Tony Dean Passes the Torch to Jason Mitchell
Brad Dokken Grand Forks Herald
Published Sunday, May 25, 2008
Tony Dean retires from the TV business
One of the pioneers in outdoors television is passing the torch.
Tony Dean, longtime host of “Tony Dean Outdoors,” has sold the rights of his popular program to Devils Lake fishing personality Jason Mitchell. Dean, 67, is helping Mitchell through the transition, co-hosting new programs that will air beginning in December and teaching the new host some of the ropes of the trade.
The new show will be called “Jason Mitchell Outdoors.”
Tony Dean, who launched the “Tony Dean Outdoors” TV program in 1985, is retiring from television but will remain involved in outdoors and conservation issues.
“Tony has really set the standard for outdoor TV throughout the years, and he’s been very influential,” Mitchell, 33, said. “I want to continue the legacy he created.”
In a telephone interview from Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he was attending a conference, Dean, of Pierre, S.D., said he’d been thinking about passing the TV show on to someone else for awhile but wanted to find the right person.
According to Dean, Mitchell was a logical choice. He’s not only a savvy communicator, Dean said, but Mitchell also knows sales, having established a successful guiding business and marketing a line of fishing rods.
“You’ve got to be a salesman, and if you can’t sell advertisers, you can have the greatest show in the world, and it’s not going to get on the air,” Dean said. “Jason has proved he’s very good at sales and likes it, and he’s very good at it. I think he’s going to turn into a pretty good outdoor communicator.
“He’s a great kid,” Dean said. “From the day I met Jason, I liked him and saw great potential for him.”
Dean, who launched “Tony Dean Outdoors” in 1985, said he plans to spend more time working as an advocate for conservation issues and hopes to establish what he calls a “conservation think tank” aimed at changing public policy programs and keeping grasslands and wetlands in place.
Dean says he’s developed a plan for the think tank and is exploring ways to fund it. He also plans to continue his daily “Dakota Backroads” radio show and writing occasional outdoors articles for newspapers such as The Forum and the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader.
Leaving the TV business, he said, wasn’t a difficult decision.
“Not really,” he said. “I had my run, well over 25 years doing it, and it’s time to pass the torch.”
Focus on stories
A Minot native, Mitchell said he aims to carry on Dean’s tradition of storytelling. It won’t be a show about how to catch more fish, in other words, but will focus on people and places across the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and northern Michigan.
Nothing will be staged, he says, and the show won’t be filled with blatant product pitches.
“You have to be able to promote and sell a product so advertisers can feel the results, but at the same time, you can do so with a level of integrity,” Mitchell said. “I think the best way to do that is to set down the egos and not, ‘I’ve got a TV show, and I’m the world’s greatest fisherman.’
“There are so many interesting things happening out on the water,” Mitchell said. “People want a good story. It’s our job to find those and tell them.”
Where “Tony Dean Outdoors” also included hunting segments, Mitchell says he plans to keep the new show focused on fishing. Most shows will feature two segments. The first season features 19 episodes, and shows in the works include walleye fishing on the Missouri River south of Bismarck, an interview with Dean looking back on the longtime host’s career, a historical perspective on Devils Lake and the bluegill bonanza on North Dakota’s Lake Metigoshe.
Production and filming for the show will be based in Bismarck, where cameraman Paul Oster lives, but Mitchell said he plans to remain in Devils Lake. Thanks to the Internet, Mitchell said, he and Dean can collaborate with Oster remotely.
Mitchell says he also plans to scale back his time on the water as a fishing guide. The career transition, he says, isn’t scary, and it didn’t take him long to decide when Dean approached him in October about taking over the show.
“It’s pretty exciting, actually,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been in the trenches a long time. I love guiding, but I’m starting to get wore out. People think, ‘Fishing, that isn’t work at all,’ but you fish 100 days in a row with only one or two days off, and it just wears you down. And if you don’t guide that many days, it’s hard to make a living. I’m getting older and slowing down. I’ve got a family now.”
‘Labor of love’
Dean started his broadcast career as a weekend radio host in Bismarck and later worked in Fort Collins, Colo., Sheyenne Wyo., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Huron, S.D. Before launching his TV show, Dean hosted a radio program for South Dakota’s Department of Game, Fish and Parks for 20 years and also spent some time with In-Fisherman Radio.
He said “Tony Dean Outdoors” almost went bankrupt the first year but survived and eventually flourished.
“It’s been a labor of love right from the start,” Dean said. “I had an advantage when I started because I already had communications experience. It was so much easier for me to learn than someone who came from a totally fishing background to try to become a communicator. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
As for Mitchell, hosting an outdoors TV show is a far cry from his early days as a guide, when he’d sometimes sleep in his boat at night for lack of anywhere else to stay and wrap a drift sock around his head as protection from mosquitoes.
“I loved to fish so I just got by,” Mitchell said. “If someone would have told me when I was a kid that I’d be doing this, I’d have fallen right out of my boat.”
n On the Web: