to the sun, surf and sand of south Florida. “Four girls, and I’m sad to say, not one knows how to skate,” jokes their dad. “It’s really depressing.”

When he wasn’t giving first-chance filmmaking opportunities to what are now some of Hollywood’s best-known directors, legendary producer Roger Corman was handing out sage guidance. Gale Anne Hurd, among today’s most successful film producers and executive producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead, still recalls one of the best pieces of advice she received from Corman, her first boss.

Shortly after the surprising success of Hurd’s 1984 futuristic classic The Terminator, Corman told her many were still expecting her to fail. “‘People are going to tell you that The Terminator is a fluke, that you got lucky once,’” Hurd recalls Corman saying. “‘Don’t believe them.’”

Corman was right. Hurd’s film credits include Aliens, Armageddon, The Incredible Hulk and two Terminator sequels. “I wouldn’t have a career if my first job wasn’t working for Roger,” says Hurd.

‘Dead’ and Loving It

The Walking Dead premiered in 2011 and returns for season 5 Oct. 12. Last season it averaged 13.3 million viewers—8.6 million of them in the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 demo.

Hurd retains a zombie-like commitment to the popular series, mindful of the pitfalls that can occur with successful shows. “No one feels we can [rest] on our laurels,” she says.

Hurd says one of the biggest reasons for the show’s success came when she, Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) developed the series. They were determined to avoid any typical TV series filming conventions.

“We wanted it to be more cinematic,” says Hurd. They approach each eightday shoot like a mini-movie, with actors “taking the zombie apocalypse seriously in their performances,” she says.

Showrunner Scott Gimple has long relied on Hurd’s perspective. “Gale has been a fount of wisdom,” he says. “Whenever I’m looking for a bit of expertise, I hit her up.”

Walking Dead is Hurd’s first smallscreen foray after years of blockbusters and small-budget indie films. “You can sense when the winds of change are blowing,” she says, noting that studios were beginning to make fewer films. “It was clear that the film industry was becoming more challenging.”

As a result, Hurd is expanding her reach into TV. A companion Dead series for AMC is currently in the pilot stage, and there’s also an adaption of Annie Jacobson’s bestseller Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base with X-Files creator Chris Carter. Syfy picked up her alien drama Hunters last month, and she is helping famed comic book author Warren Ellis with his small-screen debut.

Hurd’s own debut came after studying at Stanford with professor Steven Kovacs, who was soon hired by Corman as head of production at his New World Pictures. Kovacs later recommended that Corman hire Hurd as an assistant.

She originally started on the marketing side for New World but shared a desire with Corman to get into film production. “He made me start over at the bottom,” Hurd recalls. “There is really no substitute for hard work and doing your homework and being prepared.”

It led her in time to Terminator, cowritten with her first husband, James Cameron. After another marriage to filmmaker Brian De Palma—and the birth of her daughter, Lolita—Hurd wed screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh.

Professionally, her greatest love affair continues to be with the science fiction genre, leading her to be dubbed “The First Lady of Sci-Fi.” She is particularly enthralled with the genre’s ability to mirror real-world issues against a very unreal backdrop. “You’re able to subtly comment without making a message movie or series,” she says.

And that’s part of the great appeal of The Walking Dead, which, despite being set within a zombie apocalypse, stands in for real-world issues. “How do people survive when they are facing the breakdown of law and order?” Hurd asks.

It is a question Hurd will continue to explore.

Some people spend their childhoods dreaming about how they are going to grow up and get into the TV business. Not SallyAnn Salsano.

She was studying accounting and in her junior year at the University of Missouri, and she needed an internship. It was November and she was supposed to complete one internship before her second semester in January.

Like some people, Salsano found the answer to her problems at her local bar. On the bar’s TV, an ad appeared: “Are you looking for an internship? Call 1-900-93 Sally.” Problem solved, she thought.

Salsano made the call, setting up an interview with The Sally Jessy Raphael Show during Thanksgiving break, while she was back home on Long Island.

The interview went well, and she was offered a position the following summer. That was a problem.

Salsano marched into the office of Amy Rosenblum, Sally Jessy Raphael executive producer, and said: “Hi there. I’m SallyAnn. I don’t know who you are or what you do here, but here’s the bind that I’m in.”

