Lottery hires former TV news anchor as marketing director

Salary for Bragg to be $88,968

Donna L. Bragg
Donna L. Bragg

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery has hired a Fort Smith-based health care system's marketing director as the lottery's advertising and marketing director.

Donna L. Bragg -- who had worked since 2010 as the marketing and communications director for Sparks Health System -- started work for the lottery Tuesday at a salary of $88,968 a year, lottery Director Bishop Woosley said Friday.

Bragg filled a vacancy created after Joanna Bunten, who was the lottery's advertising and marketing director between July 31, 2009, and Nov. 12, resigned for a job with J.B. Hunt Transportation. Bunten was paid $82,285 a year at the lottery.

Woosley said Friday in a written statement that Bragg was hired as the lottery's advertising and marketing director "based on her experience in advertising, marketing, communications strategies, PR, crisis communication, social media and community outreach."

He said the position wasn't advertised, but he "spoke with many individuals within the industry about available candidates."

"I also spoke with several potential candidates, both formally and informally, about the position and ultimately decided to offer the position to Donna based on her qualifications," said Woosley, who has worked at the lottery since July 2009 and has been the lottery's $165,000-a-year director since February 2012.

Bragg was a senior news anchor at KHBS/KHOG television station at Fort Smith/Fayetteville from 1997-2010, according to her resume. She also worked part time as the executive director of the Bost Foundation to raise money from 2006-2007 while she worked at the television station. The foundation supports Bost Inc. of Fort Smith, a nonprofit agency providing lifelong services for individuals with developmental disabilities.

She was a news anchor, executive producer and medical reporter at KFSM television station in Fort Smith and Fayetteville from 1988-1993 before she "retired [in] 1993 to start a family," according to her resume. She received bachelor's degrees in English and journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1988.

In April 2007, then-University of Arkansas head football Coach Houston Nutt released a letter to explain his relationship with Bragg, who was then a Fort Smith TV news anchor. At the time, in the middle of a controversy over the treatment of a Razorback football player by a fan, a side story emerged that Nutt and Bragg had exchanged 1,063 text messages between Nov. 30, 2006, and Jan. 11, 2007.

Nutt said his text messages with Bragg related to her work as a professional fundraiser for a nonprofit organization that provided services for the developmentally disabled; her insights concerning the media; condolences and support after Nutt's mother-in-law died from cancer; and information about a friend of Bragg's who was diagnosed with cancer.

Horrified by the Internet chatter that arose over the records, Bragg said in April 2007 that nothing wrong had happened. She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she was friends with Nutt and his wife.

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery has helped finance scholarships for more than 30,000 students each of the past three years. The lottery's revenue and net proceeds for college scholarships have declined each of the past three years, although they've rebounded during the first seven months of the current fiscal year. The Legislature has cut the size of the scholarships for future recipients three times during the past several years.

Metro on 03/05/2016

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