Jonathan Shuford
2003
I was a broke Music Business major at the University of South Alabama that had just quit my job peddling computers at Best Buy. Radio sounded fun, though. I played in a band and I thought being on the radio would make my band famous (it didn't). I had a buddy that worked at the legendary WABB in Mobile. He got me a job board op-ing minor league baseball games. I annoyed enough people in the building to get them to let me run Casey Kasem's AT40 on weekends. Then weekend overnights, weekday overnights, and eventually under Tom "Jammer" Naylor, nights/MD on the station until 2007.
2006
Mardi Gras in Mobile was THE event of the year, and WABB owned it. Some of my fondest memories (and there are a lot of things I don't remember) came from the WABB Boombox, or throwing beads off the balcony of bars on Dauphin Street. Bernie Dittman was a legend who loved having a bigger than life brand that was a fabric of the community. WABB was Mobile. Without Bernie's mentorship, I wouldn't have stuck in radio for more than a couple years and certainly wouldn't still be doing it almost 20 years later.
2008
My first job with Clear Channel/iHeart was as the wacky night guy/APD for KTBT in Tulsa. Not a lot of pictures exist from this time, and that's probably a good thing. What memories the alcohol didn't kill included getting my chest waxed live on the air, getting tased in the balls, endless club nights with free bar tabs, and meeting my future wife while hammered on the air at 1am. Oh, to be young....
2010
My first PD job was with the newly-minted and now-defunct GenX format in 2010. I loved the station because it played all the music I grew up on, and it gave me a chance to learn how to program. Don Cristi and Jon Zellner fully trusted me to run the ship, and while I made some mistakes, we had a lot of great moments, including having the Goo Goo Dolls help us launch the station with a 5-hour air shift.
2012
It was on to Louisville, Kentucky in 2012 to program WNRW and WLGX , a CHR and a GenX format. We were a small team that did big things, including Bras Across the Bluegrass, an annual week-long live broadcast raising money for breast cancer organizations. We hung bras in front of Oxmoor Mall and got crazy press coverage out of it. I think it was something like 5,000 bras in my final year there.
2014
My love of putting on events started in Louisville with the Back 2 School Jam. It was the first foray into creating, marketing, and producing events, and a testament to how great our staff was. This picture represented literally our entire on-air, promotions, and digital staff, but somehow we pulled off a really amazing show thanks to Jake Miller and Meghan Trainor.
2015
I landed my dream radio job in 2015 with WRVW/Nashville, a station I grew up listening to and admiring. The call letters and the city drew me to job, but the people are why I'm still here. The group has changed a few pieces over the years, but the common thread is that everyone loves each other and loves creating. Woody & Jim are consummate pros who constantly make my life easier, and I'm over the moon proud of everything we've accomplished. Here we are taking Charlie Puth for a middle school invasion in 2016.
2016
Not only did I gain a new radio family, but my actual family grew in 2016 with the birth of my now almost 5-year old son Jackson. The first artist he met was Pentatonix, a day when Kevin (to the right of me) unwittingly put his arm on a used burp cloth to take a picture.
2018
The ability to connect listeners to their favorite artists is one of my favorite parts of the job, and we've been fortunate to create some special events in Nashville that still don't feel quite real to me, including our River on the Rooftop series, which has featured artists like Alessia Cara, Maren Morris, Bebe Rexha, Judah and the Lion, Why Don't We, DNCE, and AJR over the years.
2019
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to be able to do what I do in an amazing city like Nashville, and never take for granted the opportunity to meet the best musical artists in the world and do stupid things like meeting Taylor Swift while wearing a snake onesie.
2019
I can't say enough about how the people I've been blessed to work with are the best thing about my job. Without them, I'm just a dude behind a microphone. Our Live Life Love Concert for Suicide Prevention has grown from 700 tickets sold in 2017 to a sold-out arena show generating over 200 million social media impressions in 2019. None of that happens without the amazing people in this picture, and I owe my career to the people who work tirelessly to create and execute a common vision flawlessly.
(Top row L to R: Woody Wood, Jeremy Snell, Zac Woodward, Tim Battle, me, Jim Chandler. Bottom row L to R: Kaitlyn Askew, Mary Parker Janoush, Jessica Jurzcak, Robin Fomusa, Megan Schueller)
2021
Above all my family is the engine that steers the ship. My wife has picked up and moved across the country twice to follow this crazy radio career that I fell into, and picks up my slack through every late night working, concert day, and off-air emergency. I nearly missed the birth of my son because I was dressed up as a piece of bacon at a Nick Jonas event. But being able to provide for them while doing something that I love is a blessing that I know many people don't enjoy, and the older I get the more I realize they're the most important part of who I am.
