Chet Flippo Editorial Director, CMT and CMT.com Chet Flippo is Editorial Director of CMT and CMT.com. Before joining CMT in 2001, he was Country Music Editor for Sonicnet.com. From 1995 until joining Sonicnet in 2000, he was Billboard's Nashville Bureau Chief. Flippo was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism. After working as Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone magazine while in graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, he became Rolling Stone's New York Bureau Chief in 1974. After Rolling Stone moved its offices from San Francisco to New York in 1977, he became Rolling Stone Senior Editor. In addition to covering such artists and subjects as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe, and the Who, he initiated country music coverage for Rolling Stone, profiling such artists as Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, and Waylon Jennings. He left Rolling Stone in 1980 to write the book "Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams" and since has written books on Paul McCartney, Graceland, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and published an anthology of articles, "Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing." He has also written articles for the New York Times, TV Guide, Texas Monthly, and Q Magazine of London, and other publications and has written TV scripts for VH1, CBS and CMT. From 1991 to 1994 Flippo was a lecturer in journalism at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, before moving to Nashville to work for Billboard. He has received the Country Music Association's 1998 CMA Media Achievement Award. In 2006, The International Country Music Conference (ICMC) honored Flippo with the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism.