Kevin Newman, anchor and executive editor of Global National for nearly a decade is, well, tired. Tired of reporting bad news. Tired of hosting a show that’s "one step away from the abyss" every night. And tired of observing the world from the fast lane.
That doesn’t mean the award-winning journalist is retiring from the news business altogether – or retreating to a cabin by a lake with a book and a bottle of fine wine (although he does want to catch up on his reading). Far from it.
The 51-year-old native of Toronto has simply decided he has done all he can at Global National, the nightly suppertime newscast he left ABC News in New York nearly 10 years ago to bring into being, and which he has anchored and executive edited since.
It’s time to change his focus – and his lifestyle.
"I want to read more books," Newman said, before his final newscast from Ottawa on Friday. "I want to exercise more regularly." (Although it must be said, his muscular physique and good looks have attracted more than a few adoring fans.) "I want to learn to observe by standing still, as opposed to running by it quickly, which I’ve done for most of the last 30 years. I want to rest, and I want to think a lot about the future."
He also wants to continue making documentaries, and to branch out into new media, among other projects that will likely keep retirement a long way off.
Newman got his start in journalism 27 years ago, as a coffee boy and runner at Global in Toronto. He worked his way through the ranks, eventually reporting from Queen’s Park and Ottawa, before moving to CTV in 1986 to become the network’s parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa.
He then joined CBC as a reporter and anchor for the program Midday, before being recruited in 1994 by ABC in New York to anchor and co-host Good Morning America, where he won the international Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting for his work.
Over the years, he has reported from the front lines in Iraq, Israel, Bosnia, and Central America, and has interviewed a long list of Canadian and world leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, George Bush and Jimmy Carter.
In 2001, he was lured back to Canada by the offer of heading up a new national newscast at Global. He anchored the station’s live coverage of the 9/11 tragedy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president, and, in the process, won two Gemini Awards for Best News Anchor, adding to his two Emmy awards.
But the transition from seven years in a well-financed American newsroom wasn’t easy, he recalls: "I was accustomed to things working all the time because they were well-resourced. This show (Global National) has always been one step from the abyss every night, because it’s so early (it airs at 5:30 PM, versus CBC and CTV’s 10 and 11 PM newscasts), it has relatively few resources, and the only thing that prevents our viewers from seeing it is the quality of the people behind the camera to rescue it every day. Over time, that’s stressful for the people who work on it, and probably helps contribute to the fatigue that I feel."
It didn’t help that his first day on the job was September 3, 2001 – eight days before the terrorist attack that felled the Twin Towers in New York.
"I couldn’t absorb it, because then I wasn’t doing my duty, anymore than a firefighter can absorb the fear he or she has when they go into a fire; you just have to execute your job.
"Afterwards is the issue. I remember, after 16 hours on September 11th, driving home in Vancouver (where Global National is produced) and it was a gloriously bright, sunny day and the mountains were magnificent and they still had snow on them, and I pulled over to the side of the highway, and I cried for about 20 minutes solid, just because it was so beautiful, and so many people I had known, and the city I had loved, had lost so much."
It would get no easier over the next 12 months.
"Then we had an incredible year of war to cover, and a brand-new, inexperienced news team to try to get through that, and then there was the one-year anniversary where I went back to the pit in New York, and we broadcast that for hours, and I couldn’t look at the pit, because some of my old neighbours – because I lived in New York for awhile – were in it, paying tribute to their fallen family members, and then I looked at the producer…after we went on air, and I said, ‘How much time do I have till I have to go up again?’ and he said, ‘An hour.’ So I went around the corner and I cried harder and longer than I’ve cried in my life, for 45 minutes. I think it was just the buildup and holding back of all that emotion for such a tumultuous year for us all, but also for a working news team, trying to cope with the biggest story of our lifetimes."
Newman says covering death and destruction night after night has taken a toll.
"Thirty years of covering mostly bad news takes it out of you. I’ve talked to other anchors and reporters about this, too: If you’re not careful, you can get pretty low, because everything that surrounds you is unpleasant, usually; that’s the nature of news. So when I got to cover things like the Olympics in Vancouver, which were still newsworthy, but obviously, a story filled with joy, I thought, man, I like this feeling a lot better; let’s not test fate. You know more bad things are coming. Leave on this kind of story and hopefully you’ll be better balanced for whatever comes next."
With Global National behind him, which he says "will probably end up being my legacy project out of my career," what comes next, Newman isn’t entirely sure of.
"I’m not closing the door on anything at this point, because I don’t know my own mind – and I am tired after 10 years of doing Global National."
But he says realizing his own mortality had a hand in his decision.
"(Turning 50) was the time that I could see the wall ahead of me. Once you have a sense of mortality, if you haven’t had it by the time you’re 50, you suddenly begin focusing on the living that is left, and what you want to do with that. Both things combined to bring me to the point where I thought, another five or 10 years, am I going to make much of a difference here? Probably not. Can I make a difference doing other things? More likely."
He is interested in continuing to produce documentaries (two, one on gun control and another on animal rights, aired last month), and has a couple in the can.
"I’ve got two (in production) that answer the question: What happens when the media suspect someone who turns out to be innocent? A little bit of self-analysis there, and also perhaps a little bit of catharsis on my part, because one of the things I regret as a journalist is that we blow into people’s lives, we tell the story, and then we bash onto the next one. We never go back to see what kind of entrails we’ve left, and I wanted to be part of that exercise, for a change."
He’d also like to jump on the mobile-video bandwagon, a medium he sees being the future of how news is produced and consumed.
"The truth is, our ability to tell stories visually and inexpensively is about to explode. People forget YouTube’s only four years old, but as our ability to move video over high-speed Internet increases, and especially wirelessly, my view is that a lot of journalism and communication is going to go from text-based to moving picture-based, and to me, there’s opportunity in that for people who can tell credible stories quickly, visually."
To that end, he wants to get better at editing video on a laptop computer.
"The one thing I do know is that I still enjoy making TV. I still like rolling up my sleeves, sitting in an edit suite, manipulating pictures, so one of the things I’m going to do over the next few months is improve my skills in laptop editing."
And there’s one more thing he wants to get good at:
"I have only two goals: to increase my ability to laptop-edit – and to learn three go-to recipes, so I can throw more dinner parties and not rely on my wife to do them. I still cook very much the way I did when I was living with six guys at university."
That said, Newman says he’s a bit anxious about stepping away from the nightly-news grind:
"I’m slightly concerned about the fact that I’ve been an adrenalin junkie for 30 years, creating something on an unforgiving deadline. I’m sure that has fused itself to my internal organs in such a way that I’m going to go through withdrawal."
"I will mostly miss the team work. I love that feeling when you’re together with a small group of people, all of whom are bringing their creative energy and dedication to a project and when you turn it in at the end of the day, you sort of go, ‘Well, that was OK.’ And so I will miss the teamwork, the personalities. Television people are a great tribe; journalists are a good tribe, because they’re alive, they’re slightly irreverent. The first time somebody tells them to do something, their first question is, Why do I have to? They’re always asking people to justify, which makes them impossible to manage. But it makes them great companions in life, and I’ll miss that."
And what would he like to say to those companions?
"Thank you for believing in me."
With files from the National Post
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