On November 4th, Jenn Adams marked her 20th anniversary as News Director at NewTV, Newton’s Community Media Channel (now celebrating 30 years serving the Newton community since 1992). She and her staff of interns have covered local elections, community events, Newton School Committee meetings, Newton City Council meetings (when she started, it was the Newton Board of Aldermen) State House, and Congressional news. “As long as there is a Newton connection, we’ll cover it,” she says.
Jenn was born in Maine and moved frequently in her childhood, graduating from Bellingham High School in 1990 and spending a year at Framingham State College studying communications, as her first step toward an “on-air” career in broadcasting. She switched to the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, (then in Wellesley) and worked at WGAW-AM Radio (Gardner), part-time in sales and part-time on-air, after graduating in 1992. There she learned how to write commercials for local businesses. She then accepted a job at WMRC First Class Radio 1490 AM (Milford) as the Creative Services Director, writing and producing commercials for local businesses. During her tenure at WMRC, she learned traffic, which is scheduling programs and commercials 24/7. In 1994, she accepted a full-time job as “traffic manager” at SportsChannel New England (acquired as Fox News Sports Net New England – now NBC Sports Boston). As traffic manager, she ensured all programs, commercials, and sponsorships were scheduled correctly. But it was clear to Jenn that “traffic management” was a dead end rather than a road to her on-air goal.
Ever more serious about wanting to be a broadcaster, Jenn enrolled in Emerson College while working full-time at Fox Sports Net. She even interned for one semester as a production assistant for Fox Sports, helping with highlights of Celtics games until the wee hours of the morning. Her day began working at 7 a.m., going to class for 5:30 p.m., and interning after class usually ending her day at 2 a.m.. After graduating from Emerson in 2000, she became an intern for NewTV’s Newton News under former News Director, Burt Mummolo, in 2001. When he accepted a job as a reporter in Lubbock, TX in 2002, NewtTV’s then Executive Director, Paul Berg, offered Jenn a full-time job as the News Director.
NewTV and Jenn began broadcasting in the basement of the Hyde Community Center, a small studio, state-of-the-art at that time. Tape was the recording medium, and a camera would record proceedings of the City Council from a small closet next the Council Chamber. Today NewTV, which shares space with the for-profit Another Age Productions, operates out of its own building on Needham Street, with two studios, multiple rooms for teaching and managing production, a large community theater/auditorium, staff offices, and a large eat-in kitchen overlooking the Upper Falls Greenway.
When Jenn began her NewTV career, “technology” was limited to taping interviews; her office has shelves of tapes from the first Newton News show in 1994. Her first interview was with Gail Glick, who ran for School Committee from Ward 1. Barney Frank was an early guest, as well as a wide range of community members running (not necessarily successfully) for local office. Jenn’s tapes include wide ranging news coverage from whooping cough to the Boston Marathon, Community Preservation Committee meetings, and Anne Larner and the School Committee budget.
Then as now, NewTV offered and invited hands-on training in production to community members and high school and college students. Of Jenn’s 125 former interns, 100 are scattered across the country working on-air or in production. Jenn says, “that’s the best part — seeing my interns thrive” in broadcasting. Some interns may receive a small stipend through the Lipof Fund, endowed by former Newton Alderman Mike Lipof in gratitude to NewTV for providing the initial experience that launched his son Phil on his path to newscaster for ABC.
Today, the technology is digital. “The transition is incredible,” says Jenn, who explains that a three-hour meeting can be uploaded for broadcast “in ten minutes, tops. I covered a two-hour pumpkin smash this weekend and uploaded the event in thirty-five seconds.” She and her staff have evolved with the technology, which she says has changed “a thousand fold.”
While NewTV has received funding and grants, it created a for-profit entity, Another Age Productions, in 2018 to fill the void of cable cutters and provide additional funding for NewTV by producing commercials, films, and promotional material for commercial companies like TJX. AAP also works with non-profit groups to develop promotional tools.
NewTV viewers know Jenn best in her on-air news programs and interviews. She strives to be objective, to give people a chance to express their opinions in an objective environment. Whether moderating political debates or conducting interviews, Jenn wants to ensure that she avoids making people appear as “bad guys.” “I try to go into a story open-minded. I like telling people’s stories,” she says.
On the other hand, Jenn believes that “discourse is dead.” She is concerned that facts no longer matter and that people’s opinions dominate discussions. People press points of view not substantiated by facts. “I don’t know what happened,” she says, but she’d like to rekindle the civilized exchange of perspectives.
Covid posed a challenge for NewTV, seriously curtailing in-person programming and training opportunities. City Council and other municipal meetings were entirely remote and still occur in a hybrid of in-person and remote via Zoom. Interns, armed with cameras, still covered stories and edited them. In-house training programs were suspended but are now resuming with one-on-one in-person and online training. Jenn noted that the interns learned to edit and produce programs remotely for broadcast. In fact, Jenn says, Zoom allowed more of the public to access local meetings. “We don’t have Nielsen ratings, but through video analytics we can see how many are watching,” she notes. And with the mayor’s override proposal, Jenn predicts a significant increase in online viewership.
In her twenty years at NewTV, Jenn has been a contributing factor in the station’s many awards, and the station has consistently won first place in New England for its programming and community engagement. Jenn promises that “you’ll be seeing more of NewTV out there, covering more events and hopefully getting more people involved in programs.”
When not on the job covering many aspects of Newton’s community life, Jenn is at home in Westborough with her partner, Kirk Guiod, who works for Comcast, and their thirteen-year-old son, Maxwell, who plays youth hockey for Worcester’s Junior Railers and for the Middle School League of Westborough.
