McLaughlin speaks at museum
Former WINK news anchor and Pine Island resident Jim McLaughlin was Thursday night’s guest speaker at the Southwest Florida Museum of History in Fort Myers. The topic “the evolution of television news in Southwest Florida and his role at the Beacon of H.O.P.E.”
Glenn Miller, second vice president of the museum, introduced McLaughlin to the audience.
“I’m sure everybody knows Jim, he’s probably been in your living room,”Miller said. “He was news anchor for our 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. news. He’s not from around here, he’s a Yankee from Oneida, N.Y. He went to St. Bonaventure University and moved to Southwest Florida in 1975. He’s been involved in TV in this area since 1975 and we asked him to talk to us about the TV business and how it’s changed since then.”
“I’ve never lost sight of the fact of the historic importance that we played in the community of Southwest Florida,” McLaughlin said. “I joined WINK in 1977 as a brand new TV news reporter. I had never been in TV news before and I ended up working 28 years there before I quit and then came back for 3 more years. So I was there a total of 31 years.
“My parents were up in Arcadia, Fla., and when I came to Southwest Florida I was an unemployed bar tender – college educated but unemployed,” he continued. “I arrived with a suitcase in one hand and a dream in the other. I didn’t have a car so I would hitchhike to Fort Myers, Naples and Sarasota trying to break into the business. One day I walked into WINK. I think it was 1975 or 1976. I didn’t have an appointment and they sent a young lady from the newsroom out to the lobby to talk to me. She looked at my resume and asked if she could help. I said ‘I want to be a reporter and I wanted to be on TV.’ She looked at my resume, laughed and said, .Mr. McLaughlin, you don’t have any training or experience. We couldn’t possibly hire you now could we?’
“Fast forward 18 months and guess who was there the first time I walked into the newsroom. The young lady who came out to the lobby and laughed at me. I asked her, ‘You don’t remember me do you?’ Well, she was very embarrassed and we became fast friends.
“WINK actually got started in 1954, McLaughlin said. “WINK has been owned by the same family, the McBride family, since it went on the air. Mickey McBride was the patriarch of the family and also owned the Cleveland Browns football team.
“Arthur ‘Mickey’ McBride and his brother Edward McBride put WINK TV on the air in March of 1954. WINK was the first television station in Southwest Florida and today it is the fifth oldest station in the state of Florida,” he said. “At the time there was just the one station and WINK aired ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS programming because it was the only TV station in the market. Then in 1968 the NBC affiliate was born and in 1974 ABC.
“It was a struggle in those days for someone to break into the business,” McLaughlin said. “Today’s kids come out of college with their mass communications, TV production, whatever they study today in college, and are hired on the spot. The business has changed a lot since then. Over the years the station changed as Southwest Florida changed. As the area became larger, the market became larger and the station become more powerful.
“In the middle 1970s, when I arrived, WINK, the station, was about #163 in market size,” he continued. “By the early 1980s we were growing almost 10 market positions a year because of the influx of all of the people moving to Southwest Florida. At one time we were the fastest growing television market in the country. More people watching television means more advertisers which means more revenue for the station. The money was crazy. I made three trips to Columbia, trips to Honduras, Nicaragua, Santa Domingo, the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. Eventually all that came to an end when the economy hit TV just like every other business.
“The thing I’ve learned about TV news is the only constant is change,” McLaughlin went onto say. “One of the reasons I was successful is that I was always there. People would come back after being up north and say, ‘You’re always there,’ and that registered with me. I wasn’t the greatest news anchor, we weren’t the greatest station, but people depended on us. It meant something to me that people were depending on me.
“When things got rolling in the early ’80s, I made it to anchor and a few months later put my resume together along with some demo tapes. I was planning on going to Boston or New York. But then I started looking around and noticed everyone wants to come here. Well, I’m already here and doing O.K., so I made the decision in the early ’80s to stay and I never put together another resume again. I decided this is where I belong and it was an opportunity that I couldn’t have duplicated any place else.
“If you write down the names of the people on the air today and check again in six months, they will be gone except for the main anchors,” he said. “They are missing out on all of this. Missing out on people like Pat Mann and all of the famous families that lived here. I think they miss out on something that gave me purpose.
McLaughlin then talked about what he does now.
“Today I am a volunteer chef – I work full time as a volunteer cook for the Beacon of H.O.P.E. on Pine Island,” he said. “As a board member my job is to contribute something to the organization. The Beacon was born out of Hurricane Charley and we help people. We are a United Way House, we have two dozen different programs, one of which is feeding hungry kids and that’s the part I took over in January. We just wrapped up a 7-week summer camp where we fed 120 kids a day – 50 for breakfast and 75 for lunch. We call it S.A.S., Students Achieving Success. It’s one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. News was good to me but fulfilling in a different way – this reaches into your soul. Some days it leaves me in tears.
“But this goes back to sticking around,” he said. “Had I not returned to WINK and had they not fired me last September, I would not have walked through a different door. When one door closes another one opens and that door was the door to the Beacon of H.O.P.E. I couldn’t be happier not only for what I do but where I do it.”