Don Fitzpatrick -- top scout for national TV news personalities
San Francisco Chronicle
Services will be held Friday in Louisiana for Don Fitzpatrick, one of the nation's premier television news personality scouts whose "finds" included incoming "Today" host Meredith Vieira and CBS 5-TV's Kate Kelly.
Mr. Fitzpatrick died Monday in his Alexandria, La., home of internal bleeding after a blood vessel burst in his esophagus. He was 56.
In the often cutthroat world of television news, colleagues and friends say Mr. Fitzpatrick stood out for his integrity and warmth. As Harry Fuller, a former TV news director at KGO and CBS 5-TV in San Francisco, said: "American TV is rarely accused of being kind or humane, but Don was. He was the ultimate insider who had a moment for everybody," said Fuller, now the executive editor at CNET.
George Donald Fitzpatrick Jr. was born in 1949 in Pittsburgh. He worked at two jobs throughout high school, an industrious nature that he carried throughout his life, said his brother, Sean. He graduated from Gonzaga University in Washington state and eventually made his way to the Bay Area.
He was a concert promoter and jack-of-all trades at two Bay Area radio stations, KLOK-AM and KFOG-FM. He was moonlighting for a media consulting firm named ERA Research when, in 1976, it hired him as a national talent scout for the CBS television stations. He started his own company in 1982, and over the next two decades became renowned for finding and promoting TV talent. News executives nationwide trekked to his humble North Beach office to pick his voluminous mind and bountiful video library.
Over the years, he acquired tapes of newscasters in the nation's top markets. He and his team rated them, and asked the best to send in audition tapes. Those were entered in his database. As the number of tapes grew into the thousands, Mr. Fitzpatrick made San Francisco a must-stop for TV news executives who usually don't stray far from New York or Los Angeles.
In 1982, Mr. Fitzpatrick called Kelly, then a 23-year-old reporter working at a TV station in Austin, Texas, and asked her to send him a two-minute tape of her work and a resume. She did, but didn't hear anything until about seven months later. Then, news and sports directors from Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis and New York and the William Morris Agency called on the same day.
Kelly soon learned that Mr. Fitzpatrick featured her that morning on a reel of "up-and-comers" he screened for news executives at a Las Vegas convention.
"I would give Don Fitzpatrick the majority of credit for giving me job opportunities around the United States," said Kelly, who has worked at CBS 5-TV for 22 years.
Liz Hart, who later worked with him for several years, said when Mr. Fitzpatrick viewed her audition tape, "He said, 'The good news is that you look like you're 19. The bad news is that you sound like you're 16.' But that was Don. He always started with, 'The good news is.' "
Concurrent with his talent-scouting business, Mr. Fitzpatrick used the early Internet to become a trafficker in gossip and information about the business. In the early 1980s, he began "Rumorville," one of the nation's first e-mailed newsletters, a mix of TV biz dish and tidbits.
"Sometimes," Hart said, "people found out they were fired there before they were actually told." Rumorville eventually evolved into Shoptalk, and Fitzpatrick's electronic newsletters have been must-reading for TV industry types for 20 years.
Last year, the Radio-Television News Directors Association awarded Mr. Fitzpatrick the John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award "in recognition of the key role he played in the industry" according to the association.
Three years ago, Mr. Fitzpatrick moved to Louisiana to be closer to his siblings, who had settled there, and his parents who were in ill health; they have since died.
Survivors include his sisters, Erin Rhodes of Alexandria, La., and Betsy Belgard of Pineville, La.; and his brother Sean, of Deville, La.
The family requests that memorial gifts be sent to the American Cancer Society, 1450 Peterman Drive, Alexandria, LA 71301.
TV Headhunter, Blogger Fitzpatrick Dies
By John Higgins -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/18/2006 3:12:00 PM
Don Fitzpatrick, once one of TV's top headhunters and perhaps the industry's first blogger, died over the weekend. A longtime friend, Scott Tallal, says Fitzpatrick was found dead in his Alexandria, La. home shortly after being treated for intestinal bleeding at a local hospital.
Fitzpartrick's primary business was as a recruiter for local-TV news talent. Based in San Franciso, Don Fitzpatrick Associates (DFA) was pivotal in helping TV journalists land jobs, move from small markets to a bigger ones, or jump from positions as a reporters to anchor desks. "Don guided the careers of thousands of people in the industry," says Tallal, president of research firm Insite Media Research.
Tallal recalled Fitzpatrick's earliest days as a headhunter trying to build a tape library of talent from TV stations. Fitzpatrick outfitted an RV with 3/4-inch video recorders and would drive around the country, stopping in at a market to tape the newscasts of all the stations, then moving on to the next. The tapes would be copied and edited so clients could be sent a sample of, say, 20 female anchors.
Fitzpatrick was also blogging on TV years before it became a verb, and indeed years before there was a World Wide Web. In the late 1980s, he helped start Fitz's ShopTalk (initially called Rumorville) as an e-newsletter and a forum at online services The Source and Compuserve. Each day, he would digest articles on TV from various newspapers and magazines around the country, focusing primarily on stations. Later, the project morphed to the Web and became TvSpy.com. Fitzpatrick sold TVSpy to job Web site The Vault and closed DFA in 1999.
“Don Fitzpatrick was a friend to so many of us in the industry and will be sorely missed,” said Radio-Television News Directors Association President Barbara Cochran. “His knowledge of the industry was encyclopedic, and he shared his insights generously. All of us at RTNDA will miss him very much.”
RTNDA gave Fitzpatrick its John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award in 2005 for service to the industry.
Fitzpatrick’s funeral will be in Alexandria, said RTNDA, tentatively scheduled for Friday, April 21.
Visitation is scheduled from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. Thursday, April 20, and on Friday from 8:30 a.m. until 9:30 a.m. at John Kramer & Son funeral home in Alexandria. A wake will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the funeral home.
A funeral Mass will held 10 a.m. Friday April 21, in Our Lady of Prompt Succor. Burial will be in Greenwood Memorial Park, Pineville. Pallbearers will be Mark Rosenthal, Thomas Swift, Freddy Revels, John Bowling, Michael Hall, and David Hall.
The family requests memorial to the American Cancer Society, 1450 Peterman Drive, Alexandria, La., 71301. Notes of condolence may be sent kramerfunerals@aol.com via e-mail.
I'm sorry to tell you that DON FITZPATRICK has died.
Don died over the weekend in Alexandria, LA. Details are sketchy, but he apparently had been in the hospital for tests and was released on Friday.
For many years, Don operated Don Fitzpatrick Associates, a head hunting firm for broadcasters, from offices in downtown San Francisco. He also began one of the first
online newsletters, originally called Rumorville, which later became Shoptalk.
Don closed DFA in late 1999 to concentrate on Shoptalk and a website, tvspy.com. When he did, I wrote this in my weekly newsletter: For those of you who don't know him well, or at all, his service to television news goes FAR beyond the business, his website, and his newsletter.
Don has always been willing to hop on a plane and go to speak a University journalism class here, or an AP Broadcasters meeting there, speaking to young people getting into the TV News, and to others hoping to move up. He has given selflessly of his time for many years, and I hope he continues to do so. He moved to Louisiana a few years ago, where he had family.
Funeral services are still being planned, and when those details are finalized I will let you know.
regards,
Rick Gevers
Rick Gevers & Associates
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