On Saturdays, when JoAnne Purtan was a girl, her father sometimes brought his daughters along to work. Dick Purtan was one of the best-known voices in Detroit radio. On those visits JoAnne would slip into the chair at Channel 7’s anchor desk, where Bill Bonds read the news to the whole city, and pretend to read it herself.
She got the desk. But first she won the state championship in Radio Speaking. Twice.
1986 and 1987
Radio Speaking was the forerunner of the event MIFA now calls Broadcasting: a student reads the news against the clock with the authority of someone who belongs on the air. There were no class divisions in individual events in those years, so there was one Radio Speaking champion for all of Michigan. In 1986 it was JoAnne Purtan, a junior at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills. In 1987 it was JoAnne Purtan again.
The Bloomfield Hills schools had a student radio station, WBFH, known as the Biff, and five of the six Purtan sisters worked there across ten years. JoAnne has written that her father introduced her to broadcasting but that the Biff is where she fell in love with it, and that her fondest memories of high school were made at the station. She credits its longtime adviser, Pete Bowers.
Albany, then home
She went to Michigan State, and then to WRGB in Albany, New York, where she spent seven years as a reporter and anchor. On June 8, 1998, she came home to WXYZ, Channel 7, the building with the anchor desk. It was also Carolyn Clifford’s first day.
She stayed twenty years. She anchored the noon news and co-anchored the four o’clock show, and she became the station’s consumer reporter, the person who told Detroit which deals were worth it. When the noon newscast moved to a street-level studio downtown in 2015, she was the one behind the glass. She won four Emmys. One of them was for a story about her father.
Her run at Channel 7 ended in March 2018. Her father has described the farewell party her colleagues threw as packed. Seventeen days after her last newscast she was back on the air, this time on the radio, co-hosting mornings on 104.3 WOMC, the station where Dick Purtan had spent the last chapter of his own career. She said she was humbled to follow him there. She still co-hosts the morning show.
The family business
The Purtans have always treated a microphone as something you use for other people. In 1988 her father started the Salvation Army’s Bed & Bread Club Radiothon. It has raised more than $46 million to feed and shelter people in metro Detroit, and this February, in its thirty-ninth year, it raised another $1.3 million. Her mother, Gail, lived with cancer for more than twenty years before her death in 2018, and JoAnne has walked with her sister in the Michigan Ovarian Cancer Alliance’s Time to Teal. JoAnne serves on the board of the New Day Foundation for Families, which helps families facing cancer with their bills, and on the advisory board of Midnight Golf.
This year she is hosting Henry Ford Health’s documentary series Minds of Medicine, and on September 29, 2026, she emcees an evening in Plymouth honoring Michigan’s Rosie the Riveters of World War II. In July the family celebrated Dick Purtan’s ninetieth birthday.
She has said she knew from the time she was a girl that this was the work she wanted, and that what she loves about it is telling people’s stories. The judges at State in 1986 and 1987 heard it early. Detroit has been hearing it for twenty-eight years.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
