at Fish Factory

By Mark Carter

The Fish Factory, as it’s affectionately called, the words etched in stone above the Romanesque revival entrance to its handsome brick façade, looks like anything but what the name implies.

The two-story building in downtown Little Rock’s SoMa neighborhood hides in plain sight, passersby almost certainly unaware that inside its walls, one of the nation’s leading producers of outdoor TV programming is humming like a beehive. The company co-founded and built by the late Jerry McKinnis — the company that helped build ESPN — indeed is humming right along with son Mike McKinnis at the helm of JM Associates.

Each year, thousands of hours of production go into JM’s portfolio of outdoors TV programming, which includes shows about bass fishing, shows about saltwater fishing, air racing, boat racing, lumberjack sports, sled dog racing, even racquetball. And that includes hundreds of hours of live coverage.

The Little Rock firm’s handiwork is seen on ABC, ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox and FS1 among other networks, and the Fish Factory just entered the busiest season of what always is a busy year: Bassmaster season.

Mike McKinnis is the local lead at JM, the company co-founded by his father, Jerry, more than 40 years ago. Though JM was sold to the Anderson Media Group in 2017, Mike remains in charge on the ground at JM. In fact, Mike was running the business’ day-to-day ops long before Jerry died in 2019 at age 82.

Anderson Media Group’s hands-off approach to ownership has ensured that operations don’t skip a beat, and those ops annually build up to the Bassmaster Classic. For JM’s team of roughly 40, split evenly between full-time onsite employees and freelance contractors, the Bassmaster Classic is its March Madness, literally and otherwise.

JM produces coverage of the three-day event, which runs this year March 24-26 in Knoxville, Tenn., the Super Bowl for bass anglers. Each winter, the lead-up and prep for Bassmaster — the Classic and the Elite Series, the latter of which entails nine live events running from late February through August — has the Fish Factory in beehive mode.

Classic coverage includes live streaming and broadcasts on cable network FS1 and the mothership, Fox itself. McKinnis, who’ll turn 60 later this year, said viewership approaches the neighborhood of 1 million. Not bad for a niche sport. And therein lies the hook.

“The pinnacle of what we do is the Bassmaster Classic when we go live on the Fox broadcast, which is the big boy network,” he said. “This year, we’re gonna be on Sunday from noon to 3. And when we start getting the count, and we’re about to go live, and we’ve got our talent and it’s just the height of the moment...”

For McKinnis, the rush entails the entire process from planning to site set-up but peaks in those tense moments before a broadcast goes live.

“When you get in the seat at 6:30 in the morning, which is an hour and a half before we go live on the network, and you’re prepping, and you’re looking at everything, and we’ve got our cameras going, and talent’s getting in the seat, and everything’s ramped up,” he said. “And you know here in 10 minutes FS1’s gonna count us in, and we’re gonna be live from this truck. Yeah, it’s a rush like nothing else.”

Most times, any necessary pivots work around a preceding event running over a couple of minutes. But sometimes Mother Nature decides to throw a backdoor slider.

“Literally, you’re waiting for, say, NASCAR’s got a time trials before us. And they’re about to finish their show, and NASCAR’s on the line, and we’re on the line, and Fox is on the line,” he said. “But two years ago, we were in Fort Worth, and about to go live on FS1. And it’s June. And if you pull up the weather map, there was one cell over the entire United States, and it was right on top of the lake that we were at. And we’re about to go live in 10 minutes. And so, they canceled the takeoff until further notice. ‘But we’re about to go live…’ ”

“We had to fill about an hour and 15 minutes with no live cameras. Of course, we’re prepared with content from past events and all that kind of stuff. But we were also doing live hits with our reporter at the lake who’s out there in the storm. So, for our team to adjust and put on that broadcast meant so much.

“Doesn’t sound like much, an hour and 15 minutes, but that’s a lot. When the pressure’s on, when it’s all on you, even just five seconds is a long time.”

