Honoring a life and love of journalism
Paul Davis, Past RTDNA President and Treasurer, 1938-2021 Tribute by Dan Shelley, RTDNA/F Executive Director I’ll never forget the first time I met Paul Davis. We were both attending a journalism conference in Boston. It was the summer of 1988. Paul was news director at the behemoth WGN-TV, Chicago; I wa...
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Radio Television Digital News Foundation
Tribute by Dan Shelley, RTDNA/F Executive Director

I’ll never forget the first time I met Paul Davis.

We were both attending a journalism conference in Boston. It was the summer of 1988. Paul was news director at the behemoth WGN-TV, Chicago; I was news director at a small-market radio station in Missouri.

At the end of the day, Paul put together a group of people to go to dinner at the original Legal Sea Foods restaurant in Cambridge. So I joined Paul and six other people as we crammed into his rented Crown Vic for the drive to the restaurant. We were packed like canned sardines.

The restaurant had a 90-minute wait. Paul put his name on the list and then decided we should all stuff back into his car and go to Lexington to see a monument commemorating where the Revolutionary War had started in 1775.

Later, on the way back to the restaurant, Paul, navigating from a roadmap draped across the steering wheel, inadvertently drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic. Someone in the car yelled out, and he swiftly swerved back into the correct lane, barely missing a phalanx of Boston Police motorcycles.

It was the motorcade for then-governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.

While his passengers, including me, were mortified, Paul let out a bellow of laughter. Someone suggested that maybe she could read the map so Paul could concentrate on his driving.

“This is nothing,” he said. “I do a crossword puzzle on the Dan Ryan (or was it the Kennedy?) every day on my way to work!”

He would be news director at WGN-TV for 13 years, building the “super station’s” newsroom into a nationally recognized powerhouse and founding a Washington, DC bureau serving all of parent company Tribune’s stations across the country.

Broadcast journalism was in Paul’s DNA. Born in Effingham, Illinois, Paul spent many of his formative years at the local radio station, WCRA-AM, where his mother Zona was the news director, sole reporter and a local legend.

When he was old enough, at age 15 – after “my voice dropped,” he later said – Paul worked as the station’s staff announcer. And boy, did his voice drop. His deep baritone would serve him well through college, throughout his career, and indeed, his entire life.

By my count, throughout his 67 years as WCRA’s former staff announcer, Paul worked at nine radio and television stations, most notably at WGN-TV (and Radio) and, just before that, as an anchor/reporter and then news director at WCIA-TV in Champaign, Illinois, where he had graduated from the University of Illinois. He also worked as a TV news consultant and advocated for First Amendment issues. He left the Midwest to live in Los Angeles for a time.

Paul also found ways to give back to journalism. He was RTDNA’s treasurer from 1973 to 1977. He was our elected president in 1979. He later was president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He was president of the Illinois News Broadcasters Association. He was on the board of the Chicago/Midwest chapter of NATAS and served on many other journalism boards and committees.

Paul’s voice was silenced this week when his years-long effort to stave off cancer ended peacefully, in his sleep, in a hospice facility. But his influence on RTDNA and the broadcast journalism industry will never be squelched.