Interview: Nelson Has Comm Experience Into Career

Candice Nelson began her reporting career at WSLS-10, the NBC affiliate in Roanoke, with an internship that stretched over the course of three years.

Nelson has covered stories ranging from forest fires to following police through the woods looking for a potential murder. However, the story that has had the biggest effect on Nelson was the recent shooting of David Lee Letzler and Heidi Lynn Child. Nelson said, “I remember coming in the weekend it happened and I just sat at my desk and cried..."

In a recent interview with Planet Blacksburg, Nelson discussed her experiences working at WSLS 10 and gives advise for anyone looking to go into the media industry. What follows is a selection of question and answers from that recent interview with Planet Blacksburg.

Q: What inspired you to want to go into reporting?

Nelson: I think it probably started when I was in fourth grade because they would have the 4H public speaking competitions and I got interested in the public speaking part of it. I became interested in reporting through that. Then In high school I took a TV production class, and they would have us go out and do packages. So I did that in high school and then when I got to college, I didn’t really have a lot of experience working for a newspaper so I started working for the Colligate Times and then became interested in VTTV. I then took an E.N.G [Electronic News Gathering] class and that was the class that we did a newscast every week and fortunately I liked it enough to keep going.

Q: Did you have any reporters/anchors you looked up to as a kid?

Nelson: I really just looked up to the local anchors that were in my area because you could watch them every night and see them doing stuff every night in my community. People like John Carlin and Karen McNew are some of them that I looked up to and now I am working with them, of course John already retired.

Q: What about them did you admire?

Nelson: I think just that their integrity, as journalist, is admirable. Also, Katie Couric is one I looked up to. She went to UVA and I wanted to go to UVA because of her but they didn’t have a communication department and so my senior year of high school I applied to UVA and VT, and I just loved the campus at Tech so much that I turned down UVA and came here instead.

Q: I read on your website you like baton twirling. What made you get into that and are you still doing that today?

Nelson: Oh no not anymore. I started out as a dancer when I was three-years-old. It just happened that they had baton twirling so I got into that. I did it for the Marching Virginians here at Tech. I competed starting when I was 12 and did it up until my freshman year. But no I don’t do it anymore; there really is no other place to do it. I wish I could still do it somehow. I still have the baton in my living room and will walk around and do it.

Q: What other activities do you like to do?

Nelson: I love to read. I am one of those people that can go into Barnes and Noble and stay there for two hours just reading. Of course I love movies. I am not much of an exerciser and in fact I hate exercising. I am trying to get intro running and I just started it last week, so we will see how that goes.

Q: So you were in VTTV and Colligate Times, how involved were you in them and what did you do?

Nelson: I was not as involved in the Colligate Times as I was VTTV. I worked with Colligate time, either my sophomore or junior year, and I think I wrote about five or six stories. I was trying to get an internship at a local newspaper in Martinsville, so that’s what I was trying to do was get my foot in the door. And I got that internship. VTTV I went from freshman to junior year, I did Tech Tonight, the newscast, and I did some anchoring and reporting there. Senior year I stopped doing VTTV and did the ENG class at Virginia Tech and that took a lot of time.

Q: What did college not prepare you for in your industry?

Nelson: It did not prepare me for, and this is something I will tell anyone, how to make contacts in the industry. That’s a huge deal and probably the hardest thing I had to face when I got into the business. You really rely on your contacts, like maybe your one contact in the police department or fire department to let you know what is going on. That’s something I wished they pushed more in classes.

Q: How did you overcome that obstacle?

Nelson: You just have to keep trying. It’s a business where every single day you have to turn a story in and you have to make a deadline. It’s a challenge every single day and you may have a really good day or a really bad day. But the next day, you have to keep making those calls and forget what happened the day before. It’s completely different from any other business.

*Q: While you were an intern for WSLS did you have any memorable or exciting stories to cover?*

Nelson: Oh yes! When I was an intern I got to go to this really big forest fire down in Patrick County and it was called Bull Mountain. That was one of the biggest experiences I had as an intern because usually when you’re an intern you just follow someone out to an interview but I also interned on weekends, so there was only one reporter on weekends. So wherever they go I had to go. And that was just a really big story; that fire ended up burning thousands of acres. It was on Easter Sunday. We got to put all the gear on and see them fighting the fires.

Q: You were here for April 16th . What was that experience like being a reporter at the time and did you cover any part of it?

Nelson: I was a senior intern at the time. I covered a little bit of it. It was the same time of year as all these bomb threats were going on, so when someone called into the studio and said there had been a shooting at first we were like ehh we will put in a few calls and see what happens, but no one was taking it seriously because nothing was confirmed. The biggest story that day, if April 16th had not happened, was the wind because the wind was really really bad that day. So I was sent on wind patrol and I had to go find down trees and go to the schools because school was being let out since there was no power they could not make lunches and such. So that was my morning, and while I was doing that, I called my boyfriend who was here as an engineering student in the building connected to Norris Hall to see what was going on. He was talking about how they heard gunshots but maybe it was just constructed and said that everyone was just staying low that day because they were unsure. After I finished my story about the wind, I called my assignment director to let him know and he was like, “Candice I don’t care just get back to the station right now. ”And I was like, “Oh so it has been confirmed.” And he said, “Yeah just get here now.” So I went back to the station, and they just had me making phone calls to people I knew to see if they would talk to us. We tried to get them to call in, because we were on the whole time, we did not do just a 6 o’clock news, we just stayed live all day, and wanted to see if they would talk about what happened.

Q: Do you come up with your own story ideas to report on or do you have someone to help you?

