George Vogel
When George Vogel graduated from Georgetown, Ohio, High School in 1975, he wasn’t sure what career he wanted to pursue.
He enrolled at Southern State Community College for two years while driving a truck making freight deliveries for a Georgetown company
Everything clicked in 1979 when he transferred to the University of Cincinnati and enrolled in the Electronic Media Department within the College-Conservatory of Music.
Vogel loved it from the get-go. He took broadcast journalism and writing courses to learn everything he could about the industry. That paid off with an internship at WLWT-TV working with Sports Director Zip Rzeppa. The one-term internship led to independent study and four quarters of on-the-job learning.
While still a student, he was hired part-time at WLWT-TV to work with his UC newswriting teacher Tony Mastriani writing copy for cut-ins and the Mid-Day news.
Armed with a UC degree in 1981, Vogel became a full-time WLWT-TV employee in 1982, but it wasn’t in sports. He worked the assignment desk for nearly three years. When the station expanded its high school sports coverage in 1987, he moved to on-air sports reporting.
From then on, it was all anchoring and reporting on some of the biggest stories in Cincinnati sports history. He was in the right place at the right time. When the Bengals went to the Super Bowl in Miami in 1989, Vogel was there. When the Reds went wire-to-wire and won the 1990 World Series, Vogel was part of the coverage.
It was the same in 1992 when UC went to the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament in Minneapolis. News anchor Jerry Springer was part of the team coverage as well.
Beyond that, there were countless high school sports championships to cover, college sports including UC playing for a national championship and much more.
Vogel retired at the end of 2023.
Betsy Ross
Some people might hesitate at volunteering for something new and untested, but not Betsy Ross.
Her willingness to think out of the box and get beyond her comfort zone led to her becoming the first woman to report sports stories on a Cincinnati television station. Plus, she was one of the first women to break into national sports news.
She’s set a high standard for women in both broadcasting and business.
Opportunity knocked and she answered the door.
Ross’ journey began after graduation from Indiana’s Connorsville High School in 1968, followed by a journalism degree at Ball State University and graduate school at Notre Dame University.
Luckily, WNDU, the NBC affiliate in South Bend, was located on Notre Dame’s campus. It was a hands-on laboratory for students to learn from professionals who served as adjunct professors.
That created a skill set that put her on the path to stardom.
But that wasn’t enough for Ross. She also worked on the copy desk and as a reporter for the South Bend Tribune.
That tenacity and experience landed her a job in 1978 as a morning anchor and news reporter for WSVJ, the ABC affiliate in South Bend.
But Ross wanted to work in the Cincinnati market. So, she sent resumes to all the television stations. WCPO-TV’s legendary newsman Al Schottelkotte called Ross’ mother trying to get hold of her, they connected and she was hired as a morning show producer and fill-in anchor in 1980.
That was good, but it wasn’t enough for Ross. She wanted to do sports reports. Knowing the sports departments often needed help, the volunteered her services to Sports Director John Popovich. It was a match made in heaven.
Ross’ first assignment was covering the LPGA Championships held at Kings Island when Nancy Lopez was at the top of her game. She soon was paired with Mike Binkley on the weekend anchor desk and reported three days a week,
But she continued to volunteer for sports assignments and the variety of stories she handled came in handy at her next stop in 1987 — Indianapolis’ WTHR. Much of what the station did was sports coverage, since the city is a hotbed of amateur sports organizations and teams.
Three years later, New York came calling and she moved into the anchor chair at SportsChannel America for their version of ESPN’s SportsCenter.
It was back to Cincinnati in 1991, this time at WLWT-TV for six years, not as a sports reporter, but as a morning anchor and fill-in for sports. She covered the 1996 Presidential Election and Inauguration and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Olympic trials.
Ross’ next move was a big leap into full-time sports at ESPN in 1997 as the anchor for ESPN News and SportsCenter Weekend in Bristol, Connecticut.
It was there she was witness to one of the nation’s biggest stories: the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Ross was at the anchor desk for over eight hours across all platforms. As the day went on, the focus shifted to sports coverage. The National Football League and Major League Baseball cancelled games. Colleges and universities did the same. When games, resumed in New York, the first game at Yankee Stadium helped to heal the nation.
