Hearst Television has established a fellowship honoring a company executive who led the company’s promotion and marketing efforts for more than a dozen years as Vice President and Senior Vice President, before her December 2024 retirement.
The Suzanne Grethen Creative Services Associate Producer Fellowship, designed to support the recruitment and nurturing of young local TV marketing talent, will be overseen by Grethen’s successor, Russ Nelligan, the company’s Vice President of Marketing.
“No one in our organization has ever been more invested in the growth and development of our creative professionals than Suzanne,” said Michael J. Hayes, President of Hearst Television. “This fellowship underscores the importance of her decades-long commitment to our people, our product, and our mission in local broadcasting.”
Katherine Barnett, Hearst Television’s SVP of Human Resources, added, “Developing early-career talent is a continuous process. Building on Suzanne’s initial work in this area, we’re highly encouraged about the prospects for success with this new fellowship.”
“Having worked closely with Suzanne for years, I witnessed her deep commitment to mentoring,” Nelligan commented. “At the station level, I had the privilege of helping guide some of the very first participants in the program she launched. This fellowship is not only a meaningful tribute to her legacy, but also essential to developing the next generation of local television marketers.”
In 2022, Grethen launched the Creative Services Associate Producer Development Program, drawing inspiration from the company’s other successful fellowship initiatives. These include the Fred Young Producing Fellowship, designed to develop talent in news production and honoring the company’s retired senior vice president of news; and the Marty Faubell Broadcast Technology Fellowship, designed to recruit rising minds in broadcast TV engineering and IT and honoring its retired vice president of engineering. With today’s announcement, Hearst Television is formally establishing the Grethen program as a fellowship.
Other organizations have collaborated with Hearst Television in support of nurturing emerging professionals in media. In 2021, Hearst Television parent Hearst, in partnership with the Emma Bowen Foundation, established an endowment honoring Jeana Stanley, a longtime Hearst Television executive later serving as Hearst’s vice president of finance who passed away in 2020. The endowment provides need-based scholarships and paid internship opportunities within the media industry to college students. In 2023, the National Association of Broadcasters Leadership Foundation launched The Emerson Coleman Fellowship, honoring Hearst Television’s retired senior vice president of programming by providing students with exposure, information and experience to begin a career in television programming or production.
Following its August 2022 inception, Grethen’s initial 12-month curriculum achieved a 93% fellowship completion rate with an impressive 80% of participants converting to full-time roles across Hearst’s stations. To date, the program has placed 15 fellows across the group, some of whom were alumni of the Emma Bowen or Emerson Coleman programs; at any given point, the company may have up to five Grethen fellows placed across its stations.
During her Hearst Television career spanning three decades — which included creative services director positions at Hearst stations WISN in Milwaukee and WESH in Orlando, prior to her promotion to her corporate role — Grethen worked with stations to position and market the special value of their content and service to local audiences. These efforts helped advance the stations’ reputation throughout their communities and among multiple constituencies, guiding the foundation of their brands and helping earn multiple NAB Service to America Awards. Her innovations, including advancing the company’s groupwide centralized graphics capabilities, served in providing best practices industrywide.