Salsano explained her problem—and asked if Rosenblum could sign a form saying that Salsano had already completed the internship, displaying the gumption that many a Sally Jessy guest had. Rosenblum’s response (according to Salsano): “I don’t know who you are or what you are doing here, but I’m definitely going to say yes.”

Thus a producing star was born. “Her stories of her days in the talk-show circuit are hysterical and show that she has balls of steel,” says Mike Darnell, president of unscripted and alternative at Warner Bros. Television. “I have rarely met a producer more willing to do whatever she must to produce the show she wants.”

‘Bitten By the Bug’

Salsano finished up her degree and returned to work at Sally Jessy. Over five years, she climbed the ranks.

From then on, she never wanted for production work, whether on Warner Bros.’ Elimi-Date or reality specials for Darnell, who was then Fox’s head of alternative. Eventually, she interviewed to produce a daytime talk show at Telepictures, and found herself crying to Telepictures’ Sheila Bouttier during the interview.

“I didn’t want to work in daytime anymore,” Salsano says. “Reality was the big boom.”

Bouttier called Mike Fleiss at Telepictures and suddenly Salsano was a reality TV producer. While working at Fleiss’ Next Entertainment, she produced The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and other shows.

Making the Leap

In 2006, Salsano opened 495 Productions. The company’s first original was MTV’s Shot at Love With Tia Tequila, which turned into a six-series deal with MTV.

Salsano began producing shows, including HGTV’s Design Star and Oxygen’s Dance Your Ass Off. She also had other shows in production, including a crazy little piece called Jersey Shore.

New executives arrived at HGTV and Oxygen. They wanted to put their own producers in place, dropping her.

“The last show I had a shot with was Jersey Shore,” Salsano says. “I knew this show was psychotically crazy, and I didn’t know if it was good-different or bad-different. If Jersey Shore didn’t hit, I only had three months that I could afford to keep my doors open. My MTV deal expired literally the night before the episode aired in which Snooki got punched in the face.”

As everyone now knows, “The next day, Jersey Shore went through the roof. They picked up my deal for another two years and from there it just got busier and busier.”

In 2013, Telepictures’ Bouttier called, asking if she wouldn’t mind returning to daytime talk. The project—a twist on The View with a diverse cast—appealed to her and she took the job.

Salsano cast The Real by testing chemistry until she found what she thought was the right combination: Tamera Mowry-Housley, Tamar Braxton, Adrienne Bailon, Loni Love and Jeannie Mai. And the stars believe the whole thing works with Salsano aboard.

“[Salsano is] not fake or phony,” says Love. “You can see why the projects she produces become hits. They are different, creative, sparky and bright, and she is just as creative and sparky and bright as her ideas.”

On Sept. 15, The Real debuted in national syndication.

“I am sick to my freaking stomach, I am so excited,” says Salsano, who was so busy this summer she could barely make time to get married. She wed Peter Aronson, executive VP of IFC, on July 26 in Mexico. “I’m proud of what we are putting out. Last summer was a high school play. Now we’re going to Broadway, and we’re going to see if we’re going to make it.”

After 30 years as a correspondent for CBS News, Bill Whitaker was summoned to New York from Los Angeles to meet with chairman Jeff Fager. “I am thinking this is either really good or really bad,” Whitaker recalls. “Jeff Fager said he’d like me to join the staff of 60 Minutes. At which point your mouth drops open and you look kind of goofy.”

Whitaker had done some stories for 60 Minutes Sports when “it dawned on me, he should be working with us all the time,” says Fager, who is also executive producer of 60 Minutes.

60 Minutes is a pinnacle of TV news, and correspondents often come from the ranks of CBS reporters who understand how to focus stories on deadline. “Bill’s a real journalist. He’s done it all,” Fager says, recalling Whitaker’s reports from the 2011 earthquake in Fukushima, Japan. “To come out of unpredictable situations with thoughtful reports that stand out for the care that was put into them, for the quality of the storytelling and writing, those things add up to the kind of correspondent that will succeed at 60 Minutes,” he says. His first piece, on Mexican drug trafficking, could run in the next week or two.

Whitaker also brings to 60 Minutes diversity missing since Ed Bradley’s passing. “That’s important, too. It happens to be a side benefit because it’s not the reason he’s got the job,” Fager says.

