Where Are They Now? MTV VJs

A NOTE ON THIS BOOK.

Everything you are about to hear is built from the public record. Interviews these people gave, broadcasts that went out to tens of millions of living rooms, announcements they made themselves, obituaries written by people who loved them. Nothing here is invented. Where a life turned hard, we tell you the truth of it, but we do not linger over the wreckage, and we do not pretend to know a person's heart better than they knew it themselves. These were mostly very young people who took a job that had never existed before, introducing music videos on a channel nobody believed in, and the job made them a strange and intimate kind of famous, the kind where an entire generation considers you a personal friend it has never met. They are owed the same warmth in the retelling that they gave the camera every afternoon.

Some of the people in this book are still with us, still on the air, still building second and third acts the channel never predicted. Some of them are gone. Four of them, in fact, and one of those losses is so recent that the flowers have barely arrived. We will hold all of it in the same hand, the wins and the hard roads, the empires and the quiet exits, because that is what it means to ask the question this whole series is built on. Not who they were when the video ended and the camera cut back to their face. What happened after. Where are they now.

INTRODUCTION. THE PEOPLE WHO PLAYED THE VIDEOS.

One minute past midnight, on the first of August, 1981, a rocket climbed off a launch pad and a voice said, ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.

Then a song played, and the song was a joke and a prophecy at the same time. Video Killed the Radio Star. The channel that played it was so small and so new that it was not even available in Manhattan, where it was made. It reached a few cable systems, mostly in New Jersey, which is why, in one of the great origin stories in American broadcasting, the five young people hired to host the thing had to pile out to a bar across the river that happened to carry it, to watch themselves make history on a television bolted above the beer taps. Nobody in that bar fully understood what had just been switched on. A few thousand households in the Garden State had just received the twentieth century's last great broadcast invention, and the rest of the country was about to spend a decade demanding its cable company catch up.

The five people on that screen had a job title nobody had ever printed on a business card before. Video jockey. VJ. It sounded like a novelty, and in the beginning it paid like one. What it actually was took years to understand. A VJ was not a star, exactly, and not a disc jockey, exactly, and not an announcer at all. A VJ was the friend who had the records. The one who sat cross legged in your living room at four in the afternoon, told you what mattered, played you the thing you had not heard yet, and looked directly into the camera as though the two of you had been talking all along. Movie stars lived on mountaintops. VJs lived in your house. They wore what you wore. They mispronounced things and laughed about it. When they said, stay right there, you stayed.

And the country handed them its children. That is the part that is easy to forget now, in a world where every teenager carries an infinite jukebox in one pocket. For a stretch of about twenty years, if you were young in America, the sound of your life arrived through a handful of faces. They premiered the videos everyone would imitate at school the next day. They took the phone calls on the request lines, actual telephones, with cords, ringing off actual walls. They stood in a glass window above Times Square while a street full of teenagers screamed up at them like the building itself was famous. They told you, gently, on an ordinary April afternoon, when the music broke your heart.

Consider the sheer range of what the job asked. In a single shift a VJ might interview the biggest star in the world, read a postcard from a kid in Nebraska, vamp through a technical failure, and introduce a world premiere the entire country would be arguing about by dinner. There was no school for it. Radio people had the voice but not the face, actors had the face but not the spontaneity, journalists had the questions but not the hang. The channel needed all four at once, in somebody young enough to be believed, and although the segments were taped a day ahead, the mistakes were left in on purpose so that it felt like nothing was. Small wonder the people who could actually do it turned out to be some of the most durable broadcasters of their generation. The wonder is that anyone could do it at all.

Then the job itself began to vanish. The channel drifted from videos to reality shows, the internet swallowed the premiere, the request line became an algorithm, and the people who had been the most familiar faces in youth culture found themselves holding an expertise the world had quietly stopped selling. There is no support group for former VJs. There was no manual for being the ex best friend of an entire generation. Some of them stayed behind microphones and simply never left, and are on the air this very morning. Some walked away on purpose, to woodshops and photo studios and pulpits and farms. Some fought their way back from strokes and diagnoses and addictions with the same audience watching. And some of them we lost, one only days ago, which makes this walk feel less like nostalgia and more like a family calling itself together.

So this is a walk back through the launch crew and the night shift, the rap hosts and the metal hosts, the news desk that made a music channel matter, the alternative nation, and the Times Square window. Forty four names are coming. Some you will remember instantly. Some you will be startled to discover you never forgot. Somewhere a floor manager is counting down from five, and the red light is about to come on. Let us go back.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ROCK AND ROLL.