Ross returned to the Queen City in 2002 to start the sports and entertainment firm Game Day Communications. One of the company’s early assignments was helping Flying Pig Marathon Director Iris Simpson manage and grow the race, which was then in its infancy. She also works for WXIX-TV part-time filling in on weekends and helping out where needed.
She won a regional Emmy® in 2014 for her work on the broadcast of the Lauren Hill Mt. St. Joseph-Hilliard College basketball game at Xavier University.
Ross gives back as well, teaching at the University of Cincinnati, Xavier University and Indiana University. She handles public address announcing for University of Cincinnati women’s basketball, soccer and lacrosse.
“People gave me a break in the early years covering college and high school football,” she said. “I cut my teeth on that. They gave me a chance.”
She hasn’t looked back.
John Popovich
The broadcasting bug bit John Popovich as a student at Struthers High School near Youngstown. He worked for the school’s radio station, WKTL (Key To Life), then followed his brothers and sisters to Ohio University in Athens.
His ambition was to combine radio, television and sports into a career. It didn’t take long for that dream to become reality.
Graduating from OU in 1973, Popovich headed west to do radio news at WDBQ-AM in Dubuque, Iowa. A year later he moved to WOC Radio/Television in Davenport, Iowa, doing news and sports on both radio and television. He settled into the community, but WCPO-TV’s Al Schottelkotte came calling in 1979.
Popovich was hired that July as a sports reporter doing features for the original 7:00 O’clock Report. He was named Sports Director in 1981 and hosted the popular Sports of All Sorts program which aired for decades Sunday nights after the 11 O’Clock News.
“Popo” was one of the best writers in the business combing words and images into incredible reports that both entertained and informed viewers.
He used that talent to produce memorable stories while traveling the world for major sports events. He covered the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 for WCPO-TV and CBS and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
There were also three Super Bowls, the Reds 1990 wire-to-wire season, the Hall of Fame inductions of Johnny Bench and Pete Rose, two Masters tournaments, two US Open tournaments, six Final Fours – one involving the University of Cincinnati and much more.
He retired from WCPO-TV at the end of 2019 after 40-years with the station.
Wayne Box Miller
You might need a super-computer to keep track of everything Wayne Box Miller has done in radio and television, journalism, sports marketing and education.
He’s the pregame, halftime and postgame host on the Cincinnati Bengals Radio Network broadcasting from WLW radio.
He often co-hosted Sports Rock on WLWT-TV and wrote a sports column for The Cincinnati Herald.
He founded a sports marketing company representing athletes like Cincinnati Reds Eric Davis and Deion Sanders plus Cincinnati Bengals David Fulcher and Jeff Blake.
He worked nearly every radio job at WCIN, WIZF and WDBZ.
He’s the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at St. Xavier High School.
Miller has found a way to succeed at each level and who knows what’s left to conquer.
Born in Maysville, Kentucky, Miller’s family moved to Avondale in 1964. It was in junior high that he picked up the neighborhood nickname, Box, and it’s stuck with him ever since
He attended Woodward High School and wanted to play basketball, but a spot on the team eluded him.
For college, Miller picked Morehead State University and was so determined to play basketball that he was a walk-on for a year with the junior varsity team.
He planned to major in art, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit. Instead, he recalled winning a radio copywriting contest in high school — a contest he entered because of a free lunch — and switched his major to communications.
That choice was a turning point.
Working at the campus newspaper The Trail Blazer plus the campus radio and television station WMKY, gave Miller a wide range of broadcasting and journalism skills. He ran the radio board, wrote commercials and promos, did television news and sports play-by-play.
After graduation from Morehead in 1979, Miller ventured to California for a few months, then returned to Cincinnati and began a career as a banker. His first communications job was in The New York Times marketing department in 1982. That led to an advertising sales position with The Cincinnati Enquirer three years later.
The move to radio came when WCIN put Miller on the air hosting The Midnight Happy Hour With Champagne Wayne. That was followed by three years at WIZF, where he started in sales and ended up as promotions director.
The entrepreneurial bug bit Miller in 1988 when he launched Miller Communications Sports Marketing representing Reds and Bengals players.
It was back to broadcasting in 2000, this time with WDBZ. Miller was Sports Director and Co-Host of The Prime Time Sports Show. At the same time, he often co-hosted WLWT’S “Sports Rock” with Ken Broo and George Vogel.
