Written by: Liberty Miller | Lifestyle Editor

Content warning: this article contains mentions of homicide and shootings. 

Sidney Spencer is a 2021 graduate from the University of Alabama and a current news reporter on CBS Channel 42, based out of Birmingham, Alabama. The Howl was able to get an exclusive interview with Spencer regarding her career, experiences in the field and words of advice she may have for Western students wanting to get into broadcasting and news reporting. 

When asked about her upbringing and what brought Spencer into news broadcasting, she answered, “I’m from Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the midwest, but my family is from the South so after I graduated high school in 2016, we moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Prior to me attending and graduating from the University of Alabama, I went to Western Kentucky University for a year and a half or so and ended up transferring to the U of A.” 

“To describe me, I would say I’m very shy, I’m not the typical reporter, I’m not this overly extroverted person, sometimes I don’t even like to talk which is funny for a reporter. But I’m very shy, very goofy, very fun, and my humor is a little off sometimes — I find anything funny and I tell people that, that’s another characteristic about myself that people find funny because I don’t take anything serious. To some people, that might be bad but I don’t know. I find humor in everything, but still very shy and in person, super soft-spoken, when I’m talking to people they say ‘Huh? What are you saying?’ and that’s something I’m still working on,” said Spencer.

“I work at CBS42, here in Birmingham. This is my second station, so I’m still kind of new to the industry three years in. My first station was in Evansville, Indiana. As soon as I graduated college in 2016 from the University of Alabama, I accepted a job at 44 News in Evansville. I signed a two-year contract — worked hard, and got out –- and now I’m here in Birmingham. My one year here will be June 12,” said Spencer. 

Spencer went on to discuss what she experienced growing up and how she became inspired to pursue broadcasting as a career. 

“I grew up just watching the news because me and my family are very close-knit, we would just sit at the table or in the living room watching television together. Our family was a family that would just watch the news, so I grew up watching Fox 8 and Channel 19, and I would see them and being super shy, I still thought that it was cool. I would see how they would show their personality, and it was kind of hard for me to show personality so seeing that, it was almost like they were forced to show who they are. I kind of just wanted to see if that would bring it out of me,” Spencer said. 

Additionally, she added that she experienced a pivotal moment while watching a reality television series. “I had a moment, I was watching Basketball Wives in middle school, and I can’t remember her name, but she had long brunette hair and she was talking about getting into broadcasting. I was like, what is that? I remember watching the episode, and I went over to the computer in the kitchen and typed broadcasting. It came up as being a reporter and I was thinking ‘Oh, that is what I want to be.’”

Spencer then touched on challenges people can face in her career path. “This industry is very vain, so you may face some adversities when you get into the business. Appearance is a big thing. I’m gonna keep it real — sometimes if you look a certain way you might get up higher and become a favorite. I probably have, I wouldn’t say gained anything, but in a sense, some people might look at me and say she may have gotten a position because of the way she looks or because she’s more poised, or something in that nature, but I will say this career is very vain.” said Spencer.

Spencer’s typical day is busy, with many work-related tasks transcending the hours she clocks in and out. “I work night-side, which is a shift that I’ve pretty much always worked. So I come in at 2 p.m., but I wake up around like 10 p.m. to do my makeup and hair, which is exhausting too sometimes. I usually spend around an hour, and if I don’t already have story ideas from the day before or thought of, or texts from sources or anything, I sit and try to find some stories that I could do. I’ll sometimes watch national stories and see if I can localize it, or look at my phone and look on Facebook. We’re required to at least have two story ideas. Usually, everything needs to be a lead story, but sometimes we can do fluffy pieces or people and enterprise stories. I come into work around 1:50 p.m., sit at my desk and look over what I had written down. I go over to our conference table, we all sit down and have our pitch meeting -– we have two producers, two photographers, a news director, a meteorologist and two anchors. So all of us have to pitch stories.”

