‘Given a second chance’: ABC11’s Tisha Powell on why she’s leaving the news business
For longtime ABC11 anchor Tisha Powell, the decision to leave the station — and the news business entirely — came down to one factor: family.
Powell, who arrived at WTVD in 2004 and started anchoring duties right away, announced at the end of April that she is leaving journalism. Her last day at the station is Wednesday, June 30.
She and her husband, Dr. James Wayne, are moving back to their native Louisiana, along with their 7-year-old daughter, Eva. The couple also has a daughter, Nina, who is a freshman at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In 2020, during a period when Powell spent weeks working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that she — and her family — needed a change.
“I’ve been working nights for about 15 years,” Powell said in an interview with The News & Observer. “Being at home and being able to spend time with my children ... having that experience really opened my eyes to what I was missing. I decided at that point that I was probably going to have to make a change.”
Powell said that as the demands of digital news and online updates have increased, the job has required more of her time.
“I started seeing less and less of my family,” Powell said. “I feel like with Eva, my 7 year old, I have an opportunity to have a lot of experiences that I missed with my older daughter over the last 15 years while working nights.
“I’ve been given a second chance,” she said.
Going home to Louisiana
The change feels more pressing for Powell now, she said, because the pandemic also reminded her of what they are missing by being so far from their family in Louisiana.
She and her husband always knew they would go back home eventually, she said, but they didn’t know when.
“How I felt about being so far from home and my family changed, and all of this evolved during the last year,” she said.
Reflecting on all of the missed weddings, birthdays, baby showers and funerals — the pandemic made them realize they didn’t want to miss more of that.
“My mom passed away in 2019 of heart failure, and I feel like I didn’t make it home in time to spend those last moments with her,” Powell said. “I was traveling back and forth, and it was really hard.”
Plus, over the past year, Powell’s father-in-law has had health problems, and they know it’s important to be closer to him now.
“We started to realize how fragile life can be with COVID and the variants,” Powell said. “The pandemic showed a lot of families, I believe, how close they came to losing people, specifically the elderly. ... There is a lot of reassessing going on for a lot of families over the past year.
“If we have do to this again we’ll be in Louisiana, a lot closer to family — so we can at least drive by.”
Powell’s husband is retiring from the military but will continue to work as a full-time physician. He already has a job with Ochsner Health, and the family will live in the same parish where he was born.
Being there will also give their youngest daughter a chance to grow up surrounded by a large extended family.
“Now we feel like, OK, we have this young child who is 7 years old who doesn’t really know her grandparents all that well, and we want her to have the same experience that we had growing up with our family around,” Powell said.
“We both grew up with our aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents within driving distance. We saw them on holidays, we saw them on birthdays. We want our child to have that same experience.”
The job is hard for women, even harder for moms
On top of everything else — wanting more hours at home with her daughter and the craving for closer proximity to family in Louisiana — Powell is worn out.
“The biggest impact in my decision to step away from this job is the fact that I’m exhausted,” Powell said.
“I am physically exhausted. I get home after midnight, I get up early to take care of my daughter and take her to school. I get maybe about five hours of sleep. And doing that year after year after year, it wears you out, and the morning show people can tell you that, too — working mornings and working nights.”
Finding the right balance of career and family time is a problem that mothers with careers outside the home have grappled with for ages. And while many woman have hit on a formula that works for them and their family, some jobs — like TV news — can make it extra complicated.
That’s the point journalist Julianna Goldman makes in her 2018 piece for The Atlantic called “It’s Almost Impossible to Be a Woman in TV News.”
Goldman, a former CBS News reporter, cited studies by Scott Reinardy, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas, who found that burnout rates in newsrooms are higher for women, who are often put in the position of choosing between careers and families. In fact, Reinardy told Goldman that he found “many in the younger generation of aspiring and current female journalists see the profession as a short-term career.”
Goldman noted the inherent biases in the business that can work against women (including the requirement to maintain a certain appearance), and also the high demands of the job that compound the pressures for women with children: not just the long hours, but the requirement to be available on a moment’s notice to leave home to cover a story.
It’s a trend that has been playing out on the local level for a few years now.
Late last year, WRAL and Fox 50 evening anchor Kathryn Brown left the TV news business after time working from home during the pandemic made her realize how much she was missing her young children.
Brown told The News & Observer before her departure that the demands of her schedule meant she didn’t see her children much during the week.
“I had a real reckoning with myself that, I can’t wake up in the morning, put my kids on the bus, kiss them goodbye on Monday, and then see them on Saturday,” Brown said at the time. “And the schedule that I work, that’s what it would amount to.”
Brown had come to WRAL in 2014 as a reporter and weekend anchor, and then replaced the station’s weekday evening anchor Lynda Loveland in December 2017, when Loveland left the news business. The reason Loveland left? She took a public relations job with a schedule that allowed her more time with her children.
“It’s a job I love, working with people I love, but right now I need and want to be home with my family more,” Loveland wrote in a social media post in 2017.
Loveland is the public policy director at N.C. Farm Bureau. Brown now works as the public relations director at INE, a Cary firm that provides technical training in the IT industry.
