Tag Archives: O. Kay Henderson

“Perhaps he’ll run as a Republican…”

Posted on by

During my 30 years working in broadcasting (a term that seems quaint these days) I worked with some really good journalists. Bob Priddy, Kay Henderson, and Clyde Lear…just to name a few.

For most of that time the Iowa Caucuses kicked off the presidential election cycle and Kay Henderson was at ground zero, including covering the Iowa delegations at the national conventions. In 2000 she filed these audio reports. (As emails to friend and fellow journalist, if I remember correctly.) I found an interesting nugget from her July 29th report:

“Donald Trump is sending a bus to the hotel on Tuesday at 11 a.m. to take the Iowans to the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Does he know these people are Republicans — and they can get their fix in our own casinos? Perhaps he’ll run as a Republican in 2004 and is laying the groundwork.”

I do like the sound of “Madam President”

Posted on by

Recent events reminded me of this photo (2007) of my longtime friend (and former coworker) O. Kay Henderson

I asked her if there was any chance of recreating the photo with Vice President Harris. She pointed out that Iowa is not a swing state in this election cycle so, no, KH won’t be stopping by. But she did share this photo from July of 2019. Kay is wearing the white hat and Men In Black shades.

Iowa PBS announces new Iowa Press moderator

Posted on by


(Press release) Kay Henderson, the dean of the Iowa Capitol press corps and long-time guest panelist on Iowa Press, will be the next host and moderator of the Iowa PBS public affairs program. Henderson replaces David Yepsen, who retires from the Iowa Press desk on September 10, 2021. Her first formal broadcast as host will be Friday, September 17.

“Kay is already a member of the Iowa PBS family,” said Molly Phillips, executive director and general manager of the statewide public television network. “She has capably subbed as host and has been a regular second chair at the Iowa Press desk. She’s participated in countless campaign debates over the last three decades. We couldn’t ask for a stronger, more esteemed and experienced journalist to continue the Iowa Press legacy.”

Henderson first appeared on Iowa Press in October of 1987. For the past 20 years, she has been the national political director for Learfield news networks in Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota and Wisconsin. She has served two terms as president of the National Association of State Radio Networks’ news directors group. Henderson was hired by Learfield in 1987 as a statehouse reporter for Radio Iowa, a statewide news and sports network serving more than 70 commercial radio stations. She’s been that network’s news director since 1994 and will remain in that role alongside her new weekly assignment at Iowa PBS.

“It’s an honor to be invited to take on this new role,” Henderson said. “Watching Iowa Press hosts Dean Borg and David Yepsen guide the program over the past 34 years has given me a glimpse of the responsibilities ahead. I’m humbled by the opportunity and excited about the task of helping Iowa Press move into its fifth decade of service to our viewers.”

Henderson received the Iowa Broadcast News Association’s 2002 Jack Shelley Award, an annual recognition of “outstanding contribution to the cause of professional journalism.” The list of Shelley Award recipients includes the late Dean Borg, who retired as Iowa Press host in 2016, and the late Dan Miller, the long-time Iowa PBS general manager who was an Iowa Press producer early in his 37-year career with the network.

“After three decades of Iowa public affairs coverage on radio and on Iowa Press, Kay Henderson is the backbone of political journalism in this state,” said Andrew Batt, Iowa Press senior producer. “Our viewers have found Kay to be a trusted source for news and information throughout annual legislative sessions and nearly 20 election cycles.”

Henderson’s first salaried job in journalism was a three-month summertime stint as managing editor of the Lenox Time Table, the weekly newspaper in her southwest Iowa hometown. In addition to her work in Iowa broadcasting, Henderson has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” as well CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

O. Kay Henderson on Meet the Press

Posted on by
Reply

Friend and former coworker O. Kay Henderson was on the Meet the Press panel this morning. Kay is the news director of Radio Iowa, a state radio network I helped create back in the late 80s. Kay’s first job out of college was reporting for the network. A few years later I had the good sense and good fortune to promote her to News Director. Nobody knows more about Iowa politics than Kay.

O. Kay Henderson: On the campaign trail. Again.

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight’s PBS Newshour featured a segment that included an interview with my friend and former co-worker, O. Kay Henderson. I’ve known Kay for 32 years and — coincidently — she’s mentioned in 32 posts on this blog. I think I can safely say there is no one alive today that knows more about politics in Iowa than Ms. Henderson. It’s the only job she’s every had. She started covering politics while she was in college and came to work for Radio Iowa when she graduated and has been doing it ever since.

RadioIowa.com

Posted on by
Reply

My next “small histories” project will be an Internet timeline showing when and how the company I worked for viewed and used this new technology. We registered our first domain (Learfield.com) on August 30, 1995 but didn’t do much with that (corporate) site. In July of 1996 we created a site for one of our news networks (Radio Iowa) but I don’t recall what kinds of content we were posting in those early days.

By November of 1999 we had gotten the hang of things and were putting up a lot of news (text and audio). The Iowa Caucuses pulls lots of attention to the state every four years and our network created a feature called Campaign Countdown. Our website made it possible to extend the life of the stories we fed via the radio network and reporter O. Kay Henderson cranked out a LOT of stories and interviews, all of which went online.

As we moved and updated servers and software, much of this content was lost. Or so I thought. While poking around on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine this weekend I found the Campaign Countdown reports.

The design of the website is nothing to write home about (that’s on me) but he history is real and — thanks to the Internet Archive — preserved. (I made a donation and hope you will, too). From this screenshot (partial) of our Affiliates page and you can see that about half of the stations had websites in 1999.

