Paul A. La Camera
General Manager, WBUR Public Radio
Paul La Camera was appointed General Manager of WBUR in October, 2005. WBUR, licensed to Boston University, includes WBUR-FM, Boston; WBUR-AM, West Yarmouth; and wbur.org.
WBUR-FM is Boston’s NPR news station and one of the nation’s premier National Public Radio affiliates. Several programs that air on NPR stations across the country are produced at the WBUR studios on the Boston University campus, including “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook; “Here and Now” with Robin Young; “Only a Game” with Bill Littlefield; and “Car Talk” with the inimitable Tappet Brothers, Click and Clack.
Previously La Camera served for more than 33 years at WCVB-TV, Boston’s ABC affiliate, including 12 years as President and General Manager. WCVB is Boston’s leading local station and is widely considered to be among America’s best commercial television stations.
La Camera hails from a family steeped in media. For 30 years, his late father Anthony La Camera was the distinguished dean of American television critics, writing for the Hearst-owned Boston newspapers.
Prior to joining WCVB, Paul La Camera was Director of Communications for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and worked as a reporter for the Boston Record American and Sunday Advertiser.
Among his television industry activities, La Camera served on the White House Advisory Committee (Gore Commission) on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. He has testified on local television issues before both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the U.S. House Telecommunications Subcommittee.
La Camera is a board member of the Boston Foundation, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. He was recently appointed a trustee of the Boston Public Library.
La Camera is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, where he serves as a trustee. He has three master’s degrees: Masters in Journalism and Urban Studies from Boston University, and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Boston College. He was honored in 1992 as a distinguished alumnus of BU’s College of Communications and in 2000 with the Sanctae Crucis Alumnus Award from his college alma mater. La Camera has received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Massachusetts (Medical School) and from Boston’s Emmanuel College.
A native of the Boston suburb of Winthrop, he resides in Boston with his wife Mimi. They have three adult sons: Mark, Peter and Christopher. Mimi is President of Boston’s Freedom Trail Foundation.
Corey S. Lewis
Station Manager
Corey began his career at WBUR in 2002 as Director of Corporate Support. He was additionally made Director of Development in 2003. In his new dual role, Corey oversaw an increase in revenue, cost controls and efficiencies that helped strengthen the relationships between WBUR and its stakeholders. Corey also guided the station in its first ventures in satellite radio broadcast and external marketing in an effort to expand to a larger audience WBUR’s mission of public education.
Corey’s experience in the media industry began well before he joined WBUR. He started his career in 1985 at WTXX-TV, an independent television station in Hartford, CT, as a Local Sales Representative. From 1986 to 1993, Corey served as National Sales Representative for Paramount Pictures owned- and operated- television stations at Millenium in New York and Boston.
Corey started his management career in 1993 as National Sales Manager at Tribune’s WTIC/FOX61 in Hartford, CT. From 1996 to 2000, Corey worked for Viacom as General Sales Manager to WLWC/UPN28 in Providence, RI, and WPSG/UPN57 in Philadelphia, PA, helping to increase market share and revenue at both stations. A native of Boston’s North Shore, Corey returned to Boston as General Manager of WHUB/TV66 in 2000, helping Universal Pictures’ USA Networks launch an independent, local broadcast television station.
Corey earned his Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1985. After relocating throughout the East Coast for years, he has returned to his roots with his wife and two sons to settle in his hometown of Swampscott, MA.
Sam Fleming
Managing Director of News and Programming
Sam Fleming has served as WBUR’s Managing Director of News and Programming since 2004. He is responsible for supervising a staff of 75, including news managers, producers, reporters, writers, editors, hosts and production staff. Under his direction, WBUR’s News Department has garnered more than 50 national and local awards recognizing the quality and depth of its news coverage.
Sam brings to WBUR more than 20 years of experience in public broadcast media. He first worked at the station in 1981 as a general assignment reporter, but his longer tenure began 10 years later. In 1991, he returned as Managing Editor. The following year, he was made WBUR’s News Director, a position he held until 2004. In that role he oversaw the breadth, depth, and daily workings of the news produced at WBUR, and helped to manage the content of daily broadcasts in their diverse forms.
Sam has also worked at New Hampshire Public Television (PBS) in Durham, NH, as News Director and reporter/producer; at WGBH-TV (PBS), in Boston, MA, as political reporter for the Ten O’ Clock News, where he reported on the 1988 Presidential Campaign; at WMUR-TV (ABC) in Manchester, NH, as a political reporter covering the Statehouse; at New Hampshire Public Radio in Concord, NH, as the News Director and “Morning Edition” host and reporter. Sam also contributed pieces to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Sam is a long-time resident of New Hampshire who braves the traffic each day in his commute to Boston. He earned a B.A. in political science from the University of New Hampshire in 1976. His teenage son Wilder will soon be entering college.
John Davidow
News Director
John Davidow, WBUR’s News Director, is an award-winning broadcast journalist with more than 20 years of local, national and international news and news management experience. Since joining the station in 2003, John has led WBUR in winning numerous Regional Associated Press awards, including News Station of the Year in 2005 and 2004, plus the prestigious Regional Radio and TV News Directors Association (RTNDA) Awards, including the War in Iraq (2004) and Continuing Coverage of the 2004 Election (2005).
