2006 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

“It won’t work.” 

That’s what people always say about a new idea, according to Stanley S. Hubbard. As chairman and CEO of Hubbard Broadcasting, Inc., he has heard the phrase often—and ignored it each time.

Hubbard has spent the past 55 years transforming “unworkable” ideas into successful enterprises. Like his father before him (Hubbard Broadcasting founder Stanley E. Hubbard), he has pushed the family business to new frontiers, leaving less adventurous broadcasters scrambling to catch up.

Today, innovation remains the hallmark of Hubbard Broadcasting, whose operations include seven TV and three radio stations in Minnesota, one radio station in Wisconsin, four TV stations in New Mexico, two TV stations in New York, F & F Productions in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Reelz Channel, a 24-hour satellite and cable network scheduled to launch this September with 28 million subscribers.

Hubbard joined the family business at 18, working as a file clerk in the newsroom. His father didn’t give Stanley or his siblings any special treatment. “We were supposed to work longer hours, and harder hours,” says Hubbard, 73. “And we tried to do that.”

After about six months, he graduated to news photographer. “I had a four-inch-by-five-inch Speed Graphic,” he says. “I’d listen to the police radio and chase ambulances, and chase fires, and chase shootings—chase all sorts of stuff. I saw a lot of exciting things—and a lot of things that were pretty awful.”

Hubbard worked his way up the ranks, developing a management style that he says consisted of “being fair and honest with people, giving people a chance to do what they can do best, and hiring people who are smarter than you are—that’s the big secret.”

When he became president of Hubbard Broadcasting in 1967, he had big shoes to fill. His father’s list of firsts included being the first TV station in the United States to have regularly scheduled daily local newscasts, the first station with color news and high-speed color film processing, and the first all-color TV station in America.

But Hubbard wasted no time in accruing impressive firsts of his own, beginning with WTOG-TV in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1968. It became the first successful UHF station to operate in a VHF market.

“Everyone said it wouldn’t work, because it hadn’t worked anyplace else,” he says. “It didn’t take much brains to figure out that everyplace else had a very small tower, lousy coverage, and lousy programming. My theory was: We’re gonna get the best programming we can get, we’re gonna have the most power we can get, we’re gonna have a tall tower, and we’re gonna promote the heck out of it.”

In 1982, Hubbard formed United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB), which received the first direct broadcast satellite (DBS) permit. “We had to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to launch a satellite,” he says. “We bet the whole farm on that deal. The cable companies were telling people that DBS stood for ‘Don’t Be Stupid.’ The networks didn’t want to see it happen.”