Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Missed it by thaaat much!

Get a REAL Job- Working for The Akron Schools
Phil Hoffman

On my first day at the Akron Public Schools, I was notified that since it was the week of Thanksgiving, 1992, I would only work til Wednesday. The schools were closed Thursday and Friday, so I wasn't to come in either day.

WHAAAAT?

After nearly 10 years straight of working on every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day, I was about to find out how normal people lived. And apparently, normal people don't work on holidays. This was an auspicious beginning to a job in which I would discover that the "glamor" of working on TV wasn't so glamorous. Although, truthfully, there is always a sort of cheerful playfulness in the newsroom on a holiday...everybody resigned to spending another holiday away from family, but united in a weird way with their work family. And usually we didn't work a full day, so it really wasn't that bad. To us. To our spouses and kids, it was hard to explain this situation. To us, it made sense. It's just what we did.

So the second day on the job I get a letter in the mail from Bill Spratt, an Akron administrator who turned out to be a huge influence on me. Here's the thing, Bill wrote: "you MUST take a vacation day between now (Thanksgiving) and December 31st, or you'll lose that day."

WHAAAAAT?

I'm on the job less than 9 hours, and I need a vacation?

I won't even go on to belabor great benefits, much better pay than in TV or radio, or a myriad of other things I discovered in my new job.

And I would start working for Karen Ingraham. Karen has been in charge of communications at APS since the early 1990s. She is great at her job, but what few people know is that she is a brilliant leader of creative teams. I would learn more in the years I worked for Karen than in all my radio and TV years combined. In fact, much of what is now my approach to management is actually her approach. Or my imitation of her approach.

In the end, I would spend from 1992 through the summer of 2000 working for APS. I would be in charge of 91.3 FM, WAPS and the APS TV channel on Time Warner position 15. That's another story entirely.

But....shortly after I started at APS, I got a phone call from Mark Williamson. WAKC was sold. A new company, ValueVision was taking over and they were going to make a big investment in news. Would I consider coming back? Mark set up a meeting with the new GM, a guy named Mike Jones. I had barely left WAKC, and already they wanted me back.

But that meeting would be a very odd one indeed. More on that in the next installment.