Miller’s radio audience got bigger in 2014 when he landed a part-time job doing the Bengals Pep Rally Show and Game Day on ESPN 1530.
The Bengals called two years later and offered him the job as host of the pregame, halftime and postgame shows on the Bengals Radio Network. The show originates at WLW in Cincinnati and airs in 30-different markets.
The move into education came in 2019 as St. Xavier High School’s DEI Director.
Looking back over his career, Miller quickly names the Bengals 2022 Super Bowl Game at So-Fi Stadium in Los Angeles as his most memorable sports event. “It was surreal,” he said while wishing his father could have been there to share the experience.
Honors have often come his way. Morehead State gave him a Career Achievement Award in 2007 and inducted him into the school’s Alumni Hall of Fame. He currently serves on the LaRosa’s Hall of Fame Committee and the Cincinnati Public Schools Hall of Fame Committee.
Denny Janson
Denny Janson’s broadcasting career started humbly in 1965 when the Elder High School sophomore was hired to answer the WSAI-AM Radio request line. It was immediately clear this Price Hill native would quickly rise through the ranks.
Case in point: reporting his first breaking news story. Janson was a UC freshman in 1968 selling Christmas trees at Rinks. On the way work early one morning, he came across a fire at the Red Barn Restaurant and quickly called the station with a first-person account. A very impressed 1360 Action News Director Carl Eckels offered him a job writing copy for reporter Doug Anthony and fact-checking other stories.
By 1972 Janson was doing sports filling in for Paul Sommerkamp on WKRC Radio. In 1974, he was hired to do afternoon drive news and traffic reports on Dayton radio stations WONE-AM and WTUE-FM. Television wasn’t far behind. That was the same year he began doing sports on WLWD-TV (now WDTN).
Janson was back in the Queen City in 1977 running the Chapter 13 bar in Mount Adams.
However, the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire that May brought him back into broadcasting. He was hired by WKRC-TV to help ABC edit film of the tragedy that claimed 165 lives.
That prompted WKRC-TV News Director Bill Crafton to hire him to do Sunday sports for $50 a show. It wasn’t long before he landed the permanent sports anchor role.
By 1984, changes at WKRC-TV led Janson to WCPO-TV as a sports anchor. He became one of the most recognizable broadcasters in Cincinnati in that position.
He retired at the end of 2013.
Kevin Barnett
It all begins with an idea.
If you met Kevin Barnett as he was growing up in St. Bernard, you knew he would find a career in sports.
At 6’5” Barnett was a four-sport athlete at St. Bernard/Elmwood Place High School — soccer, basketball, baseball and tennis. He’s in the school’s Hall of Fame.
A self-proclaimed statistics nerd, he devoured box scores of games and collected baseball cards to check out the numbers.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn he did television news in high school all four years.
Then it was off to Rio Grande University to play soccer and major in broadcast communications. The school didn’t have a lot of electronic media, but it did have connections to Cincinnati television stations. Barnett interned at WKRC-TV in 1990.
The rest is history.
“Ken Broo hired me for the station,” Barnett said, relating how he won a competition with another intern to produce a sports segment for the 11:00 p.m. News. It was a one-time opportunity for $7.85 in pay with a part-time position on the line.
“I would have worked for free, but Broo called the next day and said I got the job,” Barnett recalled.
It was 1991 and Barnett was now the part-time sports producer for Local 12. To make ends meet, he worked a landscaping job during the day and clocked in at WKRC for afternoon and evening sports. It didn’t take long for WKRC news managers to recognize Barnett’s talent and he was hired full-time in 1992.
As Executive Sports Producer, Barnett worked with Broo producing the Boos and Bravos segment. He also did some reporting doing sidebar stories on the Cincinnati Bengals since WKRC was the Bengals station at the time.
“We tried to be different,” he said. “I owe everything to that man.”
In the past 30-years virtually all of WKRC-TV’s sports coverage had Barnett’s fingerprints on it.
He’s credited with being the creative mind behind Local 12 legends Broo, Walt Maher, Ken Anderson, Brad Johansen and ESPN’s Gary Miller.
Barnett created Friday Night Final, the first extended high school sports show in the Cincinnati market — seven minutes and 55-seconds of scores and highlights.
