Jayne Boyd served Gaylord Broadcasting for a total of 17 1/2 yearsnine of them with WTVT in the film and programming area. Straight talking and confident, Jayne thrived under the tutelage of Bob Olson and John Haberlan. Holding her own in the boy's club of broadcast management, Jayne was one of the first women to break through the 'glass ceiling' and become a program manager for a television station. Jayne has come full circle from her hometown of Dunedin, where she spoke with BIG 13 about her broadcasting career.
Jayne Boyd actually started out as plain 'Jane'. As a teenager, she changed the spelling of her first name with the conviction that the extra 'Y' added character. Jayne's first exposure to broadcasting was through radio programs of the late 1940's and early 50's like "Lights Out" and "One Man's Family." However, it was the new medium of television that sparked her interest in becoming a writer or journalist.
"Just before I started at St. Petersburg Junior College, television was becoming the next big thing," she recalls. "After SPJC I enrolled at the University of Florida's School of Journalism and Communication with a major in Television Programming and Production. The first year I was there we were in Quonset huts left over from World War II. The next year our fledgling class found a home inside the newly renovated Swamp. Aside from the Administration Building, it was the only air-conditioned building on campus. There we built our own sets, painted them, and wrote our own scripts. Our tools consisted of one black and white Vidicon camera, a 16mm film camera, and portable reel to reel audio tape machine."