March 3, 2015

Ken Koontz has been a chronicler of Charlotte’s community life for 45 years. On Tuesday, he offered some characteristically candid words about that history. He offered young people sharp words on how not to make some of the mistakes their elders made. And he briefly touched on his current work, digitizing the memories of the community’s elders before, as he put it, we are left only with the second-hand recollections of their progeny.

Koontz is a regular at the Forum. But that doesn’t mean all in the room know him well. So some of his presentation was about his own history at WBTV, about football, JCSU, and his serial entrepreneurial activities. Near the end of the first video below, Koontz begins reading his own biography. That document, from 2003, is here. It includes his contact info.

Video from Koontz’s presentation and the Q&A that followed will be posted below as it becomes available.

Presentation, part 1

 Presentation, part 2

 Presentation end and Q&A

Q: Why die you sell that TV station after only 8 years?

Q: Assess the role of the Charlotte Chamber in the black community. And what happened to Troy Watson’s Black Chamber?

Q: Do you see a black community or “communities”? And how will you archive your material?

Q: My grandmother, 102, remembers a time when black people took care of one another. What would it take to return to that?

Q: What’s the media’s role in setting the public narrative, and how can the least-of-these communities combat that?

Q: Define what you mean by the “okey-doke.”

Q: Would you expand more on how who you know is more important than what you know?

Q: Your father passed on to you his photography knowledge. Do you have plans to train anyone in your TV journalism skills?

Q: How do we get what you and others know to the millennials so they won’t keep burying their heads in the sand?

Q: Why do we need non-black businesses on Beatties Ford Road?

Q: How do we better communicate with youth, and how do we bring more black businesses into the black community?

Q: To reach millennials, your message must be on clothes they wear, places they go, things they watch and things they play with.