As a radio listener, the first thing that captures your attention about Jeanne Sparrow is her voice. If caramel had a description, it would be Jeanne’s voice. Smooth, sweet and satisfying – it brings a smile to your face and it warms your soul.
Sparrow has spent three decades as a 7-time Emmy-winning television host, reporter, radio personality and voiceover artist. She has a wealth of experience as a respected speaker, consultant, and is an adjunct faculty member in the Master of Science in Communication program at Northwestern University.
Her extensive repertoire includes hosting several shows on WMAQ Chicago, co-hosting her own daily TV talk show (The WCIU Morning Show “You & Me This Morning”) for eight years. She has also co-hosted radio platforms with comedic giants Steve Harvey, George Wallace, Anthony Bonaduce, and interviewed hundreds of Hollywood heavy weights including Kevin Costner, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx and Susan Sarandon.
She now hosts a radio show weekly for WVAZ V103 Chicago, the #1-ranked iHeartRadio station in Chicago and recently launched a podcast show produced and launched by iHeartRadio.
N’DIGO is pleased to talk with Chicago’s media staple as Jeanne Sparrow talks about her career path, her core values, and her new podcast series.
N’DIGO: Chicagoans are so familiar with your voice. One would think you were a native of Chicago. Where were you born and what brought you to Chicago?
Jeanne Sparrow: Well, I was born in St. Louis, but I grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, and moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern.
With a BA in psychology from Northwestern. How did you begin working in radio?
I began working in radio when I was in high school. I was on the speech and debate team and was the local programmer of the country/western station and easy listening station in town. Because of the local college they always wanted young people in the office and on the air. The closest college near me had a really strong mass-communications department. And so by recruiting high schoolers, it was kind of a way to keep part-timers around for four or five years. So I auditioned with my best friend for a part-time gig at the Country/Western station. It was a daytime am, which meant that it came on at sunrise and went off at sunset. And I had a shift, I think it was the last shift of the day during the summer. Also, a shift on Saturdays, because I remember having to shut the station down. So yeah, I began my senior year in high school.
Do you think you were destined to work in broadcasting?
Yes and no. I think I was destined to do something where I talked for a living because I’ve been running my mouth since I had learned how to talk.
I always had terrible conduct grades. I went to Catholic school for elementary and part of junior high and yeah, so they gave you conduct scores and mine were never better than a C.
Why? (LOL)
Because I was always running my mouth. So, I would say that now looking back on it, I would’ve never thought that going into it of course. But looking back on it now, I think for sure, I was meant to work in something that involved verbal communication.
I read that you were once told to be a super-servant to your audience. What does that mean and do you still follow that mindset?
Back in the nineties, my boss, Elroy Smith, (the program director at WGCI) used to say that our purpose was to over-serve our audience, our core audience, in particular. And so for him, it was about making sure that the people who were our primary target audience, we’re so happy with their experience, that they wouldn’t want to switch to another station. For me, it means that you anticipate needs, you understand who people are first of all, and then you understand what they care about and then you serve that need. So it means different things for different people. And it’s meant different things for me at different points in time in my career. But it started off with, we’re playing the hits, we’re giving away great stuff, but we’re also part of the community and we are people’s friends. We’re their company. So, that’s what that means to me. I still follow that mindset. I think it’s been in the background ever since then. I’ve become much more conscious of it again, because I teach and I think that it is something that’s important for anybody to know when they serve anyone else, like servant leadership, I think is the most successful way to run things and to make people feel like they’re part of something. Because that’s what we all want.
You took a long break from radio in 2002. Why?
Yes, I took a long break from radio in 2002. I went to television full time. I had started working in TV in the mid-nineties and when, and I was working in at NBC doing entertainment reporting and special programs and things like that in the late nineties into 2000-2001. I also remember I was working there when 9/11 happened. There was an opening for the traffic reporter for the morning news on NBC 5 and I was doing middays then at WGCI. Doing the bouncing back and forth between radio and tv was a little challenging so that’s when I left radio and when I left radio, and then I stuck to TV exclusively for about 15 years.
You developed ‘You and Me This Morning’ at WCIU? How did the concept come about?
Okay. So I would say that I contributed to the development of you and me you and me this morning at the U, but I did not create the concept, a brilliant programmer by the name of Neal Sabin, was the person who created the concept initially. It came about when he realized that there was a very faithful audience who watched WCIU in the morning, but they would always cut out at certain times. With television, you can kind of track where your audience is and where they’re going. He realized that there might be a market for people who did not want to have back-to-back news in the morning, but still needed basic information. Like the weather, the headlines, and traffic to be able to function in their day. So this idea of including that information in the mornings of the U with the programming that was already there is how it all started. Then it developed from there and he and the other managers for quite some time after that were very generous with me and then later Melissa Foreman with how we developed the product.
You have quite a few acting credits to your resume. Have you ever thought about having your own tv show?
I have been out to Hollywood and auditioned for several different television shows like as an entertainment reporter or on HGTV. I came really close to booking one of the HGTV shows and it didn’t happen. I was really disappointed because I love HGTV. I feel like I’ve had my own TV show because You and Me This Morning was the closest to the kind of program that I want to do.
