Jack Webster (journalist)
| Jack Webster | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John Edgar Webster April 15, 1918 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Died | March 2, 1999 (aged 80) Vancouver, British Columbia |
| Known for | Journalist, talk radio host |
| Awards | Order of Canada |
John Edgar "Jack" Webster, CM (April 15, 1918 – March 2, 1999) was a Scottish-born Canadian journalist, radio and television personality regarded as "king of the Vancouver airwaves" from the 1950s until his retirement in 1988.
Webster was born in Glasgow, the son of a Clydeside ironturner. He left school at age 14 to enter into newspaper businesses as a teenager. He worked in Glasgow and on Fleet Street. When World War II broke out, Webster joined the British Army and rose to the rank of Major, with most of his six years' service in the Middle East.
After the war's end, Webster emigrated to Canada. He covered the labour beat for the Vancouver Sun newspaper. In 1953, he began to work on commercial radio in the talk radio format (which had its origins in British Columbia before spreading to the US). Webster made his mark broadcasting shorthand transcripts of testimony during a probe into corruption on Vancouver's police force. His City Mike show on CJOR achieved some fame covering it.
Jack left CJOR and moved his show to CKNW. During the 1960s, he had 186,000 daily listeners and a $100,000 salary. In 1963, prisoners at the BC Penitentiary were foiled in an escape attempt and took hostages. At the prisoners' request, Webster acted as a mediator between hostage-holding prisoners and the authorities and helped resolve the stand-off.
In 1972, Jim Pattison lured Webster back to CJOR. Then in 1979, at the age of 60, Webster moved his radio show to television, where his familiar expression '9 am prrre-cisely' became his trademark. His hour-long TV interview program Webster!, which was seen weekdays at 9 am on BCTV and then-sister CHEK-TV, and beginning in 1986, at 5pm proceeding the nightly news hour on BCTV, frequently dealt with British Columbia politics. Shortly after the final BCTV show aired in April 1987, Webster and the TV station donated the videos for all nine years of his shows to the BC Archives.
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