Former WWL-TV editorialist/news director Phil Johnson dies at 80

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http://www.wwltv.com/news/New-Orleans-broadcasting-legend-Phil-Johnson-dies-at-80-88891542.html

 

New Orleans broadcasting legend Phil Johnson dies at 80

 

by Dominic Massa / Eyewitness News

Posted on March 23, 2010 at 5:00 AM

Updated today at 7:53 AM

 

NEW ORLEANS -- Phil Johnson, the New Orleans television icon who helped build WWL-TV’s newsroom into a local and national powerhouse, giving the station a distinctive and distinguished on-air editorial voice while also winning three Peabody awards for his documentaries, died late Monday after a lengthy illness. He was 80.

 

A former WWL news director, documentary writer/producer and assistant general manager, Johnson, familiar for his bearded face and trademark “Good evening,” joined the station as promotion director in 1960. It did not take long for him to make his mark. Legendary general manager J. Michael Early tapped Johnson to help establish and fulfill a mission of public service, through daily editorials, established in 1962.

 

“The Jesuits who owned the station had told him they wanted the station to stand for something,” Johnson recalled in a 2003 interview. “We figured, what better way to show that than by doing a daily editorial?”

 

Johnson would go on to write and deliver editorials on WWL-TV for 37 of his 39 years at the station. When he retired in 1999, his editorials were hailed as the longest-running series of any television station in America.

 

Johnson not only dealt in his opinion, he also shaped news coverage in Channel 4’s North Rampart Street newsroom. Roughly eight years after delivering his first editorial, Johnson took over the reins of WWL’s growing newsroom.

 

He was named news director in 1970 and helped hire and cultivate some of the city’s most-beloved and respected talents: Angela Hill, Garland Robinette, Jim Henderson, Hap Glaudi, Nash Roberts, Jim Metcalf, Eric Paulsen, Sally-Ann Roberts and Dennis Woltering, as well as scores of producers, photographers and engineers. His hires, news philosophy and news judgment helped propel WWL into first place in the local ratings race in the early 1970s, a position it has maintained to this day.

 

But Johnson’s journalism career had rather austere beginnings. He often jokingly commented that, had it not been for his brother, a police officer who saw to it that his younger brother attended Jesuit High School and stayed out of French Quarter clubs, he might have followed another career path.

 

“I always said I’d probably be hitting rim shots for strippers down on Bourbon Street,” Johnson joked. “I was a pretty good drummer."

 

The son of a fire captain killed in the line of duty, Johnson was a proud product of New Orleans’ blue-collar Third Ward. After graduating from Jesuit in 1946, Johnson (who later served in the Merchant Marine and U.S. Navy) earned a degree from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1950.

 

Soon after, he went to work in the sports department of the legendary, now-defunct Item newspaper, under the direction of sports writer and future Channel 4 sports director Hap Glaudi. It would prove to be a fertile training ground.

 

Johnson would leave New Orleans briefly for print journalism jobs in Miami and Chicago, not to mention a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1959.

But his hometown would soon call again, at the dawn of the local television era, and he signed on as promotion director at WWL-TV in 1960, which had only been on the air three short years.

 

“During the interview they asked, ‘What have you promoted lately?’” Johnson explained. “I answered, ‘Mostly me.’ I got the job.”

 

The promotions job would soon lead to a very high-profile position as editorialist. Johnson delivered his first on March 26, 1962.

 

“Beginning today and every weekday thereafter, this station will present editorial opinion – a living, vigorous commentary on all things pertaining to New Orleans, its people and its future,” Johnson wrote in that first editorial, calling it “commentary designed to stimulate thought, to awaken in all of us an awareness of our responsibilities, not only to our community but to each other and to ourselves.”

 

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