September 2021 marked two years since I ended my 11-year career at CNN Digital and started a new chapter as a field producer with Court TV. Gotta be honest, it’s been a fairly solitary journey, but not in a wholly sad way! Read on…
The pandemic hit six months after I started, but my team didn’t work from home for long. By June 2020, as Covid restrictions bent to due process, we were back on the road and finding our way into courthouses. Often, that meant squeezing into makeshift overflow rooms in closets, offices, even holding cells.
At Derek Chauvin’s trial, journalists were relegated to a conference center auditorium across the street from the courthouse where we sat alone at tables six feet apart. Other times, it was just me and my team in a Covid-restricted courtroom with trial participants. It was a surreal experience that heightened the sense of importance of our roles as witnesses to history. It continues today, although we’re slowly getting back into more courtrooms.
There were parts of traveling during the pandemic that I enjoyed. Roads were free of traffic. Planes were the cleanest I’d ever seen them. There were no lines at the airport. Walking the empty streets of big cities and small towns was eerie but sort of cool in a last-person-on-earth kind of way. In places where indoor dining was still a thing, I often had entire bars and restaurants to myself. I had my first bubble dining experience in snow-covered Green Bay outside the bright lights of Lambeau Field. It was magical, something I never thought I’d say in remote proximity to sports!
In other words, we still had a job to do and I didn’t do that part alone. I’m grateful to the visual storytellers and broadcast veterans who essentially helped this writer learn television — the correspondents, engineers and photojournalists who stood by me in the Covid trenches, and the producers and editors back in Atlanta who patiently walked me through ISOs, packages, fiber, TVUs, ifbs, sots, VOs and donuts. I’m a better journalist, collaborator and leader thanks to y’all.