Whitaker may have crossed paths with Bradley years ago, though they didn’t know it at the time. When they met at CBS, Whitaker told Bradley he came from a small town named (of all things) Media, Pa. Bradley said he dated a girl from Media, who turned out to be Whitaker’s best friend’s older sister. Bradley would visit Media and see kids playing kickball. One was Whitaker.

Whitaker says his cousins recall that growing up in Media, he would play TV news, saying into a stick, “‘This is Bill Whitaker reporting.’” But in college, Whitaker aimed to be a history professor. After grad school, that didn’t sound exciting, so he got a job producing videos for historic sites.

Whitaker liked interviewing people and the process of filmmaking. “It hit me that that’s what I’d been interested in all along, broadcast journalism,” he recalls. He enrolled in the masters in journalism program at University of California at Berkley. Before getting his degree he landed a job at public broadcasting station KQED in San Francisco. He started running tapes but was soon producing the station’s evening newscast. He wanted to be an onair reporter, so he sent tapes to stations and won a slot in a CBS program that helped local affiliates to groom (and pay for) potential talent.

Working at WBTV in Charlotte, N.C., Whitaker covered a nasty U.S. Senate race between Jesse Helms and Gov. Jim Hunt, capturing the attention of CBS News.

Early on, Whitaker contributed to the weekend Evening News, where Jon Klein—who later supervised 60 Minutes as a CBS News executive—recalls Whitaker as unflappable. “Even back then, he was very serious of purpose but very relaxed and easy to work with,” says Klein, now CEO at Tapp TV.

If you needed a story two minutes before deadline, you asked if Whitaker was around, recalls Dan Rather, longtime managing editor and anchor of The CBS Evening News and now host of The Big Interview on AXS-TV. As a person, and as a pro, “he is literally so honest you could shoot dice with him over the telephone,” says Rather, and on camera, “authenticity radiates from him, and with good reason. He has the heart and soul and guts and backbone of a reporter.”

Whitaker says he’s loved being a broadcast journalist and everyone who works in TV news would want to work at 60 Minutes. “It’s certainly a cliché but it’s true: I get a front-row seat on history,” he says. “For me it’s been the perfect job. If there’s a way to top perfection, this is it.”

Whitaker says it’s hard to explain why he’s been able to remain cool in difficult circumstances.

“I think when you are covering a story, your focus is on that and you’re not really thinking about the danger. I know that sounds crazy but you’re focused on the people there. I’m witnessing this, they’re living it,” he says. “I do remember after [the uprising in Beijing’s] Tiananmen Square there were days on end when we worked without getting any rest and I do remember at one point coming back to my hotel and taking a shower and what I was witnessing just sort of flooded in and I have to admit I was overwhelmed. Once you pull back and have a chance to reflect, it hits you.”

The hot spotlight of 60 Minutes means Whitaker will be dealing with a different kind of pressure.

“You come here and the intensity is of a different sort. You have all the resources you need, all the support you need and pretty much all the time you need to make the best story,” he says. “And it had better be; you cannot say ‘I’ve almost got it.’ No. You work with 60 Minutes so you’ve got to have it. I’m not beating that daily deadline but you’ve got to up your game and keep it up.”

Whitaker will be working alongside some of the top people in TV news, both on camera and behind the scenes. “I’m like the new kid on the block and I look down the hallway and it’s Steve Kroft and Lesley Stahl and Bob Simon. These are people I have looked up to the whole time I’ve been at CBS. And now their offices are right down the hall from mine.” (Fager says 60 Minutes staffers are breaking down Whitaker’s door to work with him.)

As for filling Ed Bradley’s role on the broadcast, Whitaker replies: “Who could do that? Ed was unique, a giant in this business. He was someone whose work and style I admired,” adding that he hopes he can add to the broadcast Bradley helped build.

And while diversity is a laudable goal, Whitaker says he’s bringing a rich set of experiences to the job as well his skin color.

“If race were a factor in why someone hired me, I bet that’s not the reason they renewed my contracts. I’m at 60 Minutes because I worked my tail off,” he says. “With the help of some excellent producers, photographers and sound techs, I managed to turn out some good stories—consistently. It’s not black or white; it’s journalism.”

Becoming part of 60 Minutes has also meant change on the home front for Whitaker, who had to move from Los Angeles to New York.

