If you’re up late and flip on 99.5 KIIMFM, you’ll hear nationally syndicated radio host Blair Garner spinning chart-topping hits, chatting with stars and giving his overnight listeners the inside scoop on country music.
And sometime during “The Blair Garner Show,” which runs from midnight to 5 a.m. weekdays in more than 150 markets nationwide, he’ll dial up a woman in Tucson to get her take on the day’s country music news, gossip and juicy rumors.
Chances are, Jessica Northey will know something that might even have escaped Garner’s radar.
From her living room office in Tucson, Northey seems to have her fingers on the pulse of Nashville. And millions of people are paying attention.
On the nationally recognized Klout Score of social-media influence, Northey has an 85 out of 100. Her presence across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus is just south of 3 million followers. She counts among her consulting clients major American corporations, Nashville superstars and industry executives and small businesses looking to increase their profile through social media.
Celebrities know her by name — she was the first person Merle Haggard followed on Twitter and the person Garth Brooks turned to when he wanted to join Twitter. She flew with him to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to get him started. He has since amassed 278,000 followers — roughly half of Northey’s 568,000.
Forbes magazine listed her at No. 3 of its top 50 social media power influencers of 2013, and the Huffington Post called her a “Twitter powerhouse.”
“She just knew and she went into it and really, I think, made it her own,” said Northey’s friend Shannon Black, co-host of KIMM FM’s “Max, Shannon & Porkchop” morning show. “She stuck with Twitter, she has stuck with the online thing, and she’s made it herself.”
Garner, one of Nashville’s biggest radio personalities, said he started paying attention to Northey a couple years ago after discovering her through her weekly online chat #CMChat. It was the first country-music centered 24/7 hashtag community — a weekly online chat of celebrity interviews and fans asking artists questions in real time.
“She has amassed for herself a following that anyone in the world of country, anyone in the world of social media, would be envious of,” Garner said. “I would look at her chats and I would look at the stuff she would get out of artists and she would be able to extract from them stuff that no one else could. I don’t know what it is, her style or what it is, but you feel like she gets to know the person much more.”
Garner is a big deal in Nashville. He’s a radio veteran whose syndicated overnight show ran for 20 years in 270 markets nationwide before he took a side trip to the morning shift two years ago. But the dayshift was short-lived; he left his popular Nash FM “America Morning Show” in August to return to the overnight shift.
When he was mapping out “The Blair Garner Show,” Northey was one of the first names that came to mind. The idea was to create an A Team of respected country music bloggers and writers from across the country who could give the lay of the land not only from their side of the country but from their unique perspectives.
Northey was a perfect fit, he said. She dances outside the box when it comes to her artist interviews, asking celebrities such earth-bound questions as how does Tim McGraw like his popcorn, buttered or plain? What was Garth Brooks’ first Halloween costume? Who would Reba McEntire want to play her in a Lifetime biopic?
“And those are the kinds of things Jessica turns in. She finds those common touch-points between the artists and the fans, and she connects them in that way,” Garner said. “And she is the perfect conduit between the artist and the fans because she asks their questions. It’s a really cool thing that she’s got going on.”
Northey didn’t set out to be a social-media pioneer, but she eyed a radio career for as long as she can remember.
Northey and her mother lived with her grandparents, who ran the Corona Speedway racetrack, which is now Tucson Speedway. Her grandfather, Bill Cheesbourg, was a local celebrity after competing in six Indianapolis 500 races from 1957 to 1965.
By the time Northey was born, he had retired from racing and was involved in managing race tracks, including the 3/8-mile oval dirt track at Corona.
When Northey was 15 or 16, she sold tickets and programs at the track and helped out in the DJ booth. She also got to know Tucson DJ Bruce St. James, who is now a prominent talk show host on Phoenix’s KTAR 92.3 FM. His family ran a rival car on the track, and whenever she saw him, she was inspired by his career, she says.
After graduating from Amphitheater High School — one of several schools she attended after what she described as a turbulent childhood — she studied political science and communications at the University of Arizona, but her eye was always on radio. She got her first shot when she was a nanny for the GM of a local radio station and landed a job as the station’s receptionist.
