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President's Letter |
At 4:30 p.m. the KPIX newsroom in the stationís Battery Street building is humming. Writers, producers and editors tap away at computer keyboards or stare intently at the monitors of video editing machines. Behind the general assignment editorís long curving blonde wood desk, police scanners crackle and white boards show the location of mobile units. Of all the items adorning the work areas ñ including a gold pair of Mickey Mouse ears, a large plastic Lufthansa airlines sign, a ìFree Paris Hiltonî petition and many half-eaten cartons of take-out food ñ a small inflatable version of Edvard Munchís famous painting ìThe Screamî most embodies the general air of controlled chaos. In the middle of all this activity, news anchor Dana King sits calmly down in front of a camera near an array of flat panel televisions and a blue screen to record teasers for the 6 oíclock news about coverage of the side-effects of a new diet pill and a vandalized local monument. Comfort in front of a camera and in a busy newsroom seems only natural for someone who is an Emmy Award-winning 20-year veteran of the business. Even one who headed out for the coast fresh from college in a Volkswagen "packed to the rafters" and sporting a "California or Bust!" sign, but without a job waiting for her there. The small office just off the newsroom King shares with her co-anchor Ken Bastida looks south toward the city’s landmark TransAmerica Building. Near her computer is the plaque for the Edward R. Murrow Award she received for her reporting on the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda. On her computer screen is the line-up of stories for the 6 o’clock broadcast. Reviewing those and doing the teasers are part of a ‘typical’ day when she’s not reporting from some global hot-spot. “I come in to work, read the New York Times, go over the wires and read the broadcast. I read all the reporters’ tracks as well. I think it’s important to have as many eyes on the work we do as possible,” says King. “We’re the last line of editorial defense. If it goes out on the air and it’s wrong, to the viewer I’m wrong. So I take great responsibility in making sure what we report is accurate and in context.” King never expected to be the person in front of the camera when she headed initially for Los Angeles with a degree in Marketing from Ferris in hand. The Cleveland native came to Big Rapids as a teenager when her mother, whom she cites as the most influential person in her life, moved to the area to work at Ferris. “Here’s this white, Jewish woman, born to a well-off family her father was a doctor who decided she was going to marry the maitre d’ of the country club that her family belonged to. Well, he just happened to be black. And it was the 50s when that was illegal. She is a feisty broad,” says King of her mother, who had the additional burden for caring for her two small children after she was widowed when King was just a year-and-a-half old. “She taught me that if you have a problem, you go to the person who can affect some kind of change. So I’ve never been afraid of going to the source and asking the questions, and that has served me well in this profession.” Not in the Script In Los Angeles, King first sold cable door to door before getting into a training program at KNBC. “I really loved it. I wanted to run the station. The best way into that is through the sales department. Instead, I took a big right turn.” After moving from KNBC to KABC where she continued working in sales, her general manager, who liked moving people to new positions, asked if she wanted to be a reporter. “I looked at him and said, ‘What’s the joke here? Why would you hire me?’ This was the number one TV station in the second largest market. He was determined, so I thought, well, okay. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” King used materials from UCLA’s journalism department to study, shadowed the station’s top reporters and “asked a lot of stupid questions.” “They worked me so hard. I used to run everywhere,” King says. “I’d run to the truck and run to the interview and run back to the station. I would fall asleep at the table eating. It was trial by fire.” A moment of truth came one afternoon when King was doing a remote about last-minute tax filers. “Back then I couldn’t remember my own name on a live shoot because I was so nervous,” she says with her ready smile. “I used to write everything down word for word. This was tax day people driving up to the bin and putting their taxes in. The wind caught my pages while the camera was on me and I froze. I don’t know how I got out of it. I went home that night and couldn’t get my key in the door because I was sobbing, but there was something that made me go back the next day. I actually cut myself some slack after that, took a deep breath and continued to make my way.” The Global Village The way King continued to make for herself included a move to St. Louis to anchor the evening news at KTVI-TV and then such network assignments as being co-anchor on the primetime news magazine “America Tonight,” co-anchor of “CBS Morning News” and contributor to “CBS This Morning.” Nonetheless, King