On TV: Times are changing, so Chen changes too

Being a recognizable television personality never held much magic for Christine Chen. Coming from a person who spent 16 years as a broadcast journalist, that idea may be hard to believe.

To explain why she stayed in local news for as long as she did, Chen recalls a TV station news internship in San Francisco. It was the second semester of her senior year at University of California, Berkeley in 1990, and she was considering a career in advertising or communications. But something hit her as she watched the producers and reporters yelling at each other in preparation for the newscast.

"I had this visceral reaction that these people knew the information first, and they were learning about their world the fastest," she said. "That was what was exciting to me, the idea that this information was flowing through these gatekeepers to the masses."

From that moment on, Chen badly wanted to become one of those gatekeepers. Her career path took her to Great Falls, Mont., and on to Portland before she arrived at KSTW in 1995.

Jumping ahead 11 years -- almost eight of those spent as a reporter and anchor for KCPQ/13's morning and evening newscasts -- local news no longer has the impact it used to. Overall viewership is declining in every market. People aren't compelled to get their news on a station's schedule when the latest information can be found on updated Web sites or sent to wireless devices.

Chen knew this technological transformation was in the works for years. Only now did she decide to change along with it.

She signed off her co-anchor slot beside Mark Wright for the last time on Nov. 29, but don't look for her to pop up behind another local station's desk. When she left KCPQ, she closed the book on her local news career.

Chen's new plan is to specialize in marketing and communications consulting, helping whichever company she decides to sign on with formulate its media strategy. Not ready to name names, she will say only that she has enjoyed attention from multiple fronts.

"I just want to do something new and move into it, because I always kind of regretted not getting out of TV and doing dot-com in '99 or 2000," she explained. "... Now, I'm just like, it's time. I let that pass me by once, and ... I don't want to miss that one more time."

Sounds reasonable -- but the average person might be thinking, come on. Chen enjoyed a great deal of success in television. During her time at KCPQ, she helped create, launch and co-anchor the morning news program, which premiered in January 2000. She took over for Leslie Miller at 10 o'clock in June 2004.

Chen, 38, also is an eight-time Northwest Emmy award nominee, winning twice. She won her first statue as a reporter at KSTW and received one of those nominations for co-anchoring KSTW's final newscast in December 1998. The second win came in 2002, in part for her coverage on the morning of 9/11. Chen also was named to the Puget Sound Business Journal's "40 under 40" list in 2004, a designation sure to serve her well as she joins the business world.

Yet Chen knows how ludicrous it must sound for an anchor in a top-20 market to voluntarily leave the chair so early in her career. Reporters across the country would claw their competition's eyes out for a shot at what she had.

Then again, this is a woman who, as a 25-year-old well on her way to becoming a national correspondent for CBS, decided the rigorous demands of network news weren't right for her life.

What interested her was the cutting-edge technology that went into creating a newscast back in the early '90s -- technology, she notes, that has been superseded by the instantaneous and niche-targeted nature of the Internet. Stiff entertainment programming on competing networks, and Fox's woeful absence of prime-time lead-in support at 9 p.m., also didn't help KCPQ's evening news situation.

"You think about all the choices that are out there, and you're asking a lot to have somebody join you for an hour, for the 10 o'clock hour, for stuff if it's not relevant to their lives," Chen said. "So, really, there's a huge challenge for all of local news to be more relevant. Except for the weather, you have so many people interested in different things and who want different things for their lives, that the idea of mass media, as I studied it back in college in the late '80s ... there's no such thing as 'mass' any more.

"Mass media is just dead, I think, as we know it," she added. "How do you produce content for the masses when everything is so customized and specialized now?"

Chen is quick to add that she has faith in her former co-workers at Q13, and believes they'll continue to do a great job.

However, "If you can make a choice that's better for your life, why not?"

"It's been great to be in (the news) business," she continued. "You get to see a lot of things that other people don't get to see. You get to talk to a lot of people that other people don't get to talk to. You just have rich experiences. But those are also balanced with some other things that aren't so exciting or positive."

Working on major holidays, for example. "Everybody has to sacrifice a lot for their jobs, ... but I think people ... take for granted that they can watch a newscast on Thanksgiving night, and they don't put it together that somebody has to do it."

There were more important factors, too: Her mother is battling lung cancer, and the demands of her position made it difficult for Chen to get back to the Bay Area to take care of her.

"My mom has been sick twice, and I feel like that was two wake-up calls that I got," she said. "Two wake-up calls to say get a more flexible kind of lifestyle (in case) this happens again."

And, after being single for more than a decade, Chen finally found a long-term relationship -- a Herculean feat in this town -- and wants to have enough time to nurture it.

"So it's not just professional," Chen said. "It's just that I want a different life, and I think that's totally reasonable. Other people do it, too."

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