The Light Within Me

by Ainsley Earhardt

  Since I was on track to graduate in December, I thought that gave me a leg up on those who graduated in May in terms of finding a job. I really wanted to work in a big market in the Northeast, a place like New York, but I knew I would have to start off at a smaller station and make my mistakes before heading to Manhattan. I planned to put together a résumé tape with multiple on-camera reports, make copies, then send it out to news directors at television stations across the country around the first of the year. One of my professors, though, had other ideas.

  Right before the Thanksgiving break, Dr. Sonya Duhé asked me where I was planning on applying for on-air positions. I explained that I was going to search outside of South Carolina. She shook her head. “You need to go visit news directors at local stations, and you need to do it during the Thanksgiving break.”

  Now I was the one shaking my head. “Dr. Duhé, I don’t want to stay in South Carolina. I’ve lived here my entire life. I want to go somewhere else.” Deep down I still had dreams of living in New York or California.

  “You don’t have a choice,” she replied. “I’m your professor and I’m telling you to do this!”

  I did as I was told. I sent résumé tapes to news directors in Savannah, Charleston, and Columbia. Although Savannah is in Georgia, not South Carolina, it is just across the border and the station had an excellent reputation. After sending out the tapes I called all the stations and asked if I could stop by and get some advice. I didn’t want to ask, “Will you hire me?” over the phone. I thought I had a better shot if they saw my drive and enthusiasm face-to-face. Most of the news directors invited me to come in for a talk. My boyfriend and I borrowed my mom’s car and visited each station.

  My professor was right. Going around to all the local stations worked. I received a job offer from the Charleston station where I’d completed an internship the summer before. Another Charleston station offered me a job with the stipulation that it was technically part-time. The station manager explained that I would work nearly forty hours a week, but he needed me to be a part-time employee so he didn’t have to pay my health insurance. The Savannah station was also interested in me. The news director told me he was trying to put together an offer for me but he wasn’t sure when he could actually do it. He even called Dr. Duhé and told her that he definitely planned on hiring me.

  The response from the news director at the Columbia station, Larry Audas, wasn’t nearly as encouraging. When I called to try to set up an appointment with him, all he said was, “Go get two years of experience and then call me.” It looked like I was going to have to choose between Charleston or Savannah, both beautiful cities, both wonderful places to live, but both small markets in terms of television news.

  A week after the Thanksgiving break, Dr. Duhé called Larry Audas and invited him to come to the university to critique our four o’clock live news broadcast. There were probably fifteen to twenty of us in the class and we each had different responsibilities during the newscast. As soon as it was over, Larry pulled me and another girl aside and said he wanted to interview us for his station. I nearly laughed. The man who told me to go get two years of experience was now asking me to come in for an interview. WLTX News-19 was a middle-size market. If I got the offer, I knew it would be a great opportunity and something I probably couldn’t turn down.

  I was a nervous wreck leading up to my interview. I sought all the advice and encouragement I could get. My then boyfriend drove me to the appointment. As I got out of the car he looked at me and said, “I hope you know, they need you as much as you need them.” That boost of confidence really helped me. I never forgot that advice. I never thought I was perfect, but I needed to be reminded that I too had something to offer: my work ethic, my positive attitude, and my drive.

  Larry Audas, bless his heart, offered me the job that day. He gave me a shot. That meant I had three offers and I needed to make a decision. My professors said there were four factors that I needed to pay attention to: the company, the position, the market size, and the pay. The company is important because not all media companies are created equal and some large corporations like Gannett and Cox own stations across the country. That makes jobs at such stations appealing because you can move to a larger market while remaining with the same company and keep the same benefits and 401(k). The market size is determined by the number of people who can turn on their TVs and watch that station. New York is the largest and, at last check, Glendive, Montana, was the smallest. The larger the market, the more visibility you receive, which can open doors to move to even larger markets or to a national news program.

  The pay, the last factor, was similar between the two full-time offers, although each had different benefits. When I weighed each job offer, the best fit seemed to be in Columbia, my hometown. The company, Gannett, was large, well-known, and owned stations all over the country; the market size was better than the other two offers (Columbia is number seventy-nine in market size, Charleston’s is ninety-nine, and Savannah is ninety-six at last check); and the schedule was unbelievable for a young, college graduate. Larry asked me to report for the late-night newscast at eleven, Sundays through Thursdays, which meant I had Fridays and Saturdays off. The pay was also a little better than the others. I made $24,000 my first year with the promise of a thousand-dollar pay raise each year. At the time I was working as a waitress at Za’s Pizza, making a lot less. I was excited to finally get a salary.

  A few days after my last interview I called Larry Audas to accept his offer. He brought my contract over for me to sign that night while I was working at the pizza place. I still have the photograph of me dressed in my waitress outfit, signing my very first contract at the bar at Za’s Pizza. I have taken a picture of me signing every contract since. That day, at Za’s, I was overjoyed. I was now officially a reporter for WLTX in my hometown, this was my first real job, and I finally had a salary. I could not wait to get started.

