Western Reserve Public Media Chief Operating Officer Don Freeman announces retirement

Has directed station’s programming for almost 20 years

With more than 40 years’ experience in the public broadcasting industry, including almost 20 years at Western Reserve Public Media, Chief Operating Officer Don Freeman announced that he will retire effective March 28, 2008.

“Don is an icon here at the station as well as within the entire public broadcasting community,” said President and CEO Trina Cutter. “There are some employees who have much greater expectations of — and put far more demands on — themselves than what the job requires,” she added. “These employees excel well beyond ‘just good enough’ and they set the bar for everyone else. Don is such an employee. The staff and I will truly miss him.”

Freeman has enjoyed increasingly more responsible roles in public television over the last four decades. His broadcast career began in the United States Air Force in the mid-1960s, when he served as a news and sports broadcast reporter with American Forces Radio in Madrid, Spain. For nearly six years he was with public broadcasting station KRMA in Denver, where he rose from an instructional television producer to director of that station’s public affairs unit. In 1979 he joined Nebraska Educational Television Network, creating nightly legislative review programs and other public affairs specials.

Freeman and his family moved to Columbus in 1979 when he accepted a position with Ohio Educational Television, first as executive producer and then as director of programming, a position he held for eight years.

In 1988, Freeman joined Western Reserve Public Media as the director of programming, where he assumed responsibility for creating the broadcast schedule as well as local production. His duties expanded over the years to include broadcast operations and then, in 2006, he was named chief operating officer of the organization. As such, he assumed additional management duties of administration, accounting and personnel.

Among Freeman’s many successes at Western Reserve Public Media over the years, his broadcast scheduling strategies have resulted in a doubling of the station’s viewing audience since the late 1980s. As an executive producer, he has won two National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Cleveland Chapter Emmy Awards, one in 1994 for the on-air campaign “More Than You See on TV” and the other in 1995 for the production Presumed Innocence: A Portrait of Youth Violence in 1995.

Freeman was honored with an additional 10 Emmy nominations between 1990-2006. He received the 1990 Ohio PTV Program of the Year Award from Ohio Educational Broadcasting for Our Family and additional OEB awards for Presumed Innocence and Spacebound (1997). He also received PBS Advertising and Promotion Awards for Our Family and “Carmen Sandiego Live.”

Freeman and his wife of 39 years, Joan, will be relocating to their home state of Colorado in early summer. They have two sons and two grandchildren.

 

About Western Reserve Public Media
Western Reserve Public Media is owned and operated by Northeastern Educational Television of Ohio, Inc., a private, nonprofit corporation. A trusted community resource, Western Reserve Public Media uses the power of noncommercial television and related services to enrich the lives of people through high-quality programming and educational services that teach, illuminate and inspire. For more information about Western Reserve Public Media, visit www.WesternReservePublicMedia.org or call 1-800-854-4549.