A typical Bassmasters week will entail preproduction on Monday, live one-hour preview shows on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and the event rolls on Thursday. The first series event, held over the last weekend of February at Lake Okeechobee in south Florida, entailed seven hours of live coverage, a remote crew of about 20 on-site and another 20 back at the studios in Little Rock.

Turns out, people like to watch other people fish, and they like to watch other people talk about fishing. At the dock, at the bar, at the water cooler. And most certainly, on TV. Jerry McKinnis figured that out more than 50 years ago, and Mike has made sure the family business never forgets it.

David Healy was 24 when he packed his stuff into a U-Haul and drove to Little Rock from his native New York City, embarking on a journey that would immerse him in the fishing culture and place him on the front lines of the outdoors television in- dustry. He felt like an honorary native Arkie already, having spent a couple of summers interning for Jerry McKinnis after being introduced to him by his dad, Jack Healy.

Five years after Jerry pitched his local fishing show to a fledgling cable outfit called ESPN and essentially launched outdoor TV programming as it’s known today, the cable outfit was sold to ABC. And Jack Healy was an executive vice president at the network who was instrumental in the launch and ultimate success of its cable ventures, including ESPN. He sat on the boards of ESPN as well as fellow former cable giants A&E and Lifetime.

Jack and Jerry became close colleagues and friends. And starting with those summer internships when David was 17, Jack entrusted Jerry with the industry apprenticeship of his son.

David arrived in downtown Little Rock in ’94 — JM then was housed in an old home about a block away from where the Fish Factory currently stands — and stayed for the next 14 years, marrying a local girl and working side-by-side with Mike McKinnis.

While Jerry McKinnis earned his reputation as a fishing and broadcasting legend, Healy said Mike’s even-keel demeanor and preference for operating outside the spotlight belie a passion to innovate.

“When I was there, Mike became more and more involved, learning every aspect of the business. He wasn’t just his dad’s son — he had the credibility because he did all the jobs, had been out on the road. We learned under Jerry and then Mike taught a whole generation of producers, camera operators and editors…

“He had the mentality, learned from his father, that nobody works harder. At JM, we were always looking to improve, the mindset was always, never settle.”

That “get ῾er done” mentality remains engrained in the walls at the Fish Factory. After all, Jerry was a former pro baseball player-turned-fishing guide in the late 1960s when he was asked to do a weekly two-minute segment on fishing for Channel 7 in Little Rock. When that segment turned into a half-hour show and then was syndicated, McKinnis was determined to produce it himself. And the rest, to borrow an old worn-out rod of a phrase, is history. * * * * * * * * *

Mike McKinnis never planned to join his dad’s business. The third of four kids and youngest son to a local fishing and broadcasting legend, he set out on the Rock and Roll Highway once he was through high school at Parkview in Little Rock and had earned his music degree at Belmont in Nashville.

As bass player and a founding member of Little Rock’s Fifth Cliff, he and his mates toured the country, recorded a couple of albums and became a mainstay of SEC college towns throughout the ‘80s.

“We’d be in Tuscaloosa at a fraternity house and look up, and there’s Violent Femmes next to us, and you know, this band or that band playing at this house,” he said. “Bands at every house.”

It was a blur, indeed, but McKinnis confessed to getting his money’s worth from the experience.

And he was a perfect fit as the band’s four-stringer. After all, he looks the part of rock ῾n’ roll bass player, and that’s no slight. His laid-back demeanor and satisfaction with delivering his art from just beyond the spotlight suggest bass guitar maestros like John Paul Jones, the piston who “quietly” fueled Led Zeppelin’s hyperactive V8 motor while frontmen Plant and Page soaked up the spotlight.

That’s the role JM Associates has played for some of the fishing industry’s biggest names including Mark Zona, Carter Andrews and the late Jose Wejebe. And it’s done so in a stealthy manner; it’s likely that more people outside the state’s borders know about JM Associates than do the natives.

Though each of Jerry’s kids eventually would work with JM in some freelance capacity, Mike was the only one who found his path inside the Fish Factory. His own two kids found their path in the entertainment industry in California, though his son freelances some for JM both behind the camera and otherwise.

