John McLaughlin

Education

Born in Rochester, New York, Higgins attended Columbus High School in Miami, Florida. Higgins graduated from Marquette University in 1984 with a degree in marketing.

Career

His writings were often cited by academics, government officials, and other journalists, and a journalism award was named in his honor. At the University of Notre Dame he became deeply involved with the student newspaper, The Observer. As a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, starting in 1983, Higgins most often worked the police desk.

He turned to business writing in 1986 on the Miami Review.

Beginning in 1989 he joined Multichannel News where, as financial editor, he covered the cable television industry and related media. In 1996, he became business editor of Broadcasting and Cable.

Higgins covered the cable television industry in the United States. from 1989 to 2006. These years saw cable television revenues more than quadruple, direct-broadcast satellite services beginning to compete with cable, a frequently-changing regulatory landscape, a boom affecting the entire telecommunications industry, and the collapse of the boom.

Richard Parsons, Chief Executive Officer of Time Warner, assessed Higgins as "an outstanding journalist and one of the smartest and best-informed reporters on our beat." A former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Richard Wiley, said after Higgins"s death: "I thought he was a terrific journalist… He got right to the point.

He was a keen analyst, and I will really miss reading his material." Higgins"s writings have frequently been cited in books, government reports, and Wikipedia articles

Achievements

• Broadcasting & Cable published tributes to Higgins after his death. CableFAX reported on a memorial held at Music Television headquarters on 12 December 2006. Higgins was posthumously inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2007. Five years after his death, in December 2011, the Staten Island Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University announced the establishment of the John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting. The award, part of the school"s annual Mirror Awards for media industry reporting, was co-sponsored by Discovery Communications and Time-Warner Cable. The first John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting was presented to Peter Maass on June 13, 2012.