Edward
Edward Saint Pe’
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Sunday Morning with Edward St. Pe’
Brandon, 50, NWN Studios president, singer
Interview by Sid Salter
Clarion-Ledger Perspective Editor
I first want to wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all our moms. And to my own momma, let me say, I love you very much. Whatever I’ve worked on so far in life — any accomplishment that I may have had or that I will have — I owe to you, Ma.
NWN stands for National Weather Networks. We provide TV weathercasts for TV stations that don’t do their own weathercasts. There are FOX, WB, UPN, PBS and independent stations across the country that just have not been in the news business, so they did not have weather departments. NWN, or “WeatherVision,” as we are known around the country today, produces these stations’ local TV weathercast with the on-air meteorologist and shoots it to them on satellite. The station captures it and plays it back over their air. It is as local a forecast as if they shot it on location right there. We can get our product to any TV station in the United States instantly. When we first starting doing this in 1991, there were “naysayers” who said it couldn’t be done. These days, it’s taken for granted that it’s a neat way to get weathercasts to markets that otherwise would not have had them and give those stations a new saleable product to sell to sponsors who particularly desire being next to weather.
As a byproduct of our TV weathercasts via satellite, we also operate as “Jackson Teleport.” We are the “go to” private satellite uplink and studio in Jackson. For example, when you are watching an interview on ABC or FOX News and the anchor is on the set and introduces a guest from another city who joins the anchor on the set via a TV monitor on the set and the interview is conducted this way, well, the person in the TV monitor is being satellite-uplinked from somewhere. We are the facility in Jackson. We have worked with ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX, ESPN, all the majors and all the major shows since 1991.
Edward co-hosting “The Good Life” program on WLEZ
We put on WLEZ FM about a year and a half ago. Of course, we play the old standards. It has been a labor of love for me and all of us here at NWN. It is a low-power FM, so we only reach out about 10 to 15 miles, but our listeners love us. We are non-commercial, so we don’t sell commercials, but instead have “underwriters.” For me to be close to this music all day long, well it makes every day a joy.
Mississippi gave me a chance — a chance to be what I wanted. In the beginning at WLBT-Channel 3 in the early ‘80, they gave me a chance. I learned the value of starting at the bottom: You have nowhere to go but up! And being at the first-ever black-owned TV station in America, being hired by a black-managed organization, given a fair chance and a career, I got a unique perspective on things. Dr. Aaron Henry was there, and since I was the mail boy/delivery boy, I got to drive him around here and there every week. We were friends and I learned what the civil rights struggle was all about from one of its leaders. The management of WLBT-Channel 3 gave me the helping hand I needed. I will always be indebted to them for this and for teaching me that no matter what the short-term obstacles, all people can and must work together.
I am confounded by the differential in the national perception of the state and the perception of people who actually come here and experience the warmth of our people firsthand. There is a big gap between the two. To send the right message to the rest of the nation and the world, for that matter, we need to aggressively market “The New Mississippi” via every way and means ...and not be a well-kept secret anymore
At my momma’s parents’ dairy farm, I learned to love the woods and the countryside and the creatures in the woods. It was magical to me then and still is today. That’s why I still live in the woods. I equate it with freedom, being able to see nature up close. I love the city, too, but my heart will always be out in the country.
Growing up, I saw my uncles involved in music, one a jazz trumpet player playing gigs while in high school and college, and the other singing those great Otis Redding songs through college. And my momma had the Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Benny Goodman and Pete Fountian and Al Hirt records on the giant stereo in the living room. I got immersed in all of this even before I was in school. Then the Beatles came out and everything changed. But the standards and jazz in general are what I have in my heart. Music is what likely got me interested in media in the first place.
I left Southeastern University my junior year and went to Los Angeles, then to New York, to play music (sing). We played Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, but of course it didn’t pay the bills. I was involved in a New York City film school project, where I was basically a “grip” on various film and video shoots around New York City. After that project concluded, I found myself at NBC network in the master control room, keeping the commercial log. That was my first taste of TV and my first real job. In fact. the day I got hired on my way up on the elevator as I walked in there were Dan Akroyd and John Belushi. They were in the heyday of Saturday Night Live and they were cutting up all the way up, basically making fun of the stuffed suits filling up the elevator. Anyway, that’s how I first got exposed to TV.