At Spencer’s current station, CBS 42, she went into depth about how pitches are chosen at the conference table. “Sometimes, my stories don’t get picked up, because news directors have their own view of what news is, and usually the news director just says ‘no, I don’t want that.’ They’ll usually have their own stories and pitches that they want in mind, and they’ll just assign us to a story — if it’s an event, then I’ll sometimes make calls, and ask if there’s anyone we can talk to. Usually, they say yes and we can get all of that lined up. If it’s a story that they want us to pursue we’ll then have to make calls and just call around to the people that we need to talk to. Whenever we get our stories together, what sticks, we’ll go out, and I have a photographer that I’ll go out with to shoot the interviews. We’re required to at least have two to three interviews within our packages. We come back to the station or stay out in the field, depending on how far we are from the station. We’ll edit and write out scripts, and then before we submit our package, we need to have our scripts in by 9:15 p.m. After scripts, I edit everything, put it together, and it needs to be on the rundown by 9:45 – 9:50 p.m. Our photographers set us up and we do the live shot. Whatever our package is, we have to cut aside a bit of our piece for the morning, and then we also upload it onto our video platform, and we also have to write our web articles. We have a web team that looks over our articles in the morning and makes some tweaks, to make it more professional. I usually don’t finish until 10:50 p.m. –- but it’s nonstop work, a 24-hour thing, even though we don’t really get paid for 24 hours.”

Spencer has covered a vast array of topics as an on-site reporter, working on topics varying from sports to community projects. She also speaks on difficult subjects including homicide investigations, crime and vigils. When asked about how she works with potentially troubling stories, Spencer stated, “Personally, I’m not super religious but I am very spiritual. I’m a Christian, so I pray every day and I pray whenever I’m going into a hard story. I ask God to just help me to make the people that I’m talking to feel better or to help them get through the situation and just put my feelings aside with it. With that though, I will say I’ve done a lot of shootings — I’ve witnessed somebody get murdered at my last station, I’ve been around situations where the police shot at animals right next to me, and I almost got shot. Being in this industry will make you a little bit insensitive at times — so with that comes, at times when you’re in a scary situation or a tough story, it’s not healthy, (you will) mentally just take yourself out of it or just pretend like it’s not happening. When I do hard stories, sometimes it becomes too much at that moment, and I usually tell the photographer that I need a moment. If it doesn’t hit me at the moment, it hits me a few days later. I usually go into it praying, and ask God to help me to not get too emotional, but still be empathetic and understanding of the situation. But with that, also asking for me to be a blessing to the people who are actually living that, and help them out in some way. I’ve done shootings back-to-back, and murders back-to-back, going to vigils back-to-back, and I just think, let me just try to get this done, and try to be a blessing to the people that I’m talking to. Then once the weekend comes around, I think, that was a hard week. I don’t know if I’m coping with it healthily. As news reporters, we’re not directly affected like those in the situation, but we are on the scene, right there with the first responders. As I said, at my last station, I witnessed somebody get shot and killed right in front of my face, and in the moment I had to walk away – it’s not normal. A lot of us journalists and reporters are trying to learn how to cope with the situation. I have coworkers that I talk to and friends in the industry that I talk to all the time. I had a friend who worked at a competitor station to my last job, and she was there too during the shooting situation. We talked about it together and she took it a little harder at the moment, and I don’t think it hit me until a few days later. We just bond — I don’t know if it’s a trauma bond — not just over the tough stories but just the industry in general, and we just talk about the amount of work that we have to do with the pay that we have to deal with sometimes. If we didn’t love it though, we wouldn’t be doing it, because life is way too short to continuously be doing something that you don’t like or you aren’t happy with.”

Spencer also gave advice to Western students who aspire to pursue a career in news and broadcasting. 

“I would say work hard, and nowadays, it doesn’t seem like it but hard work pays off. Do your research and don’t let anyone discourage you if you want to get into TV because pretty much anybody can do it. I don’t want to say everybody can do it but if you work hard, and if you really have a passion for wanting to be in broadcasting and journalism you can do it. Every day is not smooth – I hear no at least six times a day and you have to have thick skin with that. If the story works out, that is good but sometimes stories will fall through. I’ve had two or three stories fall through in one day, and it happens. You have to have tough skin to get through that. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to look a certain way or be a certain way. With that, you have to want to be a voice for people who may not have one. That is ultimately what we are, we work for the community, and we’re not doing this for ourselves. It may come across as reporters just wanting to look pretty on TV, but that is not the case. You have to have a passion for talking to people, for one, because you’re talking to people every day, and then you have to want to tell their stories. You have to learn that you’re not always going to be liked. You’re going to get pushback, especially when you’re telling controversial stories, or you’re telling stories of people that don’t have a voice. You have to be willing to speak up for them because nobody else will.” 

Contact the author at howllifestyle@wou.edu