A show called Sports Locker debuted with Broo as host, but was shelved when Broo left to work in Washington, D.C. Barnett and Johansen later revived it.
The Barnett/Johansen partnership continued with Sports Authority, one of Cincinnati’s longest running Sunday night sports shows.
And Bengals Nation was Cincinnati’s only weekly Bengals show taped in front of a live audience.
That’s quite a list, but there’s more.
He’s been Executive Producer on the Reds Opening Day Show, the Bengals preseason, playoff and Super Bowl specials, Luke Fickell’s UC Coach Show, FC Cincinnati preseason special and the Jim Beam Turfway Park specials. He’s covered a Super Bowl, MLB Playoffs, NCAA Basketball Championships, the Kentucky Derby, NASCAR, ATP Tennis and more.
Those efforts have won multiple Emmy nominations and Emmys plus regional and national awards.
Barnett says he’s very proud “Bengals Nation” won a Bronze Telly award this year, coming in behind “Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli Manning” and the “Olympic Channel.”
The one experience Barnett considers the most memorable of his career came the day Xavier’s Musketeers won their first Big East regular season championship in 2018. Coach Chris Mack was at the helm and Barnett says he got tears in his eyes as he watched Mack help cut down the nets after the victory.
That’s because from 1992 through 1996 he and the Xavier, Louisville and now College of Charleston Head Basketball coach were roommates. They became best friends and still keep in touch to this day.
Barnett was understandably excited to be chosen for the Greater Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame.
“Every day I am lucky to be doing this — doing what I love,” Barnett said. “This is the pinnacle,” This is special to me.”
HIs mother was in tears at hearing the news, having raised him as a single parent.
His wife added, “This makes up for all the times you were away on assignment.”
Ken Broo
It all begins with an idea.
Ken Broo has been up and down the dial of radio and television stations in Cincinnati and across the country for nearly 50 years. But, no matter where he landed, the lure of the Queen City always brought him back to the shores of the Ohio River.
The Belleville, New Jersey, native (think “Jersey Boys”) was a hockey player in high school and first visited Ohio University in the summer of 1969. That’s where he learned he might be able to “skate-on” the Bobcats club team as a freshman.
However, when he got to Athens in the fall of 1970, Broo found out the coach had signed several Canadian hockey players and quickly realized he needed a backup plan.
So, he wrote for the campus newspaper, The Post, did radio and television news, play-by-play for OU Bobcats Hockey and Athens High School sports along with color for The Bobcat Football network.
A WCPO-TV summer internship in promotions introduced him to Cincinnati in 1973. Little did he know those three months foreshadowed what was to come in later years,.
His first stop after graduating in 1974 was reporting sports for WKFI-AM (We Keep Farmers Informed) radio in Wilmington, Ohio. It was daytime only, meaning high school football games were taped on Friday nights and broadcast on Saturdays. That lasted a year.
After two years doing radio sports at WKST-AM in New Castle, Pennsylvania, it was back to the Queen City to work for WSAI-AM radio. He did morning sports with the legendary Jim Scott and covered the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine World Series title repeat in 1976.
As luck would have it, he got a call to fill in for a weekend sportscast on WKRC-TV. A tape from that newscast found its way to Oklahoma City where he was hired as weekend sports anchor on KWTV-TV. That was followed by sports stints at stations in Tulsa (1977 – 1981) and Tampa (1981 – 1987), but Cincinnati came calling again.
WLWT-TV hired Broo as Sports Director in 1987 where he worked with the anchor team of Jerry Springer and Norma Rashid. Three years later, he was back again at WKRC-TV helping the station cover the Reds wire-to-wire 1990 season and doing Cincinnati Bengals Radio Network play-by-play.
WSUA-TV in Washington, D.C. lured him from Cincinnati to the nation’s capital in 1996, but by 2000 he was back in the Queen City with WLWT-TV. When sports anchor Denny Janson retired from WCPO-TV in 2013, Broo moved into that slot and followed John Popovich as host of Sports of All Sorts on Sunday nights.
He retired from WCPO-TV at the end of 2018, but he wasn’t done with broadcasting.
