the repurposed journalist

Karen James has a purpose. It’s just not the one she started out with as a journalist.

In 1987, when she was a beat reporter just starting out at Ada, Oklahoma’s KTEN http://www.kten.com/, her purpose was to get to top ten TV market within ten years. “When you just get started”, Karen says, “You’re not in it for the money. You just want to tell good stories.” James says journalists have to care about people. “If you don’t,” she says, “You’ll go nowhere.” After stops in Lubbock (KCBD) http://www.kcbd.com/ and Lexington (WKYT) http://www.wkyt.com/, in 1994, she took a job at KXAS http://www.nbcdfw.com/ in Dallas.

It took her seven years to reach market number seven.

After a few months at KXAS she got out of TV news, into public relations and got married to Dallas landscape architect Kelly James, an avid mountaineer.

Fast forward to December, 2006, Karen James overhears her husband and his climbing partner Brian Hall, resolve to use their love of mountaineering to help children living in poverty. Once they’d summited Oregon’s Mount Hood, they would use their next climb to help children living in extreme poverty. It sounded like a noble purpose.

On December 10^th, Kelly James and his fellow climbers became lost near Mt Hood’s summit in white out conditions. Rescue teams headed up the mountain but conditions were abysmal. Karen James felt she had to keep the story alive and keep rescuers motivated to give Kelly a better chance. It became one of the most dramatic and extensive searches in mountaineering history.

For seven days rescue crews fought deteriorating conditions, trying in vain to rescue the climbers. Karen James spoke to every journalist who would help tell her story. She had been one of them so she knew how important it was to keep talking to the media. “I don’t know a journalist who doesn’t care,” she recalls. If she let up, she’d be letting Kelly down.

But on December 17^th time ran out. Her husband’s frozen body is found in an ice cave on Oregon’s Mount Hood. Her world with Kelly was gone. Now, the question – how do I move on? Can I move on?  That was five years ago.

Network news anchors including CBS’s Katie Couric continued to cover her compelling story http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/21/eveningnews/main2291454.shtml. As she began to recover, Karen wrote a book to inspire others. http://www.holdingfastforpurpose.com/

And now Karen James has a new purpose.

For the past year, she and four other Dallas-Fort Worth women have been a part of ifyouknew www.ifyouknew.org, a charity in which she is devoted to keeping Kelly’s dream alive. Working with international charity World Vision, Karen and her friends hope to raise $5 million dollars in five years to provide clean water to 100.000 children living in extreme poverty in Africa. Karen says so far they’ve raised more than $2.1 million – already enough to save more than 42,000 children. Earlier this year, Dallas media reported on her quest. http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Mount-Hood-Climbers-Widow-Finds-Closure-125251164.html, In April, James and her friends carried 40 pound Jerry cans of water across Dallas’s Southern Methodist University campus to illustrate the daily hardship millions of women around the world endure simply to provide water for their families.

Last summer she got a chance to visit Zambia and see how water projects are saving lives. http://blog.worldvision.org/causes/what-would-you-do-if-you-knew/ During that trip, Karen James also got a chance to meet Abigail, the child she sponsors through World Vision. ‘Needless to say I fell in love with her and now I was on another rescue mission and it was just as personal,” says Karen.

She’s been thinking about Abigail a lot lately because this Saturday will be Abigail’s fifth birthday. Abigail was born December 17^th, 2007. The same day Kelly’s body was discovered on Mount Hood by rescue crews.

Today Karen James is a Repurposed Journalist, finding peace and purpose by looking back while reaching out. “I used to get assigned to cover stories about people who were changing the world.”

“Now it’s my turn.”

This isn’t how Ben Saboonchian would have written the script. It doesn’t have an ending.

At 58, Saboonchian is starting over. After producing documentaries for 22 years at KIRO-TV 7 in Seattle, he was laid off on October 17. Today Saboonchian attended a mandatory orientation at the local unemployment agency. He’s meeting me for coffee to debrief afterwards while the impressions of the morning are still fresh.

He had to wait three hours for a job consultation and a tip for how to look for work online. When he typed “documentary producer” in the search field, “Not much came up,” says Ben, “Zero.”  Saboonchian has been in television documentary production since 1980, that’s 32 years writing, producing, directing, reporting and editing hour-long, prime-time documentaries. He’s won 74 awards, including 19 regional Emmys, 10 national awards including a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton and 6 regional Edward R. Murrow Awards. For 19 years, he’s been a co-instructor for a certificate program in documentary filmmaking at the University of Washington Extension. He also composes and performs original music for films and documentaries and has written and produced industrial films for non-profit organizations.

But today he’s just another 58-year-old looking for work.

