Free Anchorboy by Jay Onrait Page A

bang, and POOF! There came Jay?”
    Pinball gestured to me. Pinball mentioned me! You could not wipe the smile off my face! This must be what it’s like when teenage girls are pulled onstage at a Justin Bieber concert. Pinball was my Bieber!
    I didn’t leave the luncheon a religious convert, and I still thought it was inappropriate that we were asked to attend and emcee the event, but the truth is, in the end the entire exercise was pretty harmless. I learned one important thing that day: Pick your battles in this business. Sometimes being known as a “team player” is better than fighting for principles you don’t really care too much about anyway. It’s not a defeatist attitude, it’s a practical one. Sometimes you just have to say “Poof” and let it slide.

CHAPTER 12
Goin’ to Winnipeg …
    A S MUCH AS PEOPLE MIGHT think I am some sort of pop culture junkie, I don’t watch entertainment shows like
etalk
or
Entertainment Tonight
. This is not a comment on the abilities and attributes of the fine people working on those shows. I just don’t like the presentation style that has become ubiquitous with them. SHOUTING LOUDLY AND BOLDLY while posing in some sort of weird cross-legged stance so I can understand just how important this upcoming story about John Travolta’s latest masseuse is. It’s just not me. It’s just not anyone, really. If someone actually came up to you on the street and started talking to you like that, you would think they were a bloody lunatic. Whoever invented this presentation style should be exiled from the industry and forced to work with mannequins. I’m pretty certain that would be preferable to them anyway.
    I have hostile feelings toward these types of shows because it was their resurgence in the early part of this century that ushered in the death of the half-hour local sports highlight show where I got mystart. All across the country, Global Television had
Sportsline
shows that provided a half-hour of daily highlights and local sports content you couldn’t really get anywhere else. The greatest thing about these shows was that they provided the ultimate training ground for any aspiring sports broadcaster. Those shows were never ratings blockbusters, more like niche cultural mini-blockbusters for local sports fans. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that Global scrapped all their
Sportsline
-style shows across the country and replaced that half-hour of Canadian content with
Entertainment Tonight Canada
. Despite my mixed feelings, I had always been a bit curious about the world of entertainment television. I wondered if I could fit into it with my own presentation style. That is to say, with no style at all.
    I started to think about applying for entertainment reporter jobs. This was still pretty much pre-Internet, when even a small start-up local TV station had two full-time entertainment reporters! You had four media outlets to inform you of entertainment happenings in your city: radio, TV, newspapers, and of course the local alt-weekly left-leaning newspaper, which probably had the best local entertainment coverage of all of them.
    Around this time, Manitoba-based Craig Media Inc. was launching another one of their not-so-successful A-Channel stations in Winnipeg. Ads were plastered on the back of
Playback
magazine, an industry paper, announcing openings for on-air and behind-the-scenes talent for this exciting new start-up station, which in this case wasn’t really a true start-up because the Craig family were just rebranding their already existing Manitoba station to match their two television stations in Alberta.
    At no point in my life had I ever imagined moving to Winnipeg. I didn’t have any preconceived notions about the city, I just never really thought about it unless the Jets or the Blue Bombers were playing. Still I thought I’d send a demo tape to the station anyway.I didn’t think I’d be contacted about a job, but maybe I could get a bit of feedback about