Start with the five. They were hired in a hurry, in the summer of 1981, for a channel that half the music industry considered a tax write off in progress. A radio veteran, a Philadelphia disc jockey, an actor from Alabama, a rock journalist with a famous voice, and a college kid barely out of the campus radio station. No one could tell them what the job was, because the job had never been done. They invented it five days a week, a day ahead of transmission, with the fluffs left in on purpose, and in doing so they became the founding family of an entire way of being young. Forty five years later, here is the scorecard nobody in that New Jersey bar would have predicted. Four of the five stayed broadcasters for life. Four of them are on the air this very week. One of them is in the Radio Hall of Fame, and one of them we lost too soon, and all five of them remain, to a certain enormous generation, family. Everyone else in this book walked through a door those five opened.

NINA BLACKWOOD.

The voice came first. Husky, warm, a little smoky, the sound of somebody who had stayed up too late in the best possible way. Nina Blackwood was a musician before she was a broadcaster, a harpist of all things, and when the channel launched she became one of the very first faces the audience ever saw, the rock and roll big sister with the tousled hair who plainly loved the music more than the camera. For millions of kids, hers was the voice that explained the eighties while the eighties were still happening.

Here is the lovely thing. It still is. More than four decades later, Nina Blackwood has never really stopped doing the job she helped invent. She co-hosts the Big 80s Top 40 Countdown on SiriusXM on the weekends, and her voice goes out on three syndicated radio shows besides, including the long running Absolutely 80s, which means that somewhere in America at this very moment, it is a safe bet that Nina Blackwood is introducing a song you danced to at a school gym. She has scaled back over the years, by her own easy admission, and in a career retrospective interview in the spring of 2025 she looked back on the whole improbable ride with the good humor of someone who knows exactly how lucky the timing was, a musician who answered a casting call for a job that did not exist and ended up narrating a decade. The harp, incidentally, was real. She was a serious student of the instrument before rock and roll claimed her, classically trained fingers introducing hair metal videos, which may be the most nineteen eighties sentence in this entire book. And her endurance has the simple explanation she has offered all along, which is that she never treated the chair as a launching pad to somewhere better. The music was the point when she was starting out, and the music is the point now, and audiences can always tell the difference, which is why hers has never left. There is no scandal in her file, no bitter chapter, just forty years of showing up to play the records. Where is she now. She is on the radio, still the voice of the eighties, and the decade she soundtracked has never once had to find a replacement.

MARK GOODMAN.

Every launch crew needs the one who already knew how to fly the plane. Mark Goodman came to the channel from Philadelphia radio, a working disc jockey with the curls of a rock star and the delivery of a man who had done a thousand shifts before this one, and it showed. He handled the interviews that mattered, sparred famously and publicly with David Bowie about the channel's early failures on Black artists, a moment that has aged into one of the most replayed pieces of tape the era produced, and he carried the place with a professional cool the format badly needed while it figured out what it was.

The punchline of his story is that there is no twist. Mark Goodman never stopped being a disc jockey, and he is arguably working harder at it today than he did in 1981. He hosts a daily six hour block on SiriusXM's 80s on 8 channel, seven in the morning to one in the afternoon Eastern, five days a week, which is not a nostalgia cameo. That is a shift. That is a lunch pail. Most men his age with his resume are giving keynotes about the old days. Goodman is on the air while you are eating breakfast, doing the actual job, still telling you what the song is and who played on it and why it mattered, because somewhere along the line it became clear that this was never a stepping stone for him. It was the destination. There is also something quietly touching about where the shift happens. The satellite channel he works is a kind of reunion in progress, his old launch partners just down the schedule, the audience the same kids grown into commuters, and the platform itself, fittingly, was once another bet on a new way of delivering music that the smart money laughed at. Goodman has now ridden two broadcasting revolutions from the inside, and he treated them both exactly the same way, by showing up prepared and doing the hours, which is why he survived them both. Where is he now. He is in a studio with the microphone open, six hours a day, the launch crew professional who never once landed the plane.

ALAN HUNTER.

He was the one having the most fun, and it was not close. Alan Hunter was an actor and dancer from Birmingham, Alabama, who had appeared in a David Bowie video before the channel scooped him up, and of the original five he was the loosest on camera, the one doing bits, mugging through segments, treating the whole enterprise like summer camp with a budget. Audiences loved him for exactly that. He made the revolution look like a good hang.

