![]() His other family was indelibly intertwined with that one. “The majority of our newsroom has been here since at least 1996, so it’s a family. He was just such a fun person to be around. “He was either whistling, singing, or laughing. “You could hear him coming down the hallway,” says Dana Hahn, the WJBK vice president of news tasked with building the station’s mountain of daily coverage. Murri spent more time strolling through the newsroom, poking his head into cubicles, or kibitzing with co-workers than buried in his office, his resounding voice bouncing off walls. If there can be such a thing as a love affair between a boss and his employees, it blossomed on Nine Mile Road in Southfield. He knew their kids’ names, their hobbies. Fox 2 News Morning crew, since he often arrived by 5. Murri knew every person at Fox 2, the maintenance man to the 4:30 a.m. He rose steadily through the sales ranks, departed to Atlanta and New York for a few years of seasoning, then returned home to eventually assume the reins of the place where his business life began. “When I got to the station, they called him ‘The Babe,’ because he was so young,” says Marla Drutz, vice president and general manager of rival WDIV-TV (Channel 4) who worked briefly at WJBK. That’s because station oldtimers watched Murri grow up at Channel 2, the kid from Shelby Township hired as a local account executive in 1984. For a station beset by a history of iron-hearted, irascible leaders (“Wild Bill” Flynn gallops to mind), WJBK achieved this tectonic shift in broadcast philosophy with barely a rustle of internal grousing. As Fox 2’s GM since 2001, he spearheaded the station’s transition into a Detroit version of CNN, airing a staggering 11 and a half hours of live local news every weekday and another 11 and a half on weekends, generating mounds of local advertising revenue and making him the darling of Fox’s New York boardrooms. Unlike most of us, Murri was blessed to have two distinct families that adored him. “And being Jeff Murri made other people’s day better.” ![]() “He was one of those people who was not afraid to be himself,” Bruce says. Murri was a man who danced joyously to the music of his life. ![]() ![]() You know he drove away thinking, ‘Wow!’ ” And the gentleman had a smile bigger than life on his face. Here was this man in a business suit, in the middle of a parking lot, doing a dance along with him. “Then he went into a full dance! The guy was shocked. ![]()
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