In my experience, radio stations were slow to embrace the Internet. There were a lot of reasons for this. Some good and logical, some not. Most of the programming on small market stations was music and licensing and technical issues made it impractical to “stream.” I’m not sure we had that word in 1999. And why, many station managers asked, should I go to the expense and effort of creating a website when everyone we care about (advertisers and listeners) can hear our programing on the radio? Duh. And nobody was going to listen to music on a computer. (iTunes, the iPod, and XM Radio came along in 2001. Podcasting in 2004)

Reporting from the road

Posted on by
Reply

Our company has three reporters in Denver (for three different networks) covering the state delegations for their respective networks. Where they were once strictly radio reporters, today they’re also posting stories to websites; blogging and Twittering.

LaptopI could be wrong, but I seem to recall one convention when we actually shipped a couple of cart machines so the reporter could produce his/her reports that where then phoned back to the network for broadcast to affiliate stations over the satellite network. We still distribute by satellite but a lot of our affiliates get a lot of our reports on the web.

I was reminded of these Dark Days by a photo O. Kay Henderson took of her equipment set-up (annotated) in her hotel room in Denver. Blackberry, wireless data cards, laptops, minidisks… it all fits in a couple of carry-on’s.

Keep your Blackberry under your pillow

Posted on by
Reply

Former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach — a Republican — endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday morning. I think my friend and co-worker Kay Henderson broke the story. It got a lot of national play and her blog post generated 3,000+ page views. I’m sure we got a bunch more at RadioIowa.com. I asked Kay how she got on the story so early:

“I sleep with my blackberry. I woke up at 6 o’clock, checked the ‘berry, and went back to sleep.  As I sort of floated out of dreamland I must have heard or sensed the vibration the ‘berry makes when there’s an incoming email. I pulled the ‘berry from underneath the pillow and read the email sent at 7:14 a.m. from a source in the Obama campaign, alerting me to the fact that former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach would be endorsing Obama in a few hours, during a telephone conference call being organized by the Obama campaign.

I called the newsroom and gave Matt – our morning anchor – the details for him to include in our next newscast, then roused myself from bed and walked into my home office.  I started blogging by feel, as I hadn’t found my glasses yet.  By 7:45 a.m. I had a fairly complete blog post up about the news.  It included text from a speech Vice President Dick Cheney gave at a Leach campaign fundraiser in 2003, explaining the Leach-Cheney-Rumsfeld connection.

I kept updating the post through the day.  An addition at the top – the opening Leach quote — came from a noontime interview.  The McCain folks emailed responses, which got to my email box by 1:50 p.m.”

A couple of things in Kay’s account stand out for me. If she had waited until she got to the office to check her email, she might not have had the jump on the story. Should all reporters sleep with their Blackberry under their pillow? Well, yeah, if you expect to beat Kay on a story.

And that she blogged the story before having her Cheerios. A whole bunch of political reporters follow Kay’s blog.

And while the technology is cool, there’s no substitute for having the contact in the Obama campaign.

Obama Fund Raiser

Posted on by
7

Picture_1

Remember the first time you had your picture taken sitting on a pony? Or in Santa’s lap? Or that first prom photo? That’s exactly what it was like getting my picture taken with Senator Barack Obama at last night’s fund raiser in St. Louis. Assuming of course that you waited in line for two hours with 250 other kids and paid two grand for that pony picture.

This was my maiden voyage in the world of political fund raisers and I had no idea what to expect. My friends Henry and Lorna were there too, all of us first-timers. In fact, a lot of the people I met and spoke to were first-time contributers. I thought that was interesting, given that it cost $2,300 for the privilege of having your photo taken with the man that that might be the next president of the U. S. But these were true believers and everyone seemed happy to pony up. (no pun intended)

It’s just a guess, mind you, but I figure they took in more than half a million from the VIP’ers and –at $500 per– another $200,000 from those that heard Senator Obama speak but didn’t get to shake his hand. Closing in on 3/4 of a million dollars. Not big by GOP standards but not too shabby for a couple of hours.

So, what do you say to the man you hope will be your next president when you have about 10 seconds with him? I had narrowed my remarks down to three possibilities:

“O. Kay Henderson says hey”
Kay is the news director of Radio Iowa and interviewed Senator Obama numerous times during the early days of the campaign for the Iowa Caucuses. I imagined the senator responding with something like, “You know Kay Henderson? No shit?! Tell the girl hey back.”

“I’ve been waiting all my life for a president with a good jump shot.”
I scratched that one quickly given the racially charged atmosphere of this campaign.

“In the sixties we thought we’d change the world. You’ve made us believe again that we can.”
“You did, you did change the world” was the senator’s response. At least that’s what I heard. I confess I was pretty star-struck. Which surprised me a little. The aides hustled us through the line quickly and in a couple of days we can go to a website and download that pricey photograph. We’ll share it here, of course.

I guess I’m really “all in” now, as far as campaign contributions. And I’m glad I had last night’s experience. There was a very exciting vibe in the room throughout and I kept trying to imagine a John McCain event sparking the same tent revival feel that pervaded the evening. I think they’re gonna need a lot of swift boats.

PS: Henry (retired MD) gave Senator Obama a tip on how to stop smoking. Not sure what Lorna said. Lorna reports she said, “I hope we’re not sucking your energy.” A nice thought but kind of risky in such a noisy room.

PPS: I didn’t get any good photos because I didn’t want to move around or risk a cavity search by the Secret Service guys. Here’s the VIP line before it got long and rowdy. If you look closely you can see the  “x”  taped on the floor so the  Senator would know where to stand.

UPDATE: Leading Democratic fundraisers predict that Sen. Barack Obama could raise $100 million in June and could attract 2.5 million to 3 million new donors to his campaign.