Allen Kath was something of a celebrity at the station. He did the rush-hour SkyView traffic reports, and Northey answered the phone when he called in his reports. One day, she told Kath she wanted to be on his traffic team.
“She was always looking to break out and do different things,” Kath said, so he told her to make a demo tape.
Northey recruited her friend Black, who did SkyView reports and was a sidekick on KRQ’s “Mojo and Betsy Show,” to help.
“I did a reel-to-reel tape and I had to cut it,” Northey recalled with a chuckle.
Kath was impressed and gave her a shot.
He had her doing the traffic reports for Radio Tejano 1600 KXEW, a bilingual station on the AM dial.
“There was a smattering of Spanglish and we put her on and it was great. She was interacting socially with the hosts of this Tex-Mex Tejano station,” Kath recalled.
Northey did the traffic reports for about five years before landing a sales job with Tucson’s Fox TV affiliate, KMSB. The money was great — double or triple her radio pay — but after a few years, she itched to get back into radio.
She moved to central California to take a radio sales job just as MySpace was taking off in 2003. Northey was intrigued and signed on. Before long, she had 50,000 followers and was incorporating the platform into her radio sales work. She and a few colleagues tried to persuade their bosses to do the same, but it fell on deaf ears. Management didn’t see how social media could make them money.
Northey quickly proved them wrong.
After six years in California, she came home to Tucson in late 2009 with a thriving MySpace following, a dynamic Facebook presence and a foothold in Twitter, which came along in 2008.
“I just started fooling around with it and I just started getting a lot of followers and saying funny things and being witty,” she said.
At home, friends and strangers started asking Northey to help them set up Twitter accounts and manage their social media. She charged a few bucks and picked up clients along the way. A Nashville record executive who found her on Twitter hired her to do social media for the label. She also was writing a social-media column for the online magazine All Access and launched her own social-media consulting company, Finger Candy Media.
She built everything around country music, including #CMChat, which she launched in 2011 as a format for country fans to get behind-the-scenes access to superstars and rising stars. In the five years since, she has generated more than 10 billion Twitter impressions, 400,000 tweets and has more than 100,000 unique contributions, according to Hashtracking, which tracks hashtag traffic on the internet.
The chat’s success helped propel her personal brand and power as a social-media expert. She has become an in-demand social-media speaker nationwide, and has appeared on numerous radio talk shows. Her client list includes Chevrolet, which hired her as their Red Carpet host for the 2014 and 2015 Country Music Association festivals; Dick Clark Productions, which brought her on to be its social-media correspondent for the ACM Awards, ACCA Awards and Miss America contest; and Verizon, AT&T, Garth Brooks’ Ghost Tunes record label and Richard Branson’s Virgin Air offshoot, Galactic Travel. She also does social-media management for a national company based in Tucson and consults and manages social media for private clients.
Northey said she is hoping the exposure from “The Blair Garner Show” will lead to more opportunities, including correspondent work and perhaps a podcast.
“It’s been a really interesting ride,” she said. “But I do really want to stay in Tucson.”
Northey’s fellow A Team members on Garner’s show are “Morning Hangover” host Kurt Bardella on the East Coast and Lisa Konicki, the editor of the online music zine nashcountrydaily.com, representing the middle.
“We are kind of the connection to the fans of all things country,” Garner said.
Garner described the show as high energy, aimed at second- and third-shifters, people whose workday begins when most folks are crawling into bed. According to his research, Garner estimates the market is as big as 15 million, “and I think that that’s a huge group of people who deserve to be entertained.”
“I can tell you honestly that one of the highlights of my day is talking to (Northey) on the phone. Not only just about what I learn from her, but her infectious spirit, her infectious enthusiasm about life in general,” Garner said. “I love talking into that every day, and so do our listeners.”
Black said it’s a big deal to have a Tucson native on a nationally syndicated radio show.
“Whenever you can get syndicated and open up your audience and more and more people get to (exposed) to you, she’s just going to get more and more people who fall in love with her little wacky side,” said Black, who often hangs out with Northey backstage, including at Country Thunder in Florence and the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville. “I’m super proud of Jessica and everything she’s done.”