“I felt a real sense of humility,” Saboonchian tells me. “When you’re 58 and you’re trying to reinvent yourself, it’s not easy. KIRO was my family,” he says.

He says the break from KIRO TV after 22 years was amicable. “We weren’t meeting budget,” says Saboonchian. “Cuts had to be made.” Still Ben says, he didn’t see it coming. He saw the human resources rep at the meeting and thought at first he’d been re-assigned.  Ben says, “They reassigned me right out the door.”

Documentary topics ranged from street kids to Doppler radar to global warming to taking care of mom and dad, a topic he knew well because of his parents struggle with health issues. His father, Esahak Saboonchian, died just two weeks before Ben was let go. He’d just finished “Voices of the Inner City” a behind-the-scenes look at local charity World Vision’s Youth Empowerment Program. The production focused on local teens’ year-long  mentorship program sponsored by World Vision, the international charity in Federal Way. The project took six months to shoot.

He’s always felt lucky to do documentary work. He called KIRO TV the “last man standing” when it comes to long-form local TV production. Saboonchian produced three or four hour-long prime-time specials a year. He felt he was really serving the community.

“Local news just doesn’t do MUCH of that kind of long-form programming any more.”, he said. A lot of his friends in the TV business couldn’t believe he made it this long. “I had a dream job,” Ben says. “I always complained about lack of resources, but I had a dream job.”

So how will this journalist get repurposed?

He’d like to find a way to continue producing feature-length documentaries locally or on a national level. “I really don’t know about independent film making.” But he says, “I think I can do the work.”  His number one priority is to take care of his elderly mother. Saboonchian says he’s relying on his Christian faith right now. “I have a feeling God has other work for me.”

Ben Saboonchian will tell you he sees the blessing in this script without an ending. His massage therapist told him that since the termination, she’s noticed his back is getting a lot more loose. The muscles he’s told are not as tight. “I miss my friends,” he says. “But I don’t miss the stress.”

In the company of trees.

Issaquah, Washington’s Tiger Mountain, in the misty foothills of the North Cascades, is not far from my home. It’s a beautiful site from Interstate 90. At night there’s a beacon way up there at the top. With no moonlight on its slopes, that beacon looks suspended in the sky, like a red star. Even during the day, its quickly rising slopes seem to beg the question – “Am I a steep hill or just the tiniest of mountains?” Let’s be honest, calling Tiger a “mountain” is a stretch. It’s only 2,500 feet high. A strong hiker can run from the Tiger Mountain parking lot near Interstate 90 to the West Summit in about 30 minutes. Most days, I hike up at a brisk pace. My time to the West Summit is usually one hour and eleven minutes. I don’t stop unless there’s a picture I absolutely must take.

And that happens a lot.

My iPhone has 164GB of memory. It seems like a lot until it’s gobbled up by pictures. I use my phone for everything so when it gets filled, it prompts me to erase pictures because there’s just no more room. I blame Tiger Mountain for this. Every time I hike her switch-backed trails, I stop to take more pictures. My phone is packed with shots of a carpeting ferns, glistening stones and bright green moss.

But it’s trees that draw me in.

Other hikers on the trail must laugh as they pass. I’m the guy just standing there taking pictures with his eyes glued to the treetops. I live for pictures of Douglas fir. My favorite is the image (and I have a lot of these) of dozens of 200 foot tall trees just standing side by side by side by.

When I hike the steep trails of Tiger, I’m not alone. My head tells me I’m just looking at needles and branches and bark but my heart tells me this forest is the ultimate living room.

And I walk through it a lot.

Two years ago, I hiked to Tiger’s West Summit 47 times, almost once a week.
I do a lot of thinking in those 71 minutes to the top. Today it’s about
“Blowdowns.”

Blowdowns are snapped and fallen fir. They’re the tall trees that come down in the howling winds of the Pacific Northwest every year. When their feet get too wet from our near constant rain, and their roots grow weak, they get blown down. Maybe they just grew too weary to stand against the elements. Maybe they stopped sinking roots down. Maybe they just grew too old.

But every autumn I see it, another blowdown.

And today there are several on Tiger. This morning, I stepped around four blowdowns on the three-mile trail to the West Summit Viewpoint. State crews will come by soon and clear these blowdowns. Usually no one gets hurt when they fall. But eventually all the trees on Tiger will fall. It’s a “circle of life” thing, right?

I know I’m “coming down” one day. We all die. Life is a gift and time is a bandit.

But instead of dwelling too much on blowdowns, I’d rather just keep walking and notice the friends who are still standing in these woods all around me. It’s time to move on here on Tiger Mountain and remember that while our walk on earth is short and steep, it should be savored. Life is a hike. Just enjoy it while you’re in the company of trees.