My name is Jake Kerr, and this is my personal site. Here you’ll find a hodge podge of the various currents and tangents that my life has followed, everything from essays on my work to family photos. Don’t expect it all to make sense. Heck, half the time I’ll refer to myself as Jim, which is the name most of my family and business associates call me. So whether you call me Jim or Jake or whether you are interested in the NBA or chess, you’ll find the whole sloppy raggedy-assed mess right here. Here’s a short summary of the mess as it stands today:

Family

I have been married for 18 years to my amazing wife, Lea. One of the themes of this site is currents, and Lea has been the wisest navigator of my life’s currents. As I look around at the wonderful life I lead, it is clear that it wouldn’t be nearly as rich, nearly as challenging, or nearly as fun if Lea weren’t around as my partner.

I have three beautiful, intelligent, kind, and creative daughters, and their photos dominate the photo sidebar on the front page. Zoe was born in 1996, and immediately brought such joy to my life. Willow was born in 2001, and her joie de vivre is incredibly infectious. As she bounces through life, you can’t help but want to tag along. Mia was born in 2004, and she is so full of wonder, you can’t help but love life a little more after being around her.

Work

Currently I am the Vice President of Strategy for Triton Media. I work on the overall company strategy and its implementation across our various partners and divisions. I spend a great deal of time working with operations and our development/technology team. Another part of my job is assessing potential new partners, and this involves a great deal of phone calls and web presentations with exciting new companies.

I started with Triton on March 1. Previously I was a media consultant for Pollack Media Group. I work with media companies like MTV, CBS Radio, and others on finding ways to better implement the new technology and platforms of the Internet and mobile. I also work with mobile and Web 2.0 companies from the other angle–helping them find traditional media partners who will utilize their services and platforms and building their business.

My path to my role at Pollack Media Group and my subsequent job at Triton was a winding one. I started in radio at an AM station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was my dream job, other than the fact that the station was only on the air 12 hours a day, I didn’t get paid, and we had no listeners. Still, it was radio, and I loved the experience.

In 1991, based on the job I was doing making silk out of a the cow’s ear of a station I worked at, I was approached by a new record label based in New York to join their promotion staff in Dallas. To this day I remember being offered the job: I was living in my dad’s house, and I took the phone call in his TV room. When Alex Miller, the head of the department, said the pay would be $45,000 a year, I literally fell into my dad’s reclining chair. I could barely conceive making that much money. I finished the phone call stifling a fit of the giggles, as the reality of the offer seemed like a dream.

I worked hard at the job for four years, making a lot of valuable contacts, but at the end of 1994 the company went out of business. I have a lot of great stories from this time of my life, and I’ll post a few of them here.

I knew that the company was going to crash and burn, so in Thanksgiving of 1994, during my drive to Pittsburgh from Dallas to visit family, I came up with the idea of creating a fax publication solely dedicated to the Alternative radio format, which was exploding at the time and was badly underserved by existing industry publications.

This idea would turn into Alternative Radio Confidential, which I would publish out of my house via fax from 1995 to 1998. It was an influential and beloved little paper, and it expanded my contacts in the radio industry even further. In the fall of 1997, I was contacted by Radio & Records, the leading radio industry publication, about moving to LA as their Alternative editor.

I flew to LA for the job interview, with a list of demands that my wife and I had put together. We agreed that they were probably insurmountable. We were asking for the world, a six figure salary, no requirements on my time spent on the job or after hours, no constraints on topics I could write about. There were lots of things like that. Well, as I told my wife on the call after the meeting: I had good news and bad news: The good news was that they said yes to all my demands. The bad news was that they said yes to all my demands. We were moving to Los Angeles.

I worked at Radio & Records from 1998 to 2001. The publication was hitting severely hard times (most of its income came from record label advertising, and the record labels were facing tougher and tougher times). I was laid off at the end of 2001. The best news was that in 2001 I was allowed to move back to Dallas and work from there, so when I got laid off we were in a familiar and comfortable city.

I attempted to re-launch my fax publication as Alternative Radio Content, but times were different, and it didn’t even pay my mortgage payment, let alone the other bills. After 18 months of trying I was approached by Jeff Pollack about helping his company, Pollack Media Group, with their in-house newsletter. That conversation led to my current job.

I started in 2003 solely working as a radio consultant for the Alternative and Triple-A formats. At the same time I learned everything I could about new media, from mobile to the Internet. After a frustrating two years, my studies turned into expertise, and I became more and more involved in new media with our company. My deep immersion in this field across major companies and well-known start-ups has paid off, and now the new media division within Pollack Media Group is the fastest-growing division within the company.

Hobbies

My hobbies change like the seasons, and they are one of the main reasons that the concept of tangents is a theme for this site. I immerse myself in things to a great degree, only to get bored and move on to another tangent. One good example is my Dallas Mavericks site, which went 6+ months as an amazing blog about the team, only to languish now that I am bored with it. Such is the curse of my attention–it is strong but fleeting. My current hobbies include not just this site but also writing fiction, following the Mavericks, playing with my kids, examining the skill involved in online poker, and assorted other bits and bobs.