During our interview, Powell mentioned both women, and said she relates to the decisions they made.
“It’s hard to take care of yourself and other people and your family and run a household and do this job at the same time,” Powell said.
Powell said her husband, a career military officer and physician, kept things on track at home, starting with their oldest daughter.
“My husband is such a trouper,” Powell said. “No pun intended, but he’s a soldier. He has stepped in and raised our daughters at night when I wasn’t there. He’s made dinner and done laundry and done hair and put our kids to bed, and sometimes even taken our kids to school in the morning if I needed to get some extra sleep.”
Powell adds that the high price of sleeping in would be that she didn’t get to see her kids that day.
She acknowledges the harsh reality that on top of the demands of motherhood, women in television news have the added disadvantage of aging. There’s always pressure to keep up one’s looks to sustain the career.
But, Powell says her decision to change careers isn’t about that.
“This is more about my daughter’s age than mine,” Powell said.
“It does cross our minds as women. There aren’t as many older women on television as you see older men. So it does cross my mind — but it wasn’t a major factor in the decision as much as being a mother is.
“Because I thought, to be perfectly honest, I could probably have stayed in this position for as long as I wanted to.”
After 17 years at the the station, Powell is clear that she has never felt that her job at ABC11 was in any jeopardy, and says she has always felt valued there — especially after being given the opportunity to co-anchor with local news icon Larry Stogner, who passed away in 2016.
“I was never given the impression that I had an expiration date with the station,” she said. “I always felt that the job was mine for as long as I wanted it, and that my connection with the community was valuable to the station — that it was something they were always going to nurture and consider beneficial to the station as a whole.”
ABC11 president and general manager Rob Elmore told The News & Observer that the station is grateful to have had Powell on their team. The station is running special segments this week looking back on Powell’s time there, and Wednesday’s 6 p.m. newscast will include a special sendoff.
“Tisha is an exemplary team member, a wonderful representative for ABC11 in the community and exactly the person we knew we needed when we recruited her back in 2004,” Elmore said.
“As difficult as it is to say goodbye, we support Tisha’s heartfelt decision to step away, and we are extremely grateful for all of the years we’ve had together in service to our audience and our community.”
Two worlds tied together
As the clock ticks down on her last days at the station, Powell is reflecting on the moments that had the biggest impact on her journalism career.
At the top of the list: Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005.
“I remember sitting at my desk watching the flooding, watching the people wading through the water, and Rob Elmore, who was news director at the time, stood over me and said ‘Would you like to go home?’ And I looked up at him and said ‘Absolutely.’”
Powell recounts the logistical nightmare of covering the devastation following Katrina: she and photographer Dave Anderson set off in an RV and camped well outside of New Orleans, because there was nowhere else to stay, living off of water and granola bars. Each day they had to figure out where they’d get gas, how to get in and out of the city, and if they had enough gas to get back to the campground that night.
Plus, there was the emotional stress of seeing a city she loved — one she had lived and worked in for a number of years — absolutely devastated.
“You would think that I would feel safe and comfortable here in North Carolina, away from the tragedy that was taking place in my home state,” Powell said. “But I just felt the pull to be there covering that story. It allowed me to connect with the viewers in North Carolina by showing them where I came from and what was going on there, and to be able to do that as a journalist for them was pretty special to me. It sort of tied my worlds together.”
That connection to viewers, coming roughly a year or so after she first arrived at WTVD, is something that has lasted throughout her time there.
When asked to describe what it’s been like hearing from viewers since she announced her pending departure on April 29, Powell says: “Heartbreak.” (ABC11’s chief meteorologist Chris Hohmann announced his retirement on the same day.)
“It’s been sad, I’m not gonna lie,” Powell said. “I feel like people are losing a member of their family because that’s how they’ve made me feel over the last 17 years. I could not imagine the connection that I was going to build with the viewers over the years.”
Powell hopes that the connection will survive somewhat, thanks to social media, and that viewers and local friends will continue to keep up with her and her family during her next chapter.
And what’s the plan for that next chapter?
“My plan is to figure out what I’m going to do,” Powell said.
[Update: July 27, 2021: Tisha Powell takes anchor job at WAFB in Baton Rouge]
A big part of figuring that out started a year and a half ago, when Powell began working remotely on a Leadership and Communications Masters of Science degree at Purdue. She has worked on it throughout the pandemic and is more than halfway to the finish line.
“I was thinking sometime in the future I was going to transition into something else, and I just wanted to set myself up for whatever that may be,” Powell said.
She enjoyed her time reporting on health issues at ABC11, she said, and appreciated the assistance she received from media relations people at local hospitals, so maybe something in that field.
“In my mind I thought, ‘I will probably do something like that,’” Powell said. “And I know you don’t necessarily need additional education for it, but my mom had a masters and I always wanted to go back to school, and I thought if I don’t do this now I’m never going to do it.”
The new job — whatever it ends up being — doesn’t seem to matter to Powell as much as where that job will be: home.
“I wanted to go home, no matter what,” Powell said.
This story was originally published June 29, 2021 at 12:35 PM with the headline "‘Given a second chance’: ABC11’s Tisha Powell on why she’s leaving the news business."
