Kathleen Campion Email and Phone Number

Mike Bloomberg hired me to help build the broadcast presence that delivers Bloomberg News. I signed on for what I thought was a short term start up but turned into a 20 year chunk of my career. Start ups are the best! You do everything and when it's Mike...you try everything. This was the only time in my career so far that all things were possible. Nothing was too out there or too costly...try it, fly it, see if it works.At BLP I helped build our earliest and some of our best business news programming. We did the solid, day-to-day reporting that Bloomberg News is now famous for. We did quirky things too...Bloomberg Small Business shown on Acela trains and BosWash shuttles.Most of all, I'm proud of the often prickly conversations that led to a really functional Chinese Wall between our very powerful clients who paid the bills and our journalism that ignored the fact that they were paying the bills. Reporting on your customers! Who does that? Bloomberg does. Or, at least we did then.

CNBC at the outset was a hoot! It stands for "The Consumer News and Business Channel". (I still have some pretty goofy tee shirts.) Neil Cavuto and I were the first anchors...we put that puppy on the air at dawn with all the execs lurking around the edges of the set, then in Fort Lee. In hindsight, it was the moment when cable television came together with the great appetite in the middle class for markets news. But you know what they say about hindsight. CNBC in the spring of '89 had no idea what it should be or would be. I was there as a markets reporter...fresh from The Wall Street Journal Report. But...we had "consumer' segments that would make you fall down laughing now...cooking ..fashion...psychology of numbers. We tried everything. All good...the best of start ups.

To date...this was the best job I 'd ever had. The Wall Street Journal Report was the WSJ on television. This weekly magazine show had a terrific budget. Our crew car was an Audi, enough said. My best experience there, of many - I headed to Dallas to profile AMR chairman Bob Crandall, a formidable guy. In important ways, he built the place. My favorite part of his story? All the other white guys at the table (do I have to say it? Of course they were all other white guys!!) for the early morning briefing chain-smoked too. My favorite part of the story I delivered? At the same time I was there to profile Crandall, the flight attendants were readying a strike over the two-tiered pay platform Crandall had instituted. I thought their story a natural partner to his story. So I ran two profiles...his, which was great, and a profile of the woman who ran the flight attendant's union. AMR was furious because they had given us terrific access, expecting a big wet kiss and felt blindsided by this other story, not to mention they hated the idea that Crandall was put on the same level as 'that woman'. The WSJ was furious because they had greenlighted me...helped me in the door. It was one of those rare times when a television journalist running under the auspices of a print shop breaks news and the print shop is p.o.'d. What can you do?

Lifetime Network launched a bunch of live hours with a call-in element. Dr. Ruth did one. Regis did one. And they hired Fran Tarkenton and me to do the money show. Fran, the 'Scrambler' as a NFL quarterback, had built a reputation as an entrepreneur. And he was the marquee name. (one Lifetime exec told me they thought of Fran as the beauty and me as the brains. I was good with that.)Fran would fly in for the show and we'd walk thru a live hour with very high production values. Three to four sets would be dressed so we could walk from segment to segment...a game show...a small business show...a serious markets interview (that would be me) ...a starlet who wanted to know what to do with her money (that would be Fran) and so on. It was highly produced, it was fun, it was short-lived. At the wrap, Lifetime gave me an important piece of crystal...Regis and Dr. Ruth got one too.

BusinessWeek was my first news job on the financial beat. BusinessWeek magazine wanted a correspondent on the Satellite News Channel. You have never heard of SNC because of a brilliant decision Ted Turner made. (more later)ABC and Westinghouse recognized, as Turner did, the potential of twenty-four hour cable news. They threw a lot of money into building SNC in a new facility in Stamford, Connecticut. Like all the nascent cable operations it was placed outside of NYC,that is, outside the throw of union contracts.When I interviewed for the job, BusinessWeek's publisher said: "You have great credentials as a general assignment reporter but what do you know about business news?" Reporters know they can cover a beat...any beat...but we also know we have to make the case. So I said I had, in a previous life, been a teacher and had taught junior high school "economics and social studies".And you know what HE said? "Perfect! " He felt that junior high school civics was "just the level of the U.S. population when it comes to business news." I didn't argue with him as I wanted the job. And that job started me on a very satisfying beat. Funny to think about it now but there were damn few women who were thought to know anything about financial markets then. A great opportunity.And why haven't you heard of SNC? Because Ted Turner bought it and closed it down...so that CNN could become CNN without competition in this brand new market.