Once music ran its course for Mike, he traded his guitar for another kind of bass and joined the family business in 1990, starting at the bottom and working his way up, doing a little bit of everything. But most importantly, absorbing.

“I learned the best way, you know. I literally emptied the trash and was a gopher and learned my way up,” Mike said. “[Dad] hired an editor out of Dallas, and I sat next to that guy for about two or three years and really learned the business of post-production, of television, of delivering shows to networks, of all that kind of stuff. I learned the production part of it.

“I didn’t know anything about the television business, but just dug in and started on the bottom floor.”

There was much to absorb. JM annually produces hundreds of hours of live content seen on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, CBS Sports, Fox, FS1, NatGeo Wild, The Weather Channel, The Outdoor Channel, Tuff TV and Versus. Most of that content comes straight off the water, but not all of it. In addition to the Bassmaster events and fishing shows such as the Redfish Cup, the Madfin Shark Series, “The Spanish Fly,” “The Obsession of Carter Andrews” and “Zona’s Awesome Fishing Show,” JM produces the

Stihl Timbersports Series and Timbersports Collegiate Challenge, the Stihl National Championship Air Races and more.

JM creates websites and produces web content as well, and its studios have been used to broadcast the Arkansas State Lottery and film scenes from movies such as “God Is Not Dead 2” and the Hank Williams biopic, “The Last Ride.” Its work has been recognized with an Emmy, Emmy nominations and other awards.

Anyone who’s ever seen outdoor sports on TV likely was watching a JM production, if not getting a look at the inside of the company’s SportsCenter-like set. It’s the biggest in the region, and at 70 feet by 60 feet, JM’s soundstage is the largest fully equipped production studio between Nashville and Dallas. In fact, JM can accommodate at least three permanent sets at once with room to spare, room enough for a live audience of 250.

It’s all state-of-the-art at JM, and everything is done in-house. An HD-SDI fiber link to a routable port in Nashville allows the firm to reach all major global networks, network ops and technical centers and even affiliates.

Technical directors, engineers, camera/audio ops are all available 24/7. In a pinch, the Fish Factory could stand ready to pro- duce and broadcast the Zombie Apocalypse. And to think it all started with a baseball player who fell under the spell of the White River … from a photograph.

Before Jerry McKinnis became the Arkansas fishing and broadcasting legend who helped put a fledgling cable network on the map, he was the operator of the old Maumelle Harbor marina on Lake Maumelle, just west of Little Rock.

The St. Louis native had squeezed all he could out of a professional baseball career that saw him reach the AAA level at Oklahoma City. An avid fisherman, Jerry remembered an old photo as he contemplated his next move.

“He had this picture of the White River that he had torn out of a magazine, and he always said to himself, ‘I’m gonna go there and fish one of these days,’” Mike said. “So, he went and played baseball for a couple years, realized that he wasn’t gonna make it, and the first thing he did was go to the White River, where he met a fishing guide. And it was Forrest Wood.”

Both Jerry McKinnis and Forrest Wood benefited from that serendipitous meeting. Wood was in the fiberglass business and about to start manufacturing phone booths. After meeting McKinnis, he opted for fiberglass fishing boats instead and convinced Jerry to join him as a guide on the White.

As for the launch of one of the world’s most iconic boating brands, “Dad got the very first Ranger bass boat from Forrest Wood,” Mike said.

Working on the White, Jerry met a prominent Little Rock mover/shaker, Brick Lyle, who convinced him to come down and run the old boat dock on Lake Maumelle. The Maumelle Harbor of the late 1960s, later known as Jolly Rogers Marina, remained an isolated retreat seemingly far removed from the bustle of the capital city. And this is where some of Mike’s first memories were born. He said the “tiny house” the family of then five members occupied on the property was about the size of his office today.

After a few years, the family moved into town while Jerry commuted back and forth from the lake in the family’s old wood-paneled station wagon with signs reading “The Fishin’ Hole” attached to the sides. In the ῾70s and ῾80s, that old wagon was a common sight for many Little Rock residents.

