Anchoring on Newsradio WFLA

I should change the background of this blog, since the images came from 15 years, 30 pounds and thousands of hairs ago. Oh, well. Now I anchor news on the radio, so it's OK.

I started recording some of the newscasts I do at Newsradio WFLA in Tampa on my phone then marrying the video the aircheck audio later so that I could post them on my LinkedIn account. Last I visited LinkedIn, the videos had disappeared, so they have nowhere else to go but Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the early millennium platform of Blogger.

Which was when I made this blog!

Radio and Music

Just not at the same time. It's been a while, hasn't it? You probably thought I had died. Actually, you probably didn't think about me at all. That's OK. I do enough of that for both of us. I might have mentioned (or might not, and I'm too lazy to look) that I work at WFLA radio in Tampa, and have since 2016, actually. I write and read newscasts on weekends, with the luxury of showing up in my gym clothes. I fill in during the week, which is where this behind-the-scenes look at me reading a newscast this week came from.



The schedule leaves me free for what I call my mid-life crisis of trying to make a go of making music, where I write and sing songs under the name John Allen James. Here's my song "Let Me Down Easy," which I figure came out OK, since if I play it without identifying it as one of mine, people will often ask who wrote it, surprised that it was me.



That song came from an album I released last year called "Fire Sky".



The >>| icon in the player will forward you to the next song. You can also hear the album on your favorite streaming service. Just search for "John Allen James Fire Sky" and it will come up.

Music Video - "Reborn"

Live in Concert

OK, not exactly a concert, but singing and playing in front of people. Videos shot by Dale Johnston, "The Mad Scientist."

Light of Day:


Better Day:

Live Music on a Stage Near You by Me

Hello again, dear strangers. I know enough time has passed since my last post that you had forgotten I was here. That's OK. Some days I forget I'm here, too. I spend much time playing music. Have I mentioned that I recorded an album? You can hear it at MrJohnMusic.com. You can also hear my play live at venues around Tampa. Last night, someone recorded a portion of my song "Reborn."

Listen to this. "Reborn" by Mr John. Damn beautiful....
Posted by Dale Johnston on Monday, March 21, 2016

I will share more, subject to my remembering to post here. Like everyone else I have too often forsaken writing blog entries for quicker blurbs posted to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Life is progress. Of some sort.

Buy My Album!

I have an album of original songs. You can listen, and even buy it, at my page on bandcamp.com. Please give it a listen.

Music Video - Lift You Up - and New Website

This never happened in TV news. In some spare time at work at Kelby Media Group, I shot a music video for my song, "Lift You Up." A coworker who heard me play it asked, in complete seriousness, if I was on a record label. "I know people who do music," he said. "And that song's good." When he had some downtime, he even wanted to help, and he did the camera on the moving shots.

How cool is that?

I shot the rest, and edited the video. Plus, I wrote, performed and recorded the song. You've heard the term "one man band"? This is nearly that in more ways than one!

"Lift You Up" is a painful song for me in a couple of ways. First, it deals with trying to support friends who have suffered catastrophic losses in their lives. Second, one of the people who inspired it, for whom I once had great affection, decided to sever ties with me, so I get a bittersweet feeling whenever I play or hear the song now.

Like the song itself, the video is not perfect, but I like it a lot, and I hope you will, too. Please take a look:



I have taken this music stuff seriously enough that that I bought a the domain name MrJohnMusic.com. For now it uses the basic layout of JohnMcQuiston.com, but it has the best of my songs there, and I plan to tailor a style just for it. Stay tuned. (See what I did there?)

Anchor of The Year?

So this happened. For the third straight year, I am a finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists Florida Chapter Anchor of the Year. I don’t know if this is good. I worked as at WWSB-TV in Sarasota for not even two full weeks of 2014, and my entry consisted of work from a single day’s ordinary newscasts. Either the judge really liked my work on a mundane news day, or only three people entered and all of us made the finals.

You may judge for yourself:

South Dakota Wants Would-Be Mars Colonists

I have not made this up. South Dakota has produced a video extolling its virtues compared to those of Mars for people considering the one-way trip to the red planet. South Dakota, it brags, is "progressive, productive and abundant in oxygen."