Broo’s love of and expertise in pop music has made him a fixture at WLW Radio. His interviews with the legends of rock-and-roll are extremely popular. He hosts Sunday Morning Sports Talk, produces music features and fills in for various personalities.
Paul Daugherty
It all begins with an idea.
From the time he was sports editor of his high school newspaper in Bethesda, Maryland, Paul Daugherty knew he what he wanted to do with his life. He was a sports fan who loved to write, so he combined the two. Readers around the world are glad he did.
His passion for accuracy was honed as a journalism major at Washington and Lee University by Professor Ham Smith. Professor Smith drove home that point with an axe in a tree trunk mounted on his office door indicating how Incorrect copy would be treated.
As a second semester senior in 1979, Daugherty considered going to bartender school. However, that path changed with a chance meeting at a party. He struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be the editor of the Carroll County Times in Westminster, Maryland. Daugherty was offered a job working the less-than-exciting local and county government beat. He accepted it but jumped at the opportunity when the sports editor position opened.
After a general sports reporting stop at the Virginian-Pilot in Hampton Roads, Virginia, Daugherty headed southwest to The Dallas Times Herald. For two years he was given free rein to write sports features about topics anywhere in the country. Louisville vs. Duke in the 1986 Final Four? No problem! The first Great Alaska Shootout? He was there.
New York’s Newsday pulled Daugherty back east in 1985 with the same assignment: covering sports stories from all over the country.
“I loved the job, but not the area,” he said.
So, when the Cincinnati Post needed a sports columnist in 1987, Daugherty moved to the Midwest and has called the Queen City home ever since.
“Writing a column instead of features wasn’t a tough move,” Daugherty said. “I’m fairly opinionated.”
He took that mantra to The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1994 and stayed with the paper until his retirement in 2022. By his count, he’s written well over 10,000 columns.
One of his favorite topics is focusing on ordinary people doing extraordinary things. For example, George “Sugar” Costner was an up-and-coming Cincinnati boxer until punches left both retinas detached, and he was blind by age 34. Despite that challenge, Costner got a degree at Cleveland State University and worked for the Ohio Civil Rights Commission for 35 years.
Daugherty witnessed Tiger Woods’ entire career starting with a 12-stroke win in the 1997 Masters and ending with the U.S. Open in 2008. He covered all of Barry Larkin’s years with the Cincinnati Reds, Eric Davis’ home run in the 1990 World Series and more. He wrote books with Reds Hall-of-Famer Johnny Bench and Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chad Johnson.
But he also told personal stories: he considered Cincinnati a family kind of town. He wrote about son, Kelly, the “Kid Down The Hall” and their annual father/son trips to North Carolina. He wrote as the parent of a disabled child, Jillian, and her journey in “An Uncomplicated Life.
An oft-honored journalist, Daugherty was named National Sports Columnist of the Year in 2013 by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE). He was Ohio’s top sportswriter/columnist nine times.
He continues his sports writing in “retirement” online with “The Morning Line.”
John Fay
It all begins with an idea.
John Fay had two loves in his life.
The first was his wife, Laura, who grew up across the street from him on Cincinnati’s West Side and was his guiding light for over 50 years.
“She was his life,” said nephew Dan Heimbrock. “It was John and Laura or Laura and John.”
The second was a passion for writing.
For six decades, Fay’s byline appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer, and he earned a reputation for his ability to cover anything well. “The curse of versatility,” one colleague called it.
He wrote about the Cincinnati Bengals; UC, Xavier and Miami; high schools (including his beloved Elder Panthers); Olympic medalists; Thanksgiving Day Race winners and everything in between.
But his largest journalistic impact came as the paper’s Cincinnati Reds beat writer. It was a dream job for the quiet, skinny Elder High School graduate starting in the 1980’s. He loved covering the Reds, even though it meant being on the road away from Laura for weeks at a time.
“He took everything in stride,” said Reds Hall of Fame announcer Marty Brennaman. “It was tough work, not glamorous.”
Reds owner Bob Castellini called Fay a thoughtful writer with a no-nonsense and direct approach to reporting on the club.
When Laura was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in 2016, Fay was her constant caregiver and supporter. She died in January, 2023. Fay, himself, went through chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and retired from the Reds beat in 2020. However, he still posted frequently about the team.
He died of a heart attack in August of 2023 at age 66.