#MediaMonday – Rick D'Amico
Each Monday, we are posting a blog to help our readers get to know the media just a little bit better. With a TWIST!
No, we aren’t posting story pitch tips or media lists, but instead great stories from the media themselves about their lives, their work and other little known facts! Think of it as your first “networking” opportunity of the week!
Today’s #MediaMonday comes to us from Rick D’Amico.
So, Rick, time to share!
What do you want to tell the blogosphere about yourself today?
Hi everybody it’s Rick D’Amico from Fox-10 Arizona Morning. I’m sitting in the newsroom now and gazing across the tops of all the computer monitors, video monitors and robotic cameras, and I’m thinking, wow have things changed since I got here back in 1987!
I moved here from Lansing, Mich. to do the noon and 6 p.m. weather and things were quite different. We all had typewriters, and we typed on paper! And there were wire machines that clacked out the news on paper. And producers would “rip” the wire copy off the machine and hang it up on nails on the wall. And if someone walked away with the headlines or the sports or the business AP copy, you’d hear screaming in the news room, “Who stole my sports???” Today everything we do is on desktops, even editing video and producing our programs, the cameras and the shows are all computerized and robotic, and I get a kick when you hear someone say, “roll the tape!” There is no tape, it’s all in a computer!
I’m wondering what the next 10 or 20 years will bring? Will our shows be on cell-phones and I-pads, and will it all be “on demand?” Live shots from around the world sent on our cell-phones? No more live trucks and satellite trucks! Maybe cameras embedded in our foreheads, who knows!
People ask me what my secret is to be able to stay at one station for over 20 years and I always answer, “flexibility.” I’ve been a weatherman, news anchor, street reporter, business editor, and morning show host, and so much has changed and continues to change and I always look at any assignment I get from management as a challenge. A challenge to try something I’ve never done before, to expand and improve.
The morning show has been a real blessing for me, I’ve never had so much fun by getting paid for doing and saying things that used to get me in trouble when I was in high school! People always comment about how our morning show is so free-form and we seem to be able to talk about anything on our mind. Well the fact of the matter is it is scripted! I just like to bounce around the scripts a lot, adding comments here and there, it drives the producers crazy!
I’m an avid sailor. I have a 33-foot Beneteau sailboat named “Airtime” on Harbor Island in San Diego. My wife of 40 years, Ruth (She’s the Admiral) and my 4 year old granddaughter Serena (She’s the 1st Mate) and I (I’m the Captain) go sailing at least once a month. I have this secret desire to sail to a far-off distant land. It’s a secret because Ruth is dead set against leaving sight of the shore and happy-hour at the marina! Well maybe someday when I retire.
I don’t plan on leaving Fox-10 anytime soon, if they want me to leave, they’ll have to take me out in the parking lot and shoot me.
