Sue Wylie is recognized as one of Kentucky’s best-known and respected broadcast journalists. She has been named to the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and has also received the coveted “Kentucky Mike Award” from the Kentucky Associated Press for broadcast excellence.
For the past ten years, she has entertained and informed radio listeners with her top-rated “Sue Wylie Show,” which is heard throughout Kentucky each weekday morning from 10 till noon on WVLK AM based in Lexington. When her program was launched ten years ago, it marked the first regular talk-radio show in the Central Kentucky market to be hosted by a woman.
Her entire career has been spent in broadcasting, which she studied as the Cincinnati College/Conservatory of Music. During her early years in the industry, she was with the NBC, ABC and CBS TV affiliates in Cincinnati doing a variety of jobs from on-air commercials to talent promotion and appearing in acting roles on a “live” weekly mystery-drama titled “The Storm,” which was written by TV legend Rod Serling, who went on to create “The Twilight Zone.” At the time, Serling was a free-lance television writer and also Wylie’s college writing instructor.
From Cincinnati, Wylie moved to the ABC-TV station in Columbus, Ohio where she won national awards for her work as director of promotion and marketing.
Her next stop was the NBC-TV station in Miami where she helped break ground for other women in broadcast journalism, by becoming one of the first women in Florida to do “hard news” television reporting.
When she married and moved to Kentucky, she immediately was hired by the NBC-TV affiliate to produce, write and anchor its first midday TV news program. For more than 25 years, she hosted the popular “Noon Today” in addition to creating and hosting a decades-long variety of other programs from award-winning news series to prime time “lifestyler” and interview shows.
But she was best known and won journalism kudos as the host and producer of the weekly program “Your Government,” which became the flagship political program for the entire state of Kentucky. Wylie was able to attract heavyweight political guests from the U.S. presidential candidates to sitting governors and senators to the program, which was the only TV program in Kentucky to consistently generate, week after week, front-page stories for the major newspapers and wire services. As host and executive producer of “Your Government” and “Noon Today,” Wylie had complete control of the programs’ style, content and direction – a rare situation at the time for a woman in the still men’s-world of broadcasting.