  I WAS UNDERSTANDABLY nervous on my first day on the job. When I arrived Larry showed me around the office and introduced me to all my new coworkers. Everyone was polite and made me feel welcome. After this, Larry showed me my cubicle, where I would work and write my scripts. Then he escorted me into the storage closet, which was filled with pens, stacks of paper, memo pads, sticky notes, highlighters, calendars, and every other office supply imaginable.

  “Take whatever you want,” he said.

  Now, office supplies might seem ordinary to most people, but my eyes lit up. I was in heaven. When I was a little girl I loved shopping for school supplies or crafts. I had an art table in my room for all of my creative projects. In seventh grade I spent hours at that table making earrings out of watercolor paper, paints, and hot glue and sold them at school, at Dr. Boyd’s office, and at various boutiques at the beach. My company was called Ainsley’s Art, which was written out in gold paint on the top of each card that held two earrings. I displayed them in a thick, heavy, white Christmas-present box I found in my parents’ attic, and sold the most at school. My teachers loved them. This was the late eighties and watercolor, paper earrings were very popular. The moment I walked into the WLTX storage closet and was told to take whatever I wanted, I felt like that twelve-year-old girl in a craft store all over again.

  The first story I ever covered was a ride-along with the local sheriff’s department. The officers gave me and the cameraman bulletproof vests, which was both frightening and exciting. We rode through the streets of a neighborhood known for crime near Williams-Brice Stadium. We immediately saw something suspicious. The cameras were rolling as the deputies chased after a man who was allegedly caught in a drug bust. The officers finally caught up with the suspect and tackled him to the ground. I had to watch the whole thing from the car because the officers said it was too dangerous, but my heart was pounding. I saw it all. They didn’t bring the suspect straight back to the car, however. When the deputies came back I asked one, “What’s going on?”

  “We’re gonna have to take this suspect to t
he hospital,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is he hurt?”

  “No. We’re going to have to do a body-cavity search,” he replied.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “He hid the drugs up his rear end,” the deputy said. “Happens all the time.”

  When I did the news report that night I did not mention where the drugs ended up. That’s too much information for most viewers. But I did call my mom and told her, “Mom, I went on this drug bust and you will never guess what this guy did with the drugs!” My first day was over and it was thrilling. I enjoyed knowing everything that really went on, not just what the public hears. I knew I’d picked the right profession.

  Not every day was as enlightening. One day a report came across the police radio that the Summit neighborhood was on lockdown because an old hand grenade had been discovered in the ground. Everyone in the neighborhood was on edge, wondering if more were going to be found. Police warned residents not to pull the pins if they found any. My boss told me to go into the neighborhood and cover the story. Before I left the station I contacted the police and got as much information as possible. Then we headed out. Ideally, in situations like this, I might find someone in the neighborhood willing to talk on-camera.

  When we pulled into the area no one was outside. If I was going to get an interview I would have to find someone the only way I knew how. I started knocking on people’s doors hoping to get a resident’s perspective. I walked up on a porch and saw a chow dog tied to a rocking chair. That made me think the owners were home. When I got near the glass storm door I saw a woman inside. As soon as I knocked the chow lunged toward me. I jumped back and reminded myself that he was tied to the chair. But that didn’t stop the dog. He took off after me, dragging the rocking chair behind him. I leaped off the porch and ran out into the yard, the dog and rocking chair right behind me. The dog managed to take a bite out of me before I jumped back into the car.

  Back at the station, I cleaned and bandaged the wound and returned to the story. I was supposed to interview a man named Tom who worked for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. Tom immediately noticed I was a little out of sorts. “How are you doing?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m a little shaken up because I was just bitten by a dog,” I said.

  “What?” he replied.

  “A dog bit me when I tried to get some interviews for the grenade story. I still can’t believe it.”

  “Where is the dog?” he asked.

  “I’m guessing back on the front porch with its rocking chair out in the Summit neighborhood,” I said.

  Tom said, “Ainsley, I’m afraid you told the wrong person. I’m going to have to have that dog put in quarantine. State law. Anytime a dog bites somebody it is put into quarantine for a period of time to make sure it doesn’t have rabies.”

  I’m sure the lady who wouldn’t answer her door hated me after that. The dog didn’t have rabies, thank goodness. From then on, I always checked porches for dogs before knocking on doors.

  That dog wasn’t the only dangerous animal I came across in my early news stories. One day my news director told me to go check out a report that a woman’s pet tiger had gotten out of its cage and was spotted walking down the street. The tiger’s owner agreed to do an on-camera interview to tell her side of the story. I didn’t hesitate. My cameraman and I went straight to the woman’s house. She seemed eager to talk. After telling us how her tiger was a great cat, which she had raised from a cub, and how he wouldn’t hurt anyone, she asked, “Would you like to meet him?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The next thing I knew I was inside a cage with a full-grown tiger! Never in a million years would I do that today, but at the time I didn’t hesitate. My boss told me to get the story and I was determined to make it unforgettable. The woman entered the cage and I followed. She kept talking about how the tiger was just an oversized house cat. Even when he came over close to me she said something like, “Oh, he just wants to play.” I bent down to get a better look at this exquisite, strong animal and the tiger playfully locked my arm in his jaws. It was a light bite and barely broke the skin, but he definitely got my attention. I was young, invincible, and willing to go the distance to get a story, but I was also ready to tell the woman’s overgrown house cat good-bye.

