Breaking News Drives Dillon
By Matt Savener
Breaking news coverage is one of the most daunting challenges in the journalism business, and Dan Dillon loves it.
Dillon, 51, is the news director for two Wichita, Kan., radio stations, KFDI-FM and KFTI-AM. KFDI is a country station with a heavy emphasis on news, and KFTI is a classic country station with an even heavier emphasis on news, Dillon said.
Dillon's newsroom includes eight other people, with Dillon as an overseer. He makes sure the news is covered in Wichita and south central Kansas. Dillon takes pride in the stations' speed in covering breaking news.
"We try to get news like that on the air ASAP," he said.
"Newspapers can go into much more depth, television can show you what happened, so we try to tell the listeners what's going on immediately."
Dillon grew up on a farm outside Omaha. He went to a small country grade school and graduated from Creighton Prep High School.
Considering what to do after high school, Dillon noticed a particular feature that could help him in the years ahead. "I have kind of a low voice (inherited) from my father. and I decided to start in radio," he said.
Dillon enrolled at UNL to prepare for his broadcasting career. While in college, Dillon intended to go into television broadcasting but later changed his mind in favor of a career in radio. "I enjoy the variety that radio gives me," he said.
After graduating from UNL in 1974, he worked for four years as a reporter at two radio stations in Omaha before taking over as news director at KFDI/KFTI in Wichita.
KFDI and KFTI won three Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) awards last year. The first was for Overall Excellence in 2002; the second, for continuing coverage, was for live coverage of the trial of two brothers from Dodge City, Kan., charged with quadruple homicide in Wichita; and the third, for newscast, was for a story aired on the stations after two missionaries were kidnapped by rebels in the Philippines in 2001.
Peter E. Mayeux is a broadcasting professor at UNL who taught Dillon in 1973. "His station is a well-oiled machine," Mayeux said. "Like a football team, everybody does their own thing."
Mayeux said Dillon makes an effort to recruit
UNL graduates for KFDI/KFTI. "He said, 'I'm tired of hiring KU [University of Kansas] graduates. I don't want to wear red in the newsroom all by myself,'" Mayeux recalled.
Dillon's family includes his wife, Carol, an ultrasound sonographer, and his daughter, Lindsay, who is a junior radiology student at Newman University in Wichita.
Dillon compared working in Wichita with working in Omaha. Wichita has more severe weather, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for Dillon.
"We are the radio station to listen to when there's severe weather," he said. "People who despise country music will turn on KFDI when severe weather comes around."
