Former CRI Reporter Wins Midwest Emmy
Johnathan Gregg with his Video Journalist Emmy Award. (submitted photo)
Oskaloosa said farewell to Jonathan Gregg over 2 years ago. Since that time, Gregg has been working at WITI in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he was recently recognized by his peers for his work. Gregg walked away with the Video Journalist by the Midwest Emmy’s.
Gregg talked about his time in Oskaloosa and at CRI. “Working at CRI for 3 years afforded me opportunities I would not have had as a young journalist. ‘Time’ was the biggest difference, because at CRI we were given several days to produce one article. We were truly allowed to investigate matters, perform due diligence, as opposed to handing in a finished product every night. Besides time my coworkers made CRI a hotbed of creativity. While following “old school” journalistic practices we were able to flex our creative muscle in the course of producing a range of TV programming. I really was fortunate to be a part of CRI during its height.
One of those special memories that Jonathan will take from his time in Oskaloosa is the opportunity to film Chuck Russell with CRI documentary specialist Jacob Rosdail. “I really enjoyed Chuck. He was a very funny man, very smart man, a very gentle man.”
During my interview with Jonathan, I had chosen the balcony spot to chat, nearly the same spot where they had interviewed Russell, while Jonathan ran the camera. Jonathan believes the subject involved Oskaloosa’s Police Department being the first municipality to fingerprint its citizens. “That was one of my first introductions in Oskaloosa.”
Jonathan went on to say, “I wish I had done more interviews with Chuck,” but was glad his co-worker, Rosdail, had the opportunity to do extensive interviews with Russell. “It was kind of a fleeting interview, but just that experience is one of the neatest things I’ve ever done here, getting to know him.”
Jonathan knew from a young age he wanted to be in journalism, and used to spend a lot of time watching the news with his father who, according to Jonathan, watched a whole lot of news. “Evening news, newspaper every morning, like so many other people. And I would try to stay up with Dad to watch the ten o’clock. It almost never happened. I was maybe 9 or 10 years old.”
“We could watch the five, then the five thirty nightly news with Tom Brokaw and then six o’clock local news, that would be KWQC TV-6 in Davenport, the NBC there. I’d get up in the morning, Dad would be watching the morning news. But the thing about his watching it, he would always criticize people when he thought they were doing a bad job.”
“I remember this, watching the morning news and this was when news teams first started having laptops on the news desk in the mornings. They had the cup of coffee which they always had, but then they started putting laptops on the news desk during the show and they would say ‘Hey this is just coming in, or just read this off of Quad City Times website, and this is happening right now’.”
“And my Dad would go, ‘that’s stupid. I’ll just go use a computer and I’ll turn the TV off and I’ll get my news that way. You make yourself irrelevant’.”
Jonathan said that his Dad’s critiquing always motivated him. “If I go into the news business he’ll probably be pretty critical of my work, so I better do a good job so he’s not critical.”
“I just wanted to always do well by my Dad.”
