Tony Zappone
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Tony Zappone (born October 9, 1947 in Tampa, Florida) began his career in journalism at age 14 as a freelance photographer with The Tampa Tribune, paid at the rate of three dollars per published news photo.
In 1963, he photographed President John F. Kennedy during a presidential visit to Tampa just four days before Kennedy was assassinated. Nine months later, he presented the slain President's brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, with pictures he had taken that day which were accepted for public display at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Several of his photos showing the last time Secret Service Agents were posted at the rear of the presidential limousine were entered as exhibits during The Warren Commission's investigation into the Kennedy Assassination and are still used today in Secret Service training.
At age 16, Zappone was the youngest credentialed photographer to cover the 1964 Democratic National Convention at the original Atlantic City Convention Center. There, he was interviewed before a nationwide television audience by NBC News Correspondents John Chancellor and Frank McGee.
Early in his career he photographed news events for the Associated Press and United Press International. At age 17, after a brief stint as junior news hound for WTVT-TV using a borrowed World War II Bell and Howell 16mm camera, he began shooting news film for Tampa television station WFLA-TV. At that time (1965), the going rate paid to stringers by TV news departments was fifty cents per foot of film used on a newscast (eighteen feet equaled the average 30-second story.) After twelve years at WFLA-TV, he would return to WTVT-TV as a news correspondent. At 18, he filmed the aftermath of a devastating tornado which ripped through a section of North Tampa (Carrollwood) for NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, the highest-rated evening news report of that time.
During summer vacations from his studies in Political Science and Mass Communication at The University of South Florida Zappone worked as a reporter/photographer with The Philadelphia Bulletin. He was also an intern in the news department at WCAU-TV, Philadelphia, working alongside television news legend John Facenda. He was a founding staff member (photographer and reporter) of The Oracle (University of South Florida), a groundbreaking campus newspaper which printed its first issue September 6, 1966. In its first year, the publication won two National Pacemaker Awards given by the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP) for excellence in college journalism and was named to the ACP Hall of Fame in 1989.
From 1970-71, Zappone served in the U.S. Navy as part of the Armed Forces Courier Service (ARFCOS), now the Defense Courier Service, and was based at the Embassy of the United States in London. There he befriended then U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Walter H. Annenberg, founder of TV Guide and former owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, who took him under his wings and cleared a path for his advancement in the print and broadcast journalism fields. Zappone also performed functions in Europe during this time for the National Security Agency, headquartered in Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.
Over the years, he has been: a newspaper editor; television news correspondent; a stringer correspondent for the former Satellite Network News (SNN) and later Cable News Network (CNN); a radio traffic reporter; an advertising executive; a university lecturer; a real estate investor and manager; and is currently a marketing, communications and real estate consultant based in Tampa.