says it wasn’t until she moved to San Francisco and pushed to do foreign reporting that she had her first real “ah-hah” moment as a journalist. In November of 1998 she traveled with a TV crew to Honduras to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. “The devastation was overwhelming,” remembers King. “And the people that I encountered, their graciousness and faithfulness and tenacity really touched me and moved me. We were able to convey that in our stories.” As a result of King’s reporting, KPIX and the American Red Cross teamed up to open hot-lines to accept donations, which raised almost a million dollars. “We didn’t go there pitching to raise money that wasn’t it at all. It was just that this story touched people here. That was my ‘ah-hah’ moment, when I realized I could tell stories. More importantly, I could help people tell their stories.” In April of 2004 King traveled to Rwanda 10 years after the genocide in that country. In addition to her coverage earning her the Murrow award, her ability to tell the stories of survivors had surprising and positive results just like her Honduras coverage. “We met with this group of women called Abuhujamatima, rape survivors, who all have AIDS. They were raped by men who knew they had AIDS, so it was really just a continuation of the genocide,” says King. “When we came home, a woman saw this story and got her friends together and they decided, based on this story, to form an organization called Spark to raise money for women’s issues around the world, starting with the women of Abuhujamatima.” An initial fundraiser for Spark at a San Francisco art gallery (“packed with hip, motivated, well-paid, well-intentioned young people,” according to King) raised money that the group then took to Rwanda. With it, the Abuhujamatima bought a cow, seeds, tools and put one of their daughters through college. Since then, the group reports raising more than $100,000 for women’s organizations in Rwanda, Mexico, Bangladesh, Jordan, Kenya and San Francisco. Such responses bolster King’s claims that reports from places that seem far-flung hit close to home. “People say to me, ‘Why are you going to Rwanda that’s not local news.’ Well, it is local news,” says King. “If you look around the Bay area, there are people from everywhere. We have the largest Afghan population outside Afghanistan. Our world is really tiny, so local news is global news and global news is local news. It gives us all a chance to expand our journalistic boundaries. I’m really proud of that.” In addition to Honduras and Rwanda, King has reported for KPIX from El Salvador, Kosovo, Turkey, Afghanistan and Northern Iraq among others. Somewhere Out There King and Bastida are finishing up the 6 o’clock broadcast. Three large cameras that look disconcertingly like Star Wars robots outfitted with flat screen monitors and teleprompters move back and forth operated remotely from the control room. For a segment on environmental justice, one of the cameras swings away from the anchor desk to a smaller set where an investigative reporter details the burning of toxic emissions at an area refinery. Another camera performs another remotely controlled arabesque to focus on Roberta Gonzales, the weather anchor, in front of her green screen. This evening, in addition to stories about diet pills, vandalism and toxic emissions, there are reports on the fallout from the Duke University rape case, a captured alligator, sexual harassment in cyberspace, state budget troubles, the Iraq War, a local politician accused of taking bribes and free rides on a hybrid bus. King and her co-anchor report on it all with a delivery that is at once authoritative and intimate. Afterward, King talks over a problem about one of the teleprompters with an intern, asks Gonzales when she will leave to compete in an Iron Man triathalon in Switzerland and heads back to her office. King remembers an advertising professor of hers who suggested she start smaller, maybe in Chicago, before heading to New York or L.A. “I thought, if I’m going, I’m gone. I used to head up on Mulholland Drive. I didn’t have a job. I’d given all my money for my first and last month’s rent and security deposit. I used to sit up there at night when the view over the basin of Los Angeles is just incredible. All those lights. I would tell myself there was a job out there for me. I didn’t know what it would be, where it would be or when I would get it, but I told myself it was out there and not to give up. So here I am, all those years later.” In the station’s reception area looking out over the Bay Bridge is an old RCA model TK-11 camera that was used in the 1950s and early 60s. The boxy camera with its multiple lenses would have been run by an actual cameraman rather than being remotely controlled. With fewer technicians in the actual studio, a broadcast can seem oddly impersonal when seen live on the set. It’s the job of the news anchor not only to assure accuracy and context, but to exude a sense of personality and assurance. That’s the job that was waiting for King out there, and which she will perform with exactly that combination of authority and warmth tonight again at 11. |
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