About Kevin Lavery

www.wkar.msu.edu

Kevin Lavery
News Director
WKAR Radio Programming.
Phone: 517 432-3120 extension 319
Email: kevin@wkar.org
Room: 269 CAS

More About Kevin Lavery

Kevin Lavery joined WKAR's news staff in September 2006.

Meet Kevin Lavery

Not many people can say they have lived and worked in Antarctica, where there are no indigenous people. "That's what can happen when you enlist in the Navy - you can end up on land and never ‘sail the seas,'" says Kevin Lavery, who joined WKAR Radio as the station's news director in September 2006. "I was able to travel to ‘exotic' locations, and I learned that the old Navy adage is true - 'If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't, paint it.'!"

"I was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, which is outside of Philadelphia, but I grew up in Wichita, Kansas," says Lavery. "People there are friendly, helpful, and go out of their way for you. It was a good place to grow up.

"I knew I wanted to go into journalism as a career, but I also knew I had to find a way to pay for my schooling, and the Navy assisted me in both areas. During my tour, which included four four-month deployments to Antarctica, I studied journalism at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana."

While in Antarctica, he worked as the radio program director at the McMurdo Station Research Facility on Ross Island that is run by the National Science Foundation. "It was a two-channel FM station with a satellite hook-up, and we did local television news and canned music," explains Lavery. "And, from what I've heard, our Quonset huts, where I also worked in the McMurdo Sun Times newspaper office and inked the press myself, were more primitive than ones that housed WKAR-TV for many years."

Lavery's Navy stint also took him to California, where he met his future wife, Karen, and to Japan, where he worked for the American Forces Network-Japan (AFN-Japan) as news director and television producer. The AFN-Japan includes five stations broadcasting to U.S. Navy bases and base housing.

Back Home Again
Upon his tour ending in 1994, the Laverys moved to his hometown of Wichita, where Kevin enrolled at Wichita State University earning a bachelor's in communication with an emphasis in electronic media.

Lavery's radio resume includes a one-and-a-half year stay at Wichita's KMUW where he was a news reporter, and a 1999 move to KWMU in St. Louis, Missouri. While at KWMU, he covered the late Pope John Paul II's last visit to the U.S. and expanded his reporting beats to include local politics, government, and biotechnology issues.

Now at WKAR
Even though Lavery has only been at WKAR for a few months, his goal for the station is more "proactive" news coverage -- covering the issues behind the press conferences. Lavery and his team are also committed to producing more multi-part news pieces such as the October series about mid-Michigan's homeless. You can also look for some changes in WKAR's news broadcasts beginning in January 2007.

Though journalism has been his life-long career pursuit, Lavery says what matters most is his family - wife Karen, and daughters Amy and Megan. "I do not think that enough people understand that when you have children you are trying to build adults, and you have to invest time in being with them and doing activities with them," Lavery explains. "You want not only to the best for them, but you also want to teach them as they are growing up to be self-sufficient, and in turn to pass that on to the next generation."

Profile by Diane Hutchens.
December 2006.

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