Broadcaster Lugged Cameras, Waited Tables
It’s easy to assume that TV broadcast personalities are divas who waltz onto the scene with an entourage of cameramen and assistants in tow — but that’s not how it works when you’re starting out in the business.
Kara Sundlun, news anchor and host of WFSB’s Better Connecticut, was once a one-woman operation, working as on-air talent, scriptwriter, camerawoman and more in Charlottesville, Va., one of CBS’s smallest affiliates.
The 5’3’’ Sundlun would lug her own equipment out to the scene of stories, eliciting concern from gentlemanly Southerners, but the young reporter politely refused help. She wanted to run on her own steam.
Sundlun had long known that she wanted to be a broadcast journalist, but she also knew the industry required hard work and low pay to start with. The Virginia job was tough, but Sundlun had experience with such grunt work.
Not So Glamorous
She’d worked a number of unpaid internships in college, and while she made it to exciting locales like CNN and the White House, the work sometimes wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded.
It was the summer of 1995, and Sundlun was interning in the U.S. Office of Public Liaison, directly working for the woman who was then in charge of representing President Bill Clinton to the “business community” in general. It’s a big job, but Sundlun said the business liaison did all her work with only one staff member and the intern — Sundlun, in this case.
Her previous job experience was also mostly grunt work, minus the famous locations. Her first regular employment came at age 14, when she was a hair-washer for a salon. Not a bad gig, she said: Mostly, she washed the hair of older ladies who’d come in for weekly haircuts.
“There was a bit of hairspray to get through,” Sundlun said, and the best thing about it was that everyone was in a good mood when they came to the beauty salon. “The most [complaints] I ever heard were, ‘scrub harder,’” she said.
Lessons Learned
Restaurant patrons aren’t always guaranteed to be so good-natured. Sundlun, who worked as a waitress and hostess at a number of places, remembers customers who’d get irate at a Newport, R.I. restaurant’s “no tank tops” dress code rule, or other customers’ moods going sour if their meal didn’t go as planned.
But waitressing taught her how to interact with people — a skill she that came in handy for her job in broadcasting, where she has to relate to her subjects, be they media-savvy politicians or homemakers who’ve never been interviewed in their lives.
Her waitressing days also left her with a compulsion to tip well, and an ability to balance large, heavy trays on one hand.
As for her worst job, Sundlun points the finger at OfficeMax. For a summer in high school, she worked in the receiving department, pricing items before they went out to the floor. She remembers spending three days taking a pricing gun to thousands of folders.
“The monotony really got to me,” Sunlun said. “I knew that there had to be something better in life than this.”
Sundlun said broadcasting is about racing against deadlines — beating the clock, instead of watching it.
After her stint in Virginia, she went up to a bigger market in Indiana, and eventually to Connecticut, where she’s been at WFSB for eight years.
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