Ozarks Profile: Kemp Nichol

Kemp Nichol

Vice president and general manager of Quorum Broadcasting of Missouri Inc., the company that owns KDEB, the local Fox television affiliate, and has a shared services agreement with KOLR, the local CBS affiliate. Nichol's responsibilities include the oversight of the news, production and promotion departments of both stations and the oversight of the engineering, production and business office of KDEB. Nichol has been general manager of KDEB since August 1995, and the two stations entered the shared services agreement in February 1999.

Age: 39.

No. of years in Springfield area: Came to the area in August 1995; is a native of Wisconsin.

Education: Bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

Early career: Managed a sporting goods store while still in high school a "tiny place" where Nichol was the only employee besides the owner, and then sold cable TV door to door in college. After college, he began his career in broadcasting. "It's impossible for me to think of my career as being in anything but broadcasting," he said. He started out in 1984 in Green Bay, Wis., as an account executive and then sales manager for a local station, then moved to Cape Girardeau in 1986 and was a sales manager at the Fox affiliate there for six months before settling at a station in Rockford, Ill., for 10 years, where he was general sales manager. Nichol worked for Petracom in Rockford, and when that company acquired KDEB, he came to Springfield as general manager. In 1998, the station was sold to Quorum, and Nichol said making the transition to a new company has made him sensitive to the changes now ongoing as KDEB and KOLR merge services. "I understand the difficulty associated with a large change like that. When you've worked for a company for quite a long time 10 years then it's difficult to make a transition. But I was able to weather that change and see the positives that came along with that, and I think that's made me aware of what employees might be feeling here as we make this change. It helped me understand transitions and be sensitive to how others would deal with them," Nichol said. Quorum now owns 16 TV stations around the country.

Current projects: News, news and more news: overseeing the new KDEB 9 p.m. news, which had its first broadcast Jan. 16, and continuing to support KOLR's newscasts. The company is completing an addition to its building, bringing it up to 33,000 square feet of space. "We've invested millions of dollars in these two stations and will continue to build out. The money invested is really staggering, but it's proof of the combined strength of these two stations," Nichol said.

Management philosophy: "My goal is for everyone to want to work for these two television stations. If people like to be here, ... then I think we can be wildly successful," Nichol said.

Spare-time pursuits: A self-proclaimed "serial obsessionist," Nichol picks up one topic, devours all the information he can on it, then moves on to a new one. His current pursuit is the stock market. "I've been known to get absorbed in one topic, buy 20 books on it, finish those and move on to a new topic. I have a tremendous intellectual curiosity," Nichol said.

Family data: Single, shares his home with a 20-month-old Chow named Theodora, or Teddy for short.