Television

TV News Producer

This section could be more aptly titled “Out of My Comfort Zone,” but even that would be an understatement.

When I was laid off from my newspaper job in 2015, I knew I wanted to continue pursuing a career in news media — just not in print. After a few Hail Mary’s and dead-end interviews, I landed a position that left me equally excited and nervous:  newscast producer for WCIV-TV.

I was eager to prove I belonged, but I had zero TV producing experience. Too naive to be properly nervous, I accepted the role with a promise to the news director that — if given a chance to learn and succeed — there was nothing I couldn’t do and do well. It took me far longer to keep that promise than I’d like to admit.

My first day on the job left me wildly intimidated and immediately feeling like an impostor. It was “sink or swim“ time, and I was in over my head. The best I could do for a while was float. The next eight months were brutal. Each day seem to bring new humiliation and failure. Many nights I made the hour-long drive home in teary-eyed frustration.

But through repetition, tenacity and — honestly — pure spite at times, things finally started to click for me after about eight months of growing pains and hard-won lessons. By the start of my second year, I had gone from the producer nobody wanted to work with to the one hand-picked by our veteran management and anchors.

At the end of my tenure as a producer, I had been nominated for a regional Emmy, awarded Producer of the Year in the Carolinas once and finished runner-up a second time to my own mentor. I had conquered something that at times I felt would conquer me. I had grown tremendously both personally and professionally.

Being a producer taught me radical time management and effective communication within a team environment, as well as the importance of planning for everything that can go wrong so you can quickly navigate away and around problems. As a storyteller, producing TV also honed my writing skills to a previously unattained sharpness.

More than anything, the experience continues to remind me there’s nothing I can’t do.