It was at the boat dock that Jerry met Bud Campbell, then the KATV sports director and voice of the Razorbacks. Campbell sold him on the idea of a weekly two-minute fishing segment, “The Fishin’ Hole,” on his sportscast. It was an instant hit with viewers and eventually led to its own show and even syndication.

A DIY’er if ever there was one, Jerry McKinnis inevitably became involved in all aspects of his show’s production. Eventually, with business partner Jim Manion, he launched JM Productions in that old Victorian before growth necessitated the Fish Factory. His little two-minute segment on Channel 7 had grown into a local smash and then a syndicated one, and McKinnis was ready when a light bulb popped on and he decided to pitch his show to a nascent cable outfit called Entertainment Sports and Programming Network.

“He was in the northeast in a hotel room, and there was a cable network called ESPN,” Mike said. “Originally, they were gonna do sports on the weekend and movies during the week, I think. And he said, ‘I’m gonna call these guys and see if they’d be interested in my show. And so, he went and met with ῾em.”

The ESPN “campus” in suburban Connecticut wasn’t much more than “three or four house trailers and a bunch of dishes,” Mike said. But his dad saw opportunity. Turns out, McKinnis’ show represented the network’s first actual time buy, and “The Fishin’ Hole,” which ran from 1989 to 2007, remains its secondlongest running show behind SportsCenter.

McKinnis worked with the network to take his show and others from anglers like Jimmy Houston and package them together on Saturday mornings in a four-hour block of outdoor programming. And thus, ESPN Outdoors was born.

And a year later, a former rock ῾n’ roll bass player was looking for his next move. And Mike McKinnis admits it took a while for his own proverbial light bulb to switch on. The first decade on the job was a learning process, as he got married, started a family and struggled to make ends meet, on the road 20 to 30 percent of the time.

“This business is not for the faint-hearted,” he said. “If you’re gonna get in the television business, you know how it works. It never stops.”

But years of diligent hard work were rewarded. By the beginning of the 2000s, Mike was running the company’s day-to-day ops. And once ESPN bought the organization behind Bassmaster, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.), in 2001, the beehive became active.

“Our business exploded because we were doing ESPN Outdoors on Saturday and Sunday mornings and weekdays,” McKinnis said. “We were doing hundreds of hours of that content. We were still doing the lumberjack shows. We started covering the Bassmaster series and the Bassmaster Classic. Yeah, we were doing the Great Outdoor Games, redfish tournaments. All that stuff was going on from 2001 to 2007. And we look back at it now, and we were like, ‘How did we do all that?’ It’s unbelievable.”

Almost as hard to fathom as the workload for McKinnis was the opportunity to “sit front row” to some of the world’s best fishermen. One with whom he grew particularly close was Wejebe, who died in a 2013 plane crash. As producer, McKinnis followed Wejebe all over the world.

“We started producing his show in ’96, and that was the greatest,” McKinnis said. “I got to go to South America multiple times, to Central America and Australia and all over the coasts, both east and west. I had a front row seat to one of the greatest fishermen to ever live.

“He and I were really close. He was fantastic. And he and my dad were very similar. It’s so interesting. So similar in their passion for fishing, in their passion for television and just how they carry themselves. It’s really amazing the similarities that I can see.”

Steve Bowman is an Arkansas fishing and outdoors legend in his own right. A member of the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame, the Waterfowl Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Outdoors Hall of Fame, he’s also an award-winning author, TV host, advocate, journalist, crusader, web designer currently, the content director for JM.

Bowman said Mike is so much more than just “Jerry’s son,” calling him JM’s leader, mentor and motivator. And he has a simple explanation for why business continues to hum, though JM remains out of the local spotlight.

“Truth is, we don’t have enough time to be on the radar,” he said.

Even after ownership changed hands briefly in 2007 and JM purchased B.A.S.S. in 2010, the company continued to hide in plain sight. At the urging of former ESPN president George Bodenheimer, McKinnis and former Time Warner CEO Don Logan purchased back JM from an Atlanta firm and bought B.A.S.S. in the process. Though ESPN had given Bassmasters the exposure it never would have achieved otherwise, the ownership change was viewed as a welcome one on all sides.