  WHEN I STARTED at WLTX I reported for the eleven o’clock news, which meant I didn’t have to go in to work until three in the afternoon. It was a great schedule for many reasons. The night owl that I am loved staying up late and having my mornings to sleep in or just take care of personal business. Most nights I got off work between midnight and one. I had moved back in with my parents to save money and instead of going straight home, I usually stopped by my boyfriend’s apartment to talk or wind down after a long day. His apartment was very close to my parents’ home. He moved there to be closer to me even though it was about fifteen minutes away from the downtown university area.

  For most college graduates, moving back in with mom and dad is great financially, but it’s hard to live under their rules again. This was the case for me. For one thing, our schedules didn’t mesh very well. My dad still came into my room in the morning, threw open the shutters, and announced, “If I’m up, you’re up,” like he did when I was a little girl. For a twenty-two-year-old college graduate who didn’t get home from work until the middle of the night, being awakened by her father whenever he got up had lost its charm.

  That wasn’t the only difficulty of living at home. My parents stayed up to watch my reports on the news every night and were brutally honest about my appearance. More than once my mom or dad said something like, “That color you wore last night, that’s not your best color. You should wear pink tomorrow.” They also didn’t hold back on commenting about my hair. They have always liked it on the shorter side. As a parent, I know they only want to be helpful, but the critiques didn’t exactly thrill me. It was just time for me to move out and be on my own. Once I left for college, I spent very little time actually living in my parents’ house. I had a couple of internships where I lived away from home and, as I mentioned before, I spent one summer living with my grandparents and one working as a waitress in Nantucket. I got used to my independence. My mom and dad wanted me to be self-sufficient. That’s how they raised me. They wanted me to be able to make it on my own. When I asked if I could move back home for a while, they of course said yes, but I think they needed their space as much as I needed mine. I pretty quickly moved into an apartment with a friend from church and our other two closest friends lived directly across the hall from us.

  Making it on my own proved to have a big learning curve. My initial salary sounded like plenty of money to a college student but I soon found out one of the hard realities of life as an adult: money doesn’t go nearly as far as you think. Between paying rent, buying groceries and gas and clothes for work, I was barely getting by. I shopped sales and saved as much as I could but money was still tight. Some days I pulled up to the gas pump and put only $4.60 in my tank because that’s all the money I had in the ashtray of my car, and half of that was change. More than once I had to call my mom and ask if she could float me a hundred-dollar loan to get me by until my next paycheck. I usually called after I bounced a check. Part of the money went to cover the bank’s fees. I remember staring at my pay stub and shaking my head at the amount that had been deducted for taxes. If they’d just taken half that amount I wouldn’t have had to ask my parents for any money, I thought. I’d worked all the way through college, so I knew all about state taxes, federal income tax, and Social Security. Now that I was making more money, the amount the government took seemed huge.

  In spite of the struggles, I loved what I did. I was learning so much about the ins and outs of being a reporter. When you watch the news you see a reporter do a story that lasts a minute and a half or two minutes. What you do not see is how it took that reporter all day to produce those two minutes on air.

&
nbsp; My days started with a meeting of the entire news team. We talked about what we wanted to cover that day. When news breaks, you obviously cover it, but a lot of the stories we discussed had been in the news for days. We discussed ways of going deeper and expanding the story with new information. That’s why it’s called the news. We want to give the viewers new information to keep them informed.

  During our team meetings, we sat around a table and everyone pitched ideas. The news director then handed out assignments. He might tell me to go cover the escaped convict who was holed up in a nearby neighborhood or a local political controversy. I would immediately get on the phone and start researching the story and asking for on-camera interviews. If I could get one, two, or even three interviews lined up, I was good to go. My camera person and I then hit the ground running, crisscrossing the county trying hard to get our interviews and shoot the story quickly. The deadline was always looming. There was little time to even stop for lunch. We had to shoot our story, known in the business as a “package,” and get back to the station to write the script and start editing. If I was assigned a story about politics, I raced to the statehouse, interviewed legislators, or anyone who was relevant to the story. I always carried legal pads to jot down notes since most people are camera-shy but are happy to give you all the details you want off-camera.

  Once we got enough interviews and video, we went back to the station and I watched all of my interviews and wrote down everything the interviewees said. This took forever. I then sat down at my computer, wrote my script, and included sound bites from the interviews. Finally I was recorded reading my script and the editor edited his or her video over my voice recordings. For instance, if I was talking about a tax increase, the photographer added photos of people spending money.

  I had to put my packages together quickly every day. The rule in journalism is: get your story on the air! My bosses didn’t care if my equipment malfunctioned or if I had a hard time lining up interviews. In the newsroom you didn’t complain. You just did as you were told and made your deadline. That left me always pressed for time. Meals had to be quick. Most days I only had time to swing by the Papa John’s a block from the station for some breadsticks (with extra marinara sauce and no butter). I pretty much lived on this meal every day, but I didn’t care. I was having so much fun trying to meet the challenge of hitting my deadlines.