Word: pittman
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...gray-suited and blow-dried, Pittman is executive vice president and chief operating officer of MTV Networks Inc., a joint venture of Warner Communications and American Express. He earns $200,000 a year, and has stock options valued at $1.8 million. He has the job because he invented it, because he and his audience are all what he calls the TV babies...
...Pittman's father is a Methodist minister in Mississippi who taught him to "do whatever you think is right and stick with it." When Pittman wanted to take flying lessons, though, his father said he would have to pay for them himself. So he got a job as a radio disc jockey...
...Pittman went off to nearby Millsaps College and became a deejay there; offered better radio jobs in Milwaukee, Detroit and then Pittsburgh, he kept transferring to new schools. Despite a strong interest in sociology, he never did finish college, but at 20 he became the program director of NBC's WMAQ in Chicago and switched it from middle-of-the-road pop to country music...
...special kind of country music, though, an odd hybrid called urban- country, which he pretested, like any academic sociologist, with audience surveys and focus groups. "I was ridiculed by other radio professionals and country-music experts," Pittman recalls. "They thought I was nuts. They were making primal sounds. But then the ratings showed we'd become the No. 1 country-music station in America...
...prodigies at the network's main station in New York City, and outfitted accordingly in mustache, blue jeans and T shirts, he began saying as early as 1978 that "no one seems to know how to handle music very well on TV." NBC frowned on such views, so Pittman shifted to Warner. "Music is not frivolous, it is a major phenomenon," he says...