Biography for Marty Winston – CTR product review, and special reports producer

Marty is one of those people with an incredibly complex history. He got into electronics as a hobby when vacuum tubes ruled, before the days of transistors or integrated circuits. He has been on the air or in the studio or behind the scenes in radio since the 1960s, and television almost as long.

Marty started writing for newspapers and magazines in the 1960s – titles like Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics, Robotics Age, Machine Design, Popular Mechanics and many more – over 1000 articles in all. He worked in advertising as a writer and as a TV/radio commercial producer/director. He’s been in executive roles in electronics manufacturing since the 1970s, was a headquarters exec at Radio Shack and for 40 years ran Newstips – a pioneering user of email and databases – the first weekly email publication – and, while often confused for a PR firm, it was a journalist-to-journalist information service with all-working-press readers with sponsoring clients who saw sell-through increases.

Marty has also been involved with several of the precursors to today’s social media: Ham radio, CB radio, The Source, CompuServe and more.

As if that wasn’t enough to tag Marty a smart-Alec know-it-all, he also wrote jingle lyrics (which won stacks of awards, including a Clio), station promotion scripts, and wrote jokes for entertainers.  He has also photographed magazine covers, shot most-watched coverage on assignment to a major network news organization, invented products (he isn’t sure how many patents include his name), and taught Isaac Asimov how to use a word processor.

He’s lived in Dayton, Seoul, New Haven, Fort Worth and Aiken but home is Chagrin Falls, Ohio. At home, he currently has 4 bottles of The Macallan on hand, but is working on making it three.