Exit Strategy

Prague, Czech Republic

I was a junior in college and realized that if I was actually going to get into journalism I had best get started. I had been working at the college newspaper since my freshman year but now came the moment to actually start in earnest, you know, get a job. Through sheer good luck and incredible timing I managed to get an internship at KTRK-TV. And from that day to this it has been an unbroken string of ‘sheer good luck and incredible timing.

Now I am taking off in a new direction. After a remarkably head spinning four decades, I am taking a sabbatical from full time work and the wacky, too often fundamentally bizarre world of what is today’s journalism, Television news.

What an incredible ride. I used to joke that there are only a hundred people in TV news and how lucky am I that though so many stories I have met most of you. We started with videotape and typewriters. We are exiting, as a generation, and leaving the field to smartphones and MMJs. Sadly, they will never know the delight of television, the anxiety inducing joy of racing a tape to a feed point or using semaphore from a pay phone to cue a live shot. Or knowing you had about a minute to rip the wire, read the story, write the story, and get it on the air. They have missed the culinary delights of Mac and cheese cooked over an open grill in a parking lot at a national convention or the gourmet experience of granola bars, beef jerky and peanut butter sandwiches prepared in the back of van all while waiting for a hurricane. So.Many.Hurricanes.

But damn, we had fun.

And here I am, in Prague. Once the frontline in the Cold War world that was. TV has taken me from a legendary local newsroom to countless exotic locales around the world. From the lawn of the White House to the halls of Congress. Across the fields of Patagonia, down the highways of Latin America, learning to navigate the chaos of London or swimming in the crystalline waters of the Adriatic, enjoying tea in a smokey Bosnian café, tubing down the snow peaked mountains of Kyrgyzstan, or strolling the sidewalks in the artificial air of the Persian Gulf. I have bounced along the Russian rimmed roads in the Caucuses mountains of Georgia and plunged through the subterranean tunnels of Kyiv. All because I have had both a front row seat and a backstage pass to history, even if I sometimes had to laminate it myself.

But it is the the people we meet along the way that make the journey matter. The people we encounter, those who honor us by entrusting their stories in us. But most especially the colleagues and coworkers who become friends and confidantes. The people who helped you develop your talents and drove you to hone your skills. The people who understand because they too have worked 72 hours straight on a story. They have also stood hip deep in mud and debris and bore witness to the devastation of a community forever transformed by tragedy as we tried to capture it for an audience that stuck around to watch after Jeopardy was over, or were waiting for Carson, Letterman, Leno or Kimmel to come on. What it is like to be on stakeout that seemed to last forever or a certain murder trial that seemed to last even longer…but you had to be there, just in case.

So many stories.

And on my own journey, beyond news there have documentaries, insightful films that took me on a rare trek to otherwise hidden moments and unrevealed stories that show our profound capacity to surprise each other. The brave sharing their story in hopes of making their world just that much better.

Building television channels across Eastern Europe and working with journalists in places that were once not countries. How incredibly lucky am I? I have been welcomed by so many and somewhere in a TV studio in Bishkek hangs a photocopy of me showing the best visual format for a studio interview.

Those among us who have shared our collective experience with those who follow, that is a gift and one from which I have been a grateful beneficiary. Thank you.

I am not the first this year to exit the playing field. Heck, I am not even the first this month! So many of my contemporaries have also happily taken on the next chapter. I am looking forward to joining you in exploring what comes next.