PROFILE: Wendy Williams Selected for Cover the 2nd Edition of prestigious Black Press Yearbook: Who's Who in Black Media directory
Washington, DC -- (BlackPressMagazine.com)
Radio personality Wendy Williams has been selected to appear on the cover of the 2nd Edition of Black Press Yearbook: Who's Who in Black Media directory, the nation's most prestigious publication for Black media professionals.
"From shockjock to an accomplished author, Ms. Williams is an example of how difficult it is to determine who are the most influential people in the Black Press," said DC Livers, managing editor for the Historical Black Press Foundation, which produces the directory. "Hate it or love it, Wendy Williams is one of the few Black women in American radio who have their own syndicated program and one of the few Black journalists who have been able to convert their career into authorship."
Born July 18, 1964 is an American radio and television personality. She was raised in Ocean Township, New Jersey and presently lives in northern New Jersey with her husband, Kevin Hunter and their six-year-old son, also named Kevin. She currently has her own show called Wendy Williams Is On Fire on American VH1 and hosts a weekday syndicated radio program called The Wendy Williams Experience from its flagship station 107.5 WBLS New York City.
Williams has published several books including the paperback novel "Drama Is Her Middle Name : The Ritz Harper Chronicles Vol. 1" which was released this year. She won "Radio Personality Of The Year" awards from both Billboard and Radio & Records industry magazines. This Fall, "The Wendy Williams Experience" will air on VH1 in the form of a weekly series based on outtakes from her radio show. She is currently syndicated in Philadelphia, Shreveport, Charlotte, Tampa, Hartford, NYC, Columbia, Memphis, and Los Angeles among other markets. She is frequently rated by Arbitron having the largest audience in her time slots which vary from market to market.
Williams, who is also known for being brash and sassy in her interviews, often refers to herself, a la Howard Stern, as the "Queen of all Media." She's not stranger to controversy.
Recently, she caught fire from rap star Method Man and sparked a national media ethics debate for outing his wife who suffers from cancer. Method Man took offense to the disclosure and threatened her on video. In 2003, Williams caused additional controversy when interviewing Whitney Houston about her alleged drug habits and other issues including her marriage to Bobby Brown. During several points in their interview, Houston berated at Williams for "going too deep" with certain questions and then telling Williams that she'd "meet (her) outside" if she wasn't "a lady with class". Houston also told her that "only (her) mother had privy to information" about her drug use saying "you talk to your child about that 'cause I'm not a child, Wendy!" To this day it remains one of the most popular interviews she has done.
Williams is known to have frequent rows with celebrities including Tupac Shakur, Damon Dash, Whitney Houston, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, and Tyson Beckford. She coined the phrase, "I'm not saying, I'm just saying" and was recently named spokesmodel for Alizé. Williams will appear in a national advertising campaign to commemorate its 20 year anniversary in the US.
One of the more infamous incidents on her Hot 97 show included a segment in 1995 where she aired rumors that Tupac Shakur was raped in prison. Not surprisingly, Shakur was furious, since New Jersey underground rapper Chino XL used this as a diss. However, he only addressed Williams herself once, on the song "Why U Wanna Turn On Me?", which remained unreleased until his death in 1996.
In 1989 she was hired by 98.7 Kiss FM in New York as a fill-in DJ. As rival station WBLS was pilfering staff away from Kiss the station immediately hired her full time for their morning show and gave her a non-compete clause contract. That was when she started her gossip on celebrities. A year later she landed her own 6-10pm shift. In 1993 she won the Billboard Award for Best On-Air Radio Personality. In 1994 Emmis Broadcasting bought out Kiss FM and switched Williams over to Hot 97.
She was fired from Hot 97 in 1998 allegedly for allegedly getting in a fight with, and outing co-worker Angie Martinez's romantic relationship with rapper Q-Tip (of A Tribe Called Quest fame). Williams addressed it in her autobiography Wendy's Got the Heat. She acknowledged that there was a mostly verbal confrontation with a colleague but no fight. Williams stated that the station used the incident as an excuse to terminate her contract, but suggest it was pressure from hip-hop mogul Sean Combs that led to her dismissal. "He single-handedly tried to ruin me," she wrote in her 2nd book, the Wendy Williams Experience.
Williams attended Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts where she majored in communications and was a DJ for the college station WRBB 104.9 FM. During college, she interned at WXKS, Kiss 108, in Boston. Later, she became a DJ for a radio station in St. Croix. After a few months there, she accepted a job on, WOL-AM, a Washington D.C. station, and then soon moved to the New York market, where she has worked for WPLJ and Hot 97 (both when it was "Hot 97" and earlier, when it was "Hot 103.5").
Through it all, Williams has continued to reinvent herself. Her success as an author proves Wendy Wililams is here to stay.
Source: Reprinted from Wikipedia
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