Nelson: Yeah, that’s another hard part about it because they expect you to come in every morning and you have to have a story to pitch. Some days you will come in and they will be like,” Candice I want you to go cover this.” Its probably 50/50 as far as them wanting you to go on your own or giving you stories.

Q: How do you find the stories to do?

Nelson: It’s a mixture of contacts. A lot of times when we go out on stories, someone will come up to you and be like, “Hey, you’re with channel 10 I have another story idea for you.” So sometimes it’s about being in the public eye. A lot of times, the stories we do require a follow up. Its different every single day, and you have to come up with something concrete every single day.

Q: Describe an average day working at WSLS 10.

Nelson: I have a really weird schedule. I work night side on Mondays and Tuesdays, which is 2:30 p.m to 11:30 p.m; And dayside Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So, if I work dayside I come in at 9 a.m and you have a 9:30 meeting and you sit around a table and you pitch your story. And you pitch it hard because you want to do that story for the day. So when they give you the go ahead, they say ok go, have it. So you go out. What’s so great about this business is you do your story; you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder the entire time. It’s pretty nice having free reign.

Now if I am on the 5 o’clock show, we want to get back in time so I can log through the sound bites, which looking through the tape and finding the quotes I want and choosing the time on the tape. Editors usually have a about an hour to fix it up and get it ready to air.

Q: How time consuming is your job?

Nelson: Really time consuming. The hours I work are 9-6:30 on dayside and 2:30 to 11:30 on night side. I don’t really get a time set aside for lunch or dinner since we have the competition of channel 7 there is always that pressure of them getting the story we didn’t. I’m lucky I am not a teacher, like I don’t have homework each night when I get home, but I’m really busy during the day and it goes by really fast.

Q: What is the hardest part about the industry?

Nelson: Right now, that the industry is changing. It used to be that people would sit down to watch their 6 o’clock news, but right now because of the Internet, people are going to that instead. I mean can you blame them? The hardest part about that is we have the deadline for the newscast we are in but we also have to get it to the web a.s.a.p. You’re trying to get all the information to the web guy and he is posting everything but it’s a tug-a-war because its like what do the viewers want? Do you want to get it to the newscast first or to the web and tip off the competition so they can get it to the 6 o’clock. So I think that is definitely the hardest part right now.

Q: What is your favorite part about your job?

Nelson: Meeting the people. I am one of those people that can’t just sit in an office all day. I love getting out of the office. The bad part about it is if it’s snowing outside and they want you out there at 5 a.m. But yeah getting out and about is the best part… and meeting the people.

Q: What is your most memorable moment you have had since you have been working at WSLS 10?

Nelson: I have several. I have been here two years and the favorite story happened a little over a year ago. This is another forest fire story. It happened in February 2008 and it was a day that the wind was so bad, and it was a beautiful day so people were riding on 4-wheelers that were sparking. And it was a whole mixture of everything causing fires and the wind spreading them. It was so bad that the governor had a special day set aside to thank the firefighters for all they did. But anyway, it was a Sunday and we went out to the forest and the wind was so bad that it blew a limb out in front of us and gave us a flat tire. We were stuck because we didn’t have a spare. So we had to call another photographer to come get us but when he came to us the forest fire jumped the road and he got held back. He eventually got to us and on our way back the fire jumped the road again and we had to find other ways home. When we got back to the station that night, it was almost like a weekday because everyone was called in since the fire was so bad. It was just one of those days you were just so excited that so much was going on. That was probably my favorite story I ever covered, but my most memorable was the homestead shootings that happened back in March. A man named Beacher Hackney, whom they still have not found, shot and killed two of his co-workers at the Hot Springs Resort. We went around and followed the police looking for this guy through the woods with their weapons drawn. And yeah, that sticks in your mind a little bit because you don’t know where he is.

Q: Early we talked about the shootings of David Lee Metzler and Heidi Lynn Child, here is what Nelson had to say in relation to that story…

Nelson: I think with what happened with the two Virginia tech students, David and Heidi, I think even more so than the April 16th shootings, that story touched me more then any other story I have done. Mainly because they were a Virginia Tech couple out at Caldwell Fields, and I have been there with my boyfriend since he is a hunter. And they still have not found anybody.

Q: Did you cover any part of this story?

Nelson: Yeah, I was not at the crime scene part but I covered the funerals and I went out to the little ice cream shop they both used to work at, and I talked to the manager there. She talked about how good they were and gave us a glimpse into their lives. But yeah, that was one of the hardest stories I ever had to cover. I remember coming in that weekend it happened and I just sat at my desk and I was just crying, because it was something about that story.

Q: Is it hard, the stories where you have to cover the deaths?

Nelson: Yes. When you have to talk to the family because you’re expected to talk to the family members that’s one of the hardest things. That’s one of those stories you never get used to covering because you hate to be the one to go up and knock on the persons door. But at the same time you never know how they will react, because a lot of the times you go to the door they want to talk to you because they want you to know what their family members are like and other times they yell at you and ask you to leave.

Q: Do you have any major goals or future plans?

Nelson: A lot of people ask me if I ever want to be an anchor and it is one of those questions that I am not really sure about. There is something about going out and getting a story together and meeting the people and putting it together into a finished project. Long-term plans, I would really like to teach journalism one day.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring reporters?

Nelson: Get as much experience as you can. I don’t think you can stress that enough. Because the competition to get into this industry is so hard, especially with the way the economy is right now so you have that many more people out there looking for jobs. Intern at a place you want to go into because newspaper and broadcasting, for example, are so different. Also I would say, a lot of students try to intern at ABC, NBC and the big places and you don’t really get that much experience. So I would suggest go to a medium-size market and they give you a whole lot more that you can do and add to a resume tape and show off.