After they’d finished putting two children through college, Whitaker’s wife, Terry, had begun feathering their empty nest by remodeling the kitchen. “It was the kitchen of her dreams. We had it for about a year. And I had to come to her and say ‘honey, guess what?’”

He credits Terry for the kids he likes to brag about. Son William went to Yale and daughter Lesley is getting her master’s in physics from Case Western Reserve. And when Whitaker announced he’d be moving to New York, they decided to go too—at least temporarily.

The startup his son had been working for in Los Angeles folded and his lease was up, so he figured he’d move east, Whitaker says, adding, “He just got a job here, so he should be moving out soon.”

His daughter figured she could write her thesis as easily in New York as in Cleveland, so she’s also in New York—so the empty nest is now a full one.

“It’s great that your kids want to be with you and we want to be with them,” he says. “We know it’s not for a very long stretch of time so we’re just enjoying it right now.”

Some of the best 60 Minutes correspondents have been, in a word, venerable, and Whitaker is taking his place alongside the famous ticking stopwatch at a time when most people are thinking retirement. How long can he keep on reporting?

“I’m a very healthy older correspondent. At this point I have no aches and pains. My doctor tells me my heart is good, so I have no idea,” he says. “I know that I picked up my family and moved everybody cross-country so this had better last for more than a couple of years.”

When Colleen Fahey Rush speaks on Sept. 11 at B&C and Multichannel News’ Next TV Summit San Francisco, Viacom Media Networks’ executive VP and chief research officer will be revealing recent research the company conducted on the myriad paths viewers take to find and view content.

“How you become aware of a show, where you go to watch it…and some of the hurdles you might face to watch it…are so much more complex than they were even a few years ago,” she says. “As programmers we have to stay on top of those trends.”

TV has been a research-intensive medium since the 1960s, but rapidly changing technologies and consumer habits have made researchers like Fahey Rush more important than ever.

“Colleen’s research efforts have been instrumental in all aspects of our the business,” says Rich Eigendorff, chief operating officer, Viacom Media Networks, who particularly highlights her industry-wide efforts to improve cross-platform measurement. “People are watching more TV than ever, but without a way for advertisers to compare results, there is no way to measure the effectiveness of these creative advertising solutions.”

Ratcheting Up Research

Fahey Rush’s own path into the world of data and research insights began, she admits, “a bit by accident.” While getting an undergraduate degree at Cornell, she worked as an intern for CBS in the research department. “It was my first exposure to understanding how the whole business works off of Nielsen ratings and I was hooked,” she recalls.

After college, she moved to New York to take a job in research with the CBS O&Os in 1986 at a time when the growing importance of syndication and cable was changing the research.

In 1993, she took the top research job at Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo. “I was interested in doing something new and it was an amazing opportunity to learn about a thriving market and to educate agencies and advertisers on how big and important the Hispanic market was,” she says.

After a brief stint on the agency side, she joined VH1 as the head of research in 1996, beginning what is now an 18-year stint at Viacom. “Viacom’s calling card has always been knowing our audiences intimately and research really has a seat at the table here,” Fahey Rush says. “Research is part of the strategy teams that help drive the businesses” and they work closely with management “so we can field the right research to help solve business problems.”

As Fahey Rush assumed a wider role at the company, rising to the top research job in 2011, her efforts and expertise spread far beyond traditional Nielsen ratings into measurement and consumer insight research for all the new channels and digital platforms the company was adding to its portfolio.

The breadth of that research has included the recent “TV Here, There (Not Quite) Everywhere” study on TV Everywhere and “The Next Normal” study of millennials as well as upcoming studies on VOD, Amazon Prime and a look at the effectiveness of TV advertising that will draw on new research tools from neuroscience.

Disruptive Data

Pushing beyond the limits of that research has also found Fahey Rush working actively with industry-wide groups outside of Viacom. Frustrated by the lack of progress in measuring viewing on multiple devices, in 2009 she was part of a group of researchers and executives that founded the Coalition of Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), where she currently serves as executive chairman of the board. “We all felt that progress in measurement had come to a grinding halt and we needed to come together to help each other try to figure it out,” she says.

CIMM has since spearheaded landmark cross-platform studies, including the second phase of Project Blueprint, which offers combined viewing for TV, radio, desktop, mobile and tablets. And, industry pressure has helped push research companies to launch new measurement products this year, with Nielsen planning to add smartphone and tablet viewing to its ratings this fall.

