High-flying Jimmy ready to embrace academic career
Galway Bay FM broadcaster Jimmy Norman has been bitten by the learning bug and won’t be happy until he has a doctorate under his belt. Jimmy, who is currently studying for a Masters says his dream now is to eventually lecture, such is his love of academia and the desire to teach.
He is well known in his native city (he hails from Waterlane) as the early morning voice of Galway Bay FM but Jimmy stresses that he doesn’t want to be defined by that, adding that there is lot more to him than people hear from listening to the Jimmy Norman Breakfast Show.
It’s a good thing too that he’s a morning person as he has to rise at 5am to ensure he’s at his desk at least twenty minutes before the show starts at 6.30am.
“I was always a morning person. . . and I don’t need to be in bed any earlier than anyone else. This is my fifth time presenting the breakfast show – I had the afternoon slot when I was studying for the BA (First Class Honours degree in Business Management from the Galway Business School, of which he is now a member of its academic council).
“I always give anything I do 100% and this time, in just nine months, I have increased listenership figures by 3000,” he says, explaining that the pace of morning radio is a lot faster than in the afternoon slots.
“It’s the first time listeners hear the news, sport, traffic and weather reports or even song that day. It’s their first port of call and I love that. I am very aware that what local radio is good at is being local, being relevant. National radio can’t do that.”
Jimmy is very media savvy and uses his Twitter account and text messages to interact with listeners, something he finds very useful while on air as it gives the show immediacy.
As a youngster he was always drawn to the radio and music, so he jumped at the chance to present a programme while he was working in Zhivago’s Music Shop. That was 1990, in the early days of the local radio station, then called Radio West, and after presenting four Sunday afternoon shows, he was offered his own breakfast show. The rest is history.
But he had other options, and nearly left broadcasting when he started Eire Communications with his then partner, which was subsequently sold in 2002.
“To think I started and built a mobile phone company in my bedroom that was to become the second mobile phone company in Ireland!”
Jimmy was asked to return to broadcasting and he says he has no regrets about that decision, although in hindsight he probably could have made a lot more money in the mobile phone business had he stayed with it.
“I have never been massively motivated by money. It is much more important that a person has a good quality of life. To me success is being self-fulfilled and to realise your full potential. They say the average person has about five careers in a lifetime and I am well on my way, and the next one for me will be in education,” he says.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.