My first brush with singing standards was in the mid ‘90s. The TV weather via satellite project was up and going and I just went ahead and did it and enjoyed it. Well, sometimes change comes into your life out of the blue, and around this time my wife got diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 2000. For a long time, I think I just wandered around in a fog. How my business survived is a miracle. If not for good people on board here like Jason McCleave, we would have failed. And, for sure, I was not able to sing. I thought that I would never sing again either. I was at a point where I sort of cloistered myself up and shut down. Then, in November of 2002, at a wedding reception, bumped into my old friend Cary Spence, who had for years been the manager of POET’S where I had once sung the old Sinatra songs. He asked me to consider singing for the month of December at the restaurant he was now managing, Huntington’s Grille, during the holiday season. I thought about it, and though I really wanted to do it; I just was not sure I could. Well, I tried it and it brought a joy I was missing back into my life. In fact, it was like therapy. When you sing, you are physically like a horn pushing out the sound. Now, mix that with the emotion of the song, the interpretation of the lyric and you’ve got a sort of metaphysical experience going! So, here we are two-and-a-half years later still going every Friday and Saturday night.
The shining moment of a career is realizing you’ve survived the ebb and flow of business, of life for that matter. That’s the accomplishment. To do your best at what you do well enough to be here again tomorrow to do it again. If you are here, then that means you are winning the battle. The longer you are here, hopefully the better you become at it and the wiser you become.
I think that the secret to success in life is to find and then follow your passion. When I worked in Shreveport as a TV weather-guy years ago and also did entertainment reporting, I did a backstage interview with the great big-band drummer Buddy Rich. Between sets backstage with my cameraman, I asked him what drove him to be out on the road at this point in his life. He looked at me squarely in the eye and said, “Son, I’m working at play. I could be home in Beverly Hills right now, but this is what I love.” Well, I never forgot that. If you are passionate about what you do, then it’s not work; it becomes your passion.
I have many heroes. One is Ted Turner. I learned from him my idea to create this TV weathercast syndication model. He had taken his independent Channel 17 and put it up on a satellite, creating the first “Superstation.” I have read everything I could find on him through the years and met him once at a commencement speech at Tougaloo College around the time I was building the satellite uplink. I think I’ve learned from his success — and also from his missteps. I also admire Frank Sinatra. Yes, because he was a great singer, but moreso for being a man. He stuck by his guns. If he was in love, he was really in love. If he was down, he was really down, but not so down that he couldn’t scrape himself up and win an Academy Award. He got up. At a time when Sammy Davis Jr. could perform in Vegas but couldn’t stay in the hotel, Sinatra told them if Sammy couldn’t stay, he wouldn’t sing. That changed their minds quickly. It was his guts and integrity that I admire.
I am involved with the Salvation Army — which is a great organization — and with the Multiple Sclerosis Society. I’ve learned more about Multiple Sclerosis over the last year or two, how it strikes young adults right in the prime of life out of the blue. I would like to ask everyone reading this article to learn more about the disease and consider making a contribution to the MS Society of Mississippi, where the money goes toward helping young families stricken by this malady and toward finding a cure. If you and your family are well, that’s reason enough to help. The Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Web site is nationalmssociety.org.
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PAX Network Bio on Edward Saint Pe’
1999
Edward Saint Pé is a digital pioneer in the television business and an entrepreneur who has taken a traditional syndication model and stood it on its head. His company, WeatherVision, founded in 1991, provides daily, customized local and regional weather forecasts to 100 television stations around the country. WeatherVision’s signal is uplinked out of St. Pé’s all-digital teleport in Jackson, Mississippi via GE-4. His distribution of “virtual weather news” is syndicated on a cash and television commercial barter basis. In addition, WeatherVision provides local forecasts to more than 100 U.S. cities via its Internet company, WeatherVision.com.
Saint Pé started on his career in meteorology at Jackson State in 1980, after having already established his career in television. Saint Pé went to New York in 1976 at age 19, encouraged by a professor, a veteran of the early years at NBC, who was impressed with Saint Pé’s dramatic “Gnome Theater” shows which he had written, directed, produced and starred in. After a year at the Institute of New Cinema Artists, Saint Pé got a call from NBC, where he spent the next couple of years immersed in all aspects of operating a television network.
By 1977, Saint Pé “wanted to see a tree again” and returned to Mississippi. He went to work at WLBT, the only black-owned television station in the country, run by William Dilday, the only black General Manager in the country. “I was a guy with a lot of ideas and not much else, but those folks embraced me, gave me my shot,” recalls Saint Pé. He went from mail boy and gopher to producer and talent. St. Pé developed and starred in “Cowboy Bill,” which he describes as a satirical and crazy 30 minutes, shot on 16 mm film, wrapped around a 60-minute kid’s show. Finally, in 1980, a weather job opened up. Saint Pé auditioned for it and got it, finishing his college degree the same year.