Outside the office, Fahey Rush is so focused on her family and her two daughters that she admits she doesn’t have a lot of hobbies. Each Sunday, she makes sure her husband and daughters—“ budding programmers” she quips who are always giving her advice on MTV and Nickelodeon— are together for the dinner she cooks. “We try to keep that spot sacred,” she says.

Equally sacrosanct is her insistence on exploring new challenges and adapting the company’s research culture to the new world of Big Data, which requires advanced mathematics and methodologies for analyzing the mountains of numbers produced by digital media.

“The skills you need are definitely evolving,” she says. “But you still need people in senior positions that can weave it all together and make sense of it. You need your data analytic jockeys and you need your storytellers.”

If you're watching a PGA Tour telecast on CBS and notice a lot of eye-in-the-sky aerial views, chances are Sean McManus has been on the phone with his production team that afternoon. More than once, in fact. “I really like blimp shot coverage, and it’s one of the constants I call up about,” the CBS Sports chairman and B&C Hall of Famer says. “For the person at home, to see a shot of the golf course or player from the blimp can be extraordinary.”

On CBS’ NFL coverage, McManus is a big fan of the “goat shot,” spotlighting the player whose gaffe allowed the opposing team to score. While the network is in commercial following a touchdown, McManus will have his executive producer ask the director, “‘Have you got a shot of the goat?,’” to air after the break.

“A lot of times, that’s the more memorable shot than the player who is celebrating,” McManus says. And since the 18-year chief of CBS Sports also holds the title of executive producer of the NFL on CBS, “I can legitimately call in on that one,” he notes with a laugh.

CBS’ NFL crew will have many more opportunities to satisfy the boss’ affinity for airship and goat shots when the network kicks off its new seven-game Thursday Night Football package (plus one Saturday telecast) on Sept. 11.

TNF is “the most important franchise we’ve launched at CBS Sports since we got the NFL back in 1998,” says McManus, who made that deal to return pro football to the network after a four-year absence. The ’98 pact, which revived CBS’ then-sagging sports division, remains “the biggest professional thrill of my life,” McManus says.

The NFL is counting on McManus and CBS’ new partnership with the NFL Network (which will carry seven late-season TNF games and a Saturday game) to establish Thursdays as appointment viewing for fans.

“The quality of production on CBS Sports’ broadcasts has Sean’s fingerprints all over it, and that’s not just with the NFL,” says Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, chairman of the league’s NFL Network committee. “Sean knows how to produce, promote and entertain… and his commitment will set the standard very high for Thursday nights.”

McManus’ fascination with football began as quarterback of a flyweight team in Fairfield, Conn., from 4th through 9th grades. He painted his cleats white to emulate his idol, Joe Namath. McManus got to spend time with Namath—along with his other boyhood hero, Muhammad Ali—and scores of other stars as the son of legendary ABC sportscaster Jim McKay. The future exec got his start in the biz at age 11, sweeping out production trucks while traveling with his dad.

By the time he was in college at Duke, McManus knew he wanted a career in TV. He worked summers for ABC Sports at Olympics, U.S. Open golf tournaments and Indy 500s and a midnight-to-8 a.m. gig as an ABC News desk assistant—all at the elbow of production and rightsnegotiation wizard Roone Arledge.

“The two things I enjoy most are production and negotiating deals,” says Mc- Manus, who learned the art of the rights deal during an eight-year stint at NBC Sports before spending nine years as a senior VP of IMG’s television division.

“I don’t think there’s any thrill that matches coming out of a production truck knowing you’ve done a really good job on a broadcast,” McManus says. “It’s the same kind of thing negotiating a big deal. It’s an incredible feeling of elation and satisfaction.”

McManus and his mentor Arledge are the only execs to simultaneously run network sports and news divisions. McManus spent six years in both roles at CBS. His shift back to one job, with his 2011 promotion to chairman of CBS Sports, has allowed him to spend more time with his family and take them along to more Super Bowls and Final Fours.

“My job fortunately has a lot of intoxicating moments,” McManus says. “Being on the floor [after the NCAA championship game] with your wife and kids when they’re playing ‘One Shining Moment’ reminds me of how lucky I am to have this kind of job.”