By Don Rush

If you have ever watched local television, chances are you’ve seen Jim Hughes.

Hughes, 62 and a 1978 graduate of Oxford High School, currently hosts a show on Oxford Community TV (OCTV) called Oxford News This Week.

“I sort of fell into doing the news,” he said recently. “It’s something Howard Hoeflein started years ago.”

Years ago was back in 1989 when Hughes was hired to help run what was then called Oxford TV, out of their studios at Oxford High School (now the middle school). At that time, Hoeflein would cut and paste articles from the Oxford Leader onto pieces of paper and read them. Today, the community television has its own office and studio at Seymour Lake Township Park. “And, we now have teleprompters to read and green screens. And, now they have me standing up because they say my suit wrinkles,” he said.

Oxford News This Week still uses the Leader for some of their stories, but they also send out their camera crews and reporters to cover local issues. That show and their other programming streams on Youtube.com

Besides doing the news show, Hughes also calls Oxford High School sporting events like football, basketball, swimming and baseball. “I am most comfortable and love calling football but I hope to call golf this year,” he said, adding he also is the on street announcer for the Oxford Christmas parade.

Hughes, a Specs Howard graduate, now lives in Madison Heights and does traffic on WWJ (950 AM).

“I fell into doing traffic about four years ago with WJR and honed my craft in Cleveland. Last July I started working for WWJ,” he said. “If I would have known about doing traffic I would have done it years ago. For years I was a disk jockey at music stations. I learned long ago I had a face for radio. I feel more comfortable doing radio than TV.”

He is on air weekdays on the afternoon shift from 3 p.m to 10 p.m., every 10 minutes “on the eights.”

“I probably do about 36 reports a shift,” he said.

His parents, Diane and Jim, still live in downtown Oxford.

“I feel fortunate to have grown up in Oxford. Even though I live in Madison Heights, Oxford is my home and always will be,” he said. “Some of the news we’ve read in recent years has been hard to read, but we do it. I do it for the love of Oxford. I would do anything to help this town heal more.”