Tell me about your organization – The Spoken Bird and Fearless Authenticity…
Well, the Spoken Bird is my DBA that I formed in 2017. So it’s not really branded per se. It’s just the company that I get paid through. Fearless Authenticity is the concept that came from a lifetime of experience in serving my audiences. Fearless Authenticity is the idea that who we are, the experiences we’ve had, all the identities that we hold, when we are able to express all of those things in their truest form and bring all of that to the table – that is where we find our best success. I think many of us try to fit into a mold that other people make for us, or we try to fulfill a role that we’ve been assigned and neither of those things can be fully who we are as individuals. If we are always trying to please someone else, then we’re will never fully be ourselves and never fully reach the contribution that we were created to for ourselves, for society.
It’s about being your best, most authentic self, bringing that to every experience that you have and adding the richness that that brings. And I call it fearless because is it is scary to show yourself and be vulnerable to the world because sometimes there are things that we don’t like about ourselves, not realizing that that thing may be the essence of what connects us to another human being and breaks through and get something done and make somebody’s life better.
Your dad Allen Sparrow, passed from Covid-19 in May of 2020. Can you share any particular memory of him with N’DIGO’s readers?
God, there’s so many. The one that keeps popping in my head is when he was sick. My dad had dementia. He was diagnosed in 2016 and I cared for him. I made sure that he was in the best situation he could be for the condition that he had, and that meant commuting down to Louisiana to care for him, which was super stressful. Especially when I was at the U working on a morning show taking that much time off is just hard. It’s not a standard in broadcasting. You had to physically be someplace every day. Your vacations were scheduled and they weren’t too close together and things like that. Being a caregiver by myself, even with all the help of my family, was hard. My mother passed away back in 97.
So it had been just me and my dad, and my immediate family for a long time. And while I had a super supportive large extended family, it was still challenging. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I would have to go home, attend his doctor’s appointments, and figure out how best to support him and make sure everything was ok.
But I remember there was one day that I had been kind of short with him. I don’t remember exactly what caused me to be, but I lost my patience. I felt terrible and we get back to his place and the home healthcare worker was there. He’s getting ready to watch his news programs and before he sat down, I said to him, “you know, daddy, I’m really sorry. I hope you know that I didn’t mean that,” and I was starting to get worked up – like I am now thinking about it. He looked at me the way he did when I was a child and the love and forgiveness in his face. It was like he knew what I was doing for him. Even through the degeneration of his dementia.
He knew what it took for me to get there and he didn’t care if it was perfect. He reached out to me and he hugged me and kissed me on my forehead and said, “it’s all right, baby. It’s all right. I love you.” He had the power still despite what that dementia had stolen from him at that point. This was the year before he died.
Do you have a new book coming out?
Not at this moment. Hopefully it’ll come out in the next couple of years, I have released any attachment to an actual date. I continue to work on it and work on it with my literary agent and team. And I’m actually grateful for some of the delays because going through COVID and all the loss that I sustained around my dad’s death and all the things that happened in the year around that have made the work a lot richer. So the book I think I started off writing will be very different by the time it comes out. So, I hope that it is absolutely worth the wait for anybody else that has had to listen to me talk about it.
Why did I start a podcast and what do I hope people take away from it?
I started a podcast because it made sense to me. I always wanted to do it and brainstorming for the book is what made me think about the podcast. And I thought, the podcast would be a whole lot easier for me because it is all the things that I’ve done. It’s like a combination of all of the skills that I’ve learned interviewing you know, being on camera and on radio and understanding what the audience I’m trying to attract might be interested in.
What I hope people take away from it is that who they are is what’s important that they’re unique individuality is where their value lies. That’s what the secret of Fearless Authenticity with Jeanne Sparrow is about as a podcast, as the concept that I base all my work on, it’s the idea.
If you’re brave enough to be who you are and serve others with those gifts that you have been given, I believe that all of us come to this planet with a particular purpose and it is up to us to figure that out while we’re here and use it in service of others.
The tagline that I use for Fearless Authenticity, is Be Brave, Be Free and Be You. Being free is super important to me. You know, having the ability to understand, that other people’s judgment is not your business. Other people’s opinion of you is not your business. If you wanted to get spiritual with it, that’s the representation of God in you.
Words or affirmations that you live by?
Service is an affirmation or word that I live by. Creation and connection are important to me being creative and and generating good things to put into the world. That’s important to me. I’m pretty optimistic. I’d say, cause everything always turns out in the end, even the worst things bring blessings, they just do.
What’s the best advice you have received?
I think my best advice was the, overserving my audience, but a, a more specific way of talking about that. Realizing that my job is talent, especially on radio, but I think this is true of everything that it isn’t about me. That it’s really not about me. It’s about the people I serve, the people I’m talking to that I am just a vehicle or a vessel for whatever messages come that, you know, whatever satisfaction I get out of it. Great. But that ultimately it’s not about me. It’s about what I put out there for other people to use hopefully and hopefully make their lives better.
What hobbies do you do for fun or relaxation?
All the things I used to do I haven’t done in a while because of the pandemic. I used to go salsa dancing. I love that so much. I love great food. Cooking and entertaining at the house. I used to scuba dive. I also have a bad habit of taking things I love and turning in them into things that make money.
Name three people you would love to have dinner with?
Famous People: Malcolm X, Maya Angelou and Gandhi.
Non-Famous People: My mom and my dad. I would pay anything to have dinner with them and I wouldn’t need a third.
What medium platforms can N’DIGO readers find you?
Podcast: Fearless Authenticity with Jeanne Sparrow on iHeart podcast network or anywhere you get your podcasts.
V103 – Saturday morning, 6:00 AM to noon V103 or iHeart Radio
Facebook: Jeanne Sparrow Fan Page
Twitter: Jmsparrow
Instagram: @jmsparrow
TikTok: msjeannesparrow