What he built afterward is the part that deserves more attention than it gets. Hunter went home to Birmingham and became a genuine civic force, co-founding WorkPlay, a beloved live music venue and creative complex, and helping found the Sidewalk Film Festival, which has grown into one of the South's most respected film events and helped turn downtown Birmingham into a place people drive to on purpose. That is a legacy measured in other people's opening nights. And the microphone never let him go either. He hosts a daily block on 80s on 8, Monday through Thursday afternoons, plus time on the Classic Rewind channel, and in recent years he has relocated to St. Louis, a Southern showman turned Midwestern neighbor who commutes to the eighties by satellite. Of all the answers to the question of what to do with early fame, his may be the most replicable, and the least practiced. Take the visibility home. Spend it where you are from, on institutions that will outlive the memory of why anyone recognized you at the ribbon cutting. A venue is a machine for other people's best nights. A film festival is a machine for other people's breakthroughs. He built both, and they are still running. Where is he now. He is on the air four days a week and in the founders' photos of half of Birmingham's creative revival, the class clown of the original five, who quietly turned out to be the institution builder.

J.J. JACKSON.

Every young crew needs an elder, and the first five had a great one. J.J. Jackson was the veteran in the room, a respected rock radio man out of Boston and Los Angeles who had been friends with the giants of the previous decade, who had introduced Led Zeppelin on American radio when the others were in grade school, and who brought to a brand new channel the one thing it could not fake, credibility. The artists trusted him. The kids could tell. He explained the music like a man who had been backstage for all of it, because he had, and he did it with a gentleman's warmth that made the loudest music feel like it belonged to everybody.

He stayed a broadcaster after the VJ years, back on the radio in Los Angeles, doing the work he had always done. And then, on March 17, 2004, driving home from dinner in Los Angeles, J.J. Jackson suffered a heart attack, and he was gone at sixty two. He was the first of the original five to leave us, and the grief from his old colleagues was the specific grief you feel for the person who taught you how to do your job. More than two decades later, when the surviving VJs talk about the launch, his name still arrives wrapped in the word gentleman. There is a reason the young channel wanted a veteran in that first chair. The new format was asking artists to trust it with the only thing they had, their music, and trust is the one asset a startup cannot manufacture. Jackson had spent two decades earning it the slow way, on the radio, in the era when radio was everything, and he lent that standing to a channel full of kids without hesitation and without conditions. Every VJ who came after him, in a real sense, worked inside the credibility he carried through the door on the first night. Where is he now. He is in the bones of the whole profession, the elder statesman of the first night, the man who lent a brand new channel his hard earned credibility and never asked for it back. In memoriam, J.J. Jackson, gone in March of 2004, and honored ever since.

MARTHA QUINN.

She was hired about a week out of college, and for the rest of the decade she was America's kid sister. Martha Quinn had been answering phones and pulling shifts at the NYU campus radio station when she walked into an audition that changed her life, and something about her, the bangs, the brightness, the total absence of cynicism, made her the face the whole channel got remembered by. Polls at the time said as much. If you close your eyes and picture an MTV VJ, there is a decent chance you are picturing Martha Quinn, and there is a decent chance you are smiling.

The road since has asked more of her than the smile suggests. In 2023 she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, a thing she has spoken about openly and without drama, and she came through treatment and back to the microphone, because of course she did. These days she is the only member of the original five who left satellite radio for the old fashioned kind, and it is working. She hosts a syndicated midday show for iHeart that airs on more than sixty stations across the country, the kid sister of 1981 now a daily companion for the same listeners, forty years later, in their cars and kitchens. And in 2025 came the honor that puts a bow on all of it, induction into the Radio Hall of Fame, the campus phone answerer from NYU now enshrined alongside the giants she grew up imitating. She has also become the era's happiest historian, the original VJ most likely to tell you the whole story of the launch night, minute by minute, with an enthusiasm that has not dimmed by a single watt in four decades. Some people survive their youth. Martha Quinn appears to have kept hers on retainer, and the audience that grew up with her can hear it, every midday, in the first ten seconds of the show. Where is she now. She is on more than sixty radio stations every midday, healthy again and in the Hall of Fame, and somehow, four decades on, still the one you would trust to watch your dog.

THE SECOND SHIFT.

By the late eighties the channel was no longer an experiment. It was the weather. It was on in every dorm room and every den, and the second wave of hosts walked into a job that now had expectations, catchphrases, and a hundred million eyeballs. They were hired to be bigger, faster, and stranger than the founding five, because the channel itself had gotten bigger, faster, and stranger. Some of them became the most famous people of their particular year. And what happened to them next is some of the most surprising material in this entire book, because the second shift produced, among other things, a podcast pioneer turned preacher, a woodworker, a minister, and a man who plays the organ at hockey games.