“They were just too big for it,” McKinnis said of ESPN. “And what I mean by that is, they’re so big, and this culture is so relationship-driven. They were great, what they did for the sport, but we became this small piece. And you can’t fool our audience. You start throwing all this talent in there who doesn’t know any- thing about fishing, they’re not gonna buy it.

“It was so challenging. We knew what to do here, you know, and we wanted to do the whole thing ourselves, which is kind of what we’re doing now. Now, we have the keys, we have the reins, and we’re able to drive it, you know?”

Through it all, JM’s focus on three very Jerry McKinnis-like ideals have kept the engine purring, Bowman said: innovation, hard work and “figure out how to get it done.”

All three come in handy as tech and TV evolve and new opportunities reveal themselves. Last year, JM began working with CBS Sports to televise the sport fishing championship. JM was the first to bring on-the-water live coverage of fishing tournaments to the airwaves, placing cameras on competitors’ boats beginning in 2015 when the technology enabled it to broadcast in remote locations using cellular signals. A blessing, it turned out, when the pandemic all but shut down many other sporting events.

The next step is tackling the big open water of saltwater fishing.

“The saltwater thing is new for us,” McKinnis said. “There’s always been tons of billfish tournaments, but we’re trying to group ῾em up in a series and cover it live. And live coverage for those has humongous challenges because they’re going a hundred miles off the coast. There’s no cell service. But Starlink is about to fix that problem for us, where we could actually cover ῾em live.

“That’s new and exciting for us. We’re always looking for fun things to do, like the air races. We’ve been covering them the last half a dozen years, and it obviously is nothing close to fishing. But our team gets to pick up, go to Reno and cover a live event.”

And those live events – well, for McKinnis anyway — you can’t beat ῾em.

* * * * * * * * *

Growing up, Mike got to tag along as his dad found new fishin’ holes to try, fishin’ holes that took ῾em far from home. As did his own kids.

“When I was 8-, 10-, 12-years-old, I didn’t know that everybody didn’t get to go to British Columbia and get to go to Florida and all these places,” he said. “I just thought that’s what you did. Now I look back and go, ‘Wow, what a privilege to be able to go to those places and see those things, and then watch a guy like my dad be passionate about something.’”

Mike’s own family has been treated to some exotic places, as well, and his adult kids have worked as freelancers for JM.

And though he was passionate and proud of his team’s work, Jerry McKinnis always preferred to operate under the radar. The apple in this case rests directly under the tree. Nothing against local business, Mike stressed, but from early on JM always had enough on its plate as it was. Somewhat off the local radar was, and is, a good spot for JM.

“My dad always used to say, we like it that way. We’ve got too much going on to do local business. Nothing against local business. It’s just too much to do that. And we kind of just like being hidden here, doing our thing.”

And doing it well. JM consistently has been recognized by those within the industry as among the best in the outdoor TV industry if not the broadcasting game itself. David Healy, who now owns his own firm, Stakeholder Marketing and Media in Atlanta, said the formula is simple, though being good at what you do makes for a good start.

“I worked other places and never experienced anything like it,” he said. The teamwork, the fear of complacency, the creative drive, the steady hand of leadership — Healy said it was all there at JM and still is. He recalls his years at JM with obvious affinity.

“Mike knows when they need to kick things into gear; he has a sense of when to get down to business and when to laugh. To work so hard all day in the heat and rain and still be laughing with the team while you’re doing it … That’s a special thing. That’s the thing.

“It never felt like work for me.”

Like his dad, Mike prefers fishing for smallmouth bass, though he doesn’t get to do it much anymore. Of course, he does get to watch an awful lot of it. But he and his siblings still have the old family place on the Buffalo River at Rea Valley. And a few times a year, it serves as retreat.

As for what’s next, Mike said more of the same: innovating, busting humps and of course, lots of laughter.

“I’m more like my dad,” he said. “I don’t lead by telling people what to do, I lead by doing it, and you can jump on board or not, ῾cause the train’s going. I’m doing it. And here we go. You know?”