Greg Adaline made his debut on New Orleans FOX affiliate WVUE yesterday morning.
That alone might be interesting enough for a single post, but The Times-Picayune reports Adaline started his career by beating out hundreds of contestants in an on-air “audition derby” at Detroit’s WDIV in 2004.
“This was right around the time that ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘American Idol’ were just starting to take off,” he said. “Reality TV was a new thing.”
AdvertisementA VHS audition tape in hand, Adaline arrived at the open-call audition and took his place near the end of the line of nearly 300 contestants. He survived the first round to be one of eight finalists in the competition.
The finalists did stories on-air for the next two weeks, with a 5 p.m. newscast vote-off by a judges panel winnowing the field.
Adaline prevailed — “It was an amazing couple of weeks,” he said — and the stories he did that summer at WDIV enabled him to put together a sampler tape of stories he used to secure his next job.
“I was off and running,” he said. “That’s how my career started.”
According to his WVUE bio, he was offered a three month on-air contract at WDIV. Adaline went on to work as the morning anchor at WLNS in Lansing, Mich. He then went to KCTV in Kansas City before returning to WLNS in 2011.