After moving on to on-camera meteorologist jobs in Shreveport (LA) at the CBS affiliate (WAFB-TV), and then to Baton Rouge (KSLA), Saint Pé started his first network project with radio stations, providing an audio cut of the weather report four to five times a day. His radio client list was up to six stations when his biggest station called and said they reluctantly had to drop the service due to budget cutbacks. Saint Pé came up with a creative solution. He offered to give the station the weather news for free in exchange for the adjacent commercial spot, which he would sell himself. The station’s GM agreed. Saint Pé did the math and realized that this new business model was going to generate about 10 times the revenue as fees for the service. He quickly converted the other stations to the same model, creating the first ad hoc weather network on radio. “By getting fired, I got started,” says Saint Pé, who over the next months built his client list to nearly 30 radio stations.
Edward Saint Pe’ and Jim “Pops” Robinson singing at “Huntington’s Grille”
Buoyed by his success, Saint Pé says he had “delusions of grandeur” and set out to buy a radio station. A broker found a station in Yazoo, Mississippi, WJNS, and Saint Pé bought it, financed by the owner who sold it. Although he had never worked at a radio station, much less owned one, Saint Pé dove in. Soon after, he bought WJXN-AM in Jackson, situated on 3 acres of land downtown. He built a third station (WJXN-FM) from the ground up. But things didn’t always go smoothly. St. Pé tried putting CNN radio on WJXN-AM, which had for years featured evangelist ministers and Bible belt-oriented programming. Saint Pé recalls, “It was right after Turner came out with his ‘Ten Principles.’ People went crazy. They couldn’t stand Ted Turner.” Saint Pé went back to the previous format.
Saint Pé received his certification from the AMS (American Meteorological Society) in 1988 and began looking at opportunities to get into the television business. By 1991, his holdings had reached sufficient value to warrant selling the three station licenses while keeping the property in Jackson. This provided enough capital to build a teleport. He bought a 7-meter dish, installed a Ku-band uplink, weather computers and graphics equipment, and started calling television stations to offer them his weather segments on the same basis as he had with radio stations. Soon seven stations around Louisiana were taking the feed from St. Pé’s National Weather Network (NWN).
From the beginning, NWN was built on a digital model. St. Pé felt the higher initial investment would be offset by savings in satellite time. The studios and uplink became a valuable resource to other news broadcasters as well. As the only satellite teleport in the state, Saint Pé’s facilities were ground zero for high profile interviews. Hillary Clinton was the first, in early ’92 with CNN, on her way to becoming First Lady. The other networks followed suit, booking NWN’s studios to uplink interviews for Good Morning America, the Today Show and CNN, with news and political figures such as Jesse Jackson and Trent Lott, as well as Dan Rather doing a hurricane report from WeatherVision’s windswept parking lot.
Steadily, Saint Pé’s weather service expanded to more stations. He added meteorologists to augment his own on-camera work. Trademark features of NWN’s weathercasts were that each was customized to each market, with the station’s own graphics and carefully orchestrated banter with the local station’s anchors. This format seamlessly integrated the weather report into the local news. Viewers had no idea that the meteorologist was hundreds – or thousands of miles away, as evidenced by the requests that came to the local stations for appearances by Saint Pé and his team at local events. The local station clients found themselves carefully sidestepping such invitations.
In 1999 Saint Pé added an online service and began supplying customized weather to more than 100 cities around the U.S. His initiatives drew notice by potential buyers, including networks that were looking to acquire a business that provided content ideally suited for multiple broadband applications, and easily brand-able by sponsors. Saint Pé discussed but resisted offers, focusing instead on building his distribution. In April 2001, Saint Pé changed the name of his service to WeatherVision, and signed his first network, PAX TV, supplying national and regional forecasts to more than 40 of PAX’s stations around the country.
Mornings begin early at WeatherVision’s offices in Jackson. The meteorologists on the morning shift arrive between 3:30 and 4:30 AM. Raw data from WSI (Weather Service International) is downloaded. Weather reports are prepared, graphics fine-tuned. The morning feed begins at 6 A.M. The next feed goes out at 3:30 PM, and then the last feed from 5:30 – 7:30 P.M. All day, the computers are monitored for potential severe weather events. In such emergencies, WeatherVision runs a live feed to the stations in the area.
Saint Pé is undaunted by such a grueling schedule. His focus is on growing the business, adding specialized segments, expanding the Internet weather service, supplying Spanish-language forecasts and seeking ways to make his business even more valuable to broadband partners. Saint Pé says, “We have a product whose time has come. The world of is catching up to the thing we invented, virtual weather.”
(Article from the “PAX” Network)
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