John spent the majority of his broadcast career in commercial television before shifting to public radio. In 1998, John became Assistant News Director at WBZ-TV, Boston’s CBS- owned- and -operated television station. During John’s tenure at WBZ, the station was recognized with the Radio and Television News Directors Association’s Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding News Station of the Year. The award recognized the work of the WBZ newsroom in its coverage of the John F. Kennedy, Jr. plane crash and the Worcester Cold Storage warehouse fire.
John’s broadcast career began at WCVB-TV, Boston’s ABC affiliate, in 1981. John covered major local, national and international news at WCVB, where he spent 17 years as an award-winning producer. As the station’s Senior Special Projects Producer, John covered national presidential campaigns, investigations into international adoptions in Central America, trade issues in Asia and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. He also covered the world of international terrorism, traveling to the Middle East several times. In 1990, John became Executive Producer of News, overseeing coverage of WCVB’s major newscasts, a role he held for nearly a decade.
John graduated cum laude from Tufts University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. He and his family live in the Boston area.
Anna Bensted
Assistant Program Director/Executive Producer of Special Projects
Those listeners familiar with the station’s “Inside Out” documentaries are hearing the fruits of labor of Anna Bensted, WBUR’s Assistant Program Director and Executive Producer of Special Projects.
Anna joined WBUR in 1999, serving first as Managing Editor for daily news before shifting to the production and editing for national distribution of “Inside Out,” WBUR’s current affairs documentary series. During her five years in this role, “Inside Out” has won a number of national awards, including the duPont Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, the Robert Kennedy Journalism Award for Radio and, in 2004, the Overseas Press Club Award for Radio.
Prior to working at WBUR, Anna garnered well over a decade of experience in public radio in the United Kingdom. She worked as host and producer of a daily news magazine program at BBC Radio Sussex for five years before becoming producer at BBC Radio Scotland in Edinburgh of “The Usual Suspects,” a daily arts and culture program, and the “BBC Edinburgh Festival Shows.” Anna also served her time up and down the long corridors of both Broadcasting and Bush House in London.
In 1995, Anna relocated to the United States. Settling in Boston, she continued her work for BBC Radio as a producer and interviewer, developing and producing three six-part series. One of these, “Kane over America,” explored American culture and society in the early 90’s, with a Scottish journalist taking the BBC listener from the offices of Wired Magazine to the farmhouses of Oklahoma to the shooting galleries of New York. “Kane over America” was honored with the United Kingdom’s most prestigious broadcast award, the Sony Radio Award.
Anna still lives along the Charles River with her husband, a professor of Italian literature, and their two grown sons.
Robin Lubbock
Director of New Media
As Director of New Media, Robin Lubbock manages a team of producers, developers and designers to bring the work of WBUR onto the Web. Since 1999, the New Media Department has developed wbur.org from a brochure site delivering several thousand page views of station information per week into a news site delivering more than 1.5 million page views and 200,000 hours of streaming audio a month.
wbur.org offers an extensive range of news, features, photo-galleries and multimedia sections. Regional coverage of theater, dance, books and film is provided by WBUR’s online arts content. The New Media team strives to explore and use the latest technologies to make any of the news and information produced at WBUR available to as broad an audience as possible through all new media channels.
Prior to joining WBUR in 1999, Robin Lubbock worked in new media at the Christian Science Monitor on the newspaper’s web site, csmonitor.com. He worked as senior producer for Worldwide Television News’ Nairobi bureau before that time, traveling throughout Africa to cover news stories in Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and numerous other countries. Robin also worked in Central Europe, covering the end of the war in Bosnia. Robin started his career in journalism as a photojournalist and radio reporter, covering stories in Europe, South East Asia and Central America. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Exeter University in the United Kingdom.
Jeffrey Hutton
Director of Engineering
Jeff Hutton recently celebrated his twentieth year at WBUR. He joined the station as Chief Engineer in 1985, and since that time has overseen the construction of new transmission facilities in Newton, MA, besides leading the design and relocation team that moved WBUR’s operations from 640 to 890 Commonwealth Avenue in 1996.
A native of Boston’s South Shore, Jeff grew up listening to WJDA Quincy for local news and WMEX and WRKO for rock and roll in the 50’s and 60’s. In the 70’s he was an avid fan of CBS Radio News on WEEI, which included CBS Radio Mystery Theatre–the highlight of the evening–with host E.G. Marshall.
In 1980 Jeff landed his first job in radio at WSSH and WLLH Lowell, MA, as assistant chief engineer. After two years, he was hired by WHDH and WCOZ, two of Boston’s top five stations at the time, as a studio technician. In 1985, he joined WBUR.
Jeff lives in Dedham, Mass., with his wife, Carol, of 24 years, with whom he has two college-age children.
Jean Wong
Director of Finance
Jean Wong joined WBUR as Director of Finance in January 2005. She brings with her a wealth of experience in both financial management and the broadcast arena.
Jean’s work prior to WBUR was at Radio One, Inc., where she had been Market Controller reporting to the General Manager on all financial matters, since 2002. Her additional experience in the broadcast industry includes Business Manager and station CFO for WHUB-TV, a USA Network broadcasting station launched in 2000, and Manager of Accounting at WLVI-TV, a Boston-based television station and WB affiliate, from 1994 to 1999. Prior to that time she served as Assistant Controller for six years at WLVI-TV, then an independent UHF television station.
Jean’s brings additional experience from Brigham and Women’s Hospital OB/GYN Department; Houghton Mifflin & Company; and Jobs for Youth-Boston, Inc. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Accounting from Boston College and lives in the Boston area.
