(Photo Credit: Facebook)
In the second episode of Broadcast Bulletin, Jim and Jacob talk with retired KIII-TV Corpus Christi anchor Joe Gazin. After being the prime weeknight anchor at the same station for 43 years, Joe has seen a lot of changes in the industry during that time. Joe discusses those, as well as how he broke into broadcasting, how he landed his first TV job, and why he made the move to the Coastal Bend. Joe talks about why he retired from the day-to-day grind of TV news and what he's up to now. Hint: he's far from "retired".
Joe grew up in Los Angeles, California but made it to Texas as soon as he could. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a major in Speech Communication. Following graduation, he began his career as a talk radio host at the legendary Southern California radio station, 790 KABC, in the 1960s. It was there that Joe got his first taste of being fired, something that happens pretty commonly in the broadcast world, for no fault of his own. Management wanted to take the station in a different direction, and after another radio stint ended the same way, Joe gravitated to television.
It was there that Joe packed his Mercury Montego and drove up and down the state of California looking for TV work. No station was interested, but the news director of KCRA-TV in Sacramento allowed Joe to use his station's set to make a demo reel. Joe took that reel back to LA and hired an agent, who used it to land him his first TV job in Wausau, Wisconsin back in 1975. After two brutal winters in Wisconsin, Joe received an offer from KIII in Corpus Christi, where he spent the next 43 years as the top news anchor in South Texas, prior to his retirement in 2021.
Joe presently lives on Padre Island, Texas and currently runs a video production company, Legal Video Specialists, which produces "family-impact videos" for personal injury law firms across the country. These videos are used in a courtroom setting to convince opposing lawyers, mediators and juries that the clients deserve to be compensated at the highest-possible level.
"You're not a star. That shouldn't be why you enter the business. You're there to do a job, as part of a team, and if you get some notoriety, so be it."
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