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1% Better: Kelcey Carlson, Evening News Anchor at KMSP Fox 9 – Quick Links

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Key Takeaways

• Value of Roots and Early Aspirations: Kelcey Carlson’s journey from growing up in rural Indiana to becoming a news anchor at Fox 9 underscores the importance of one’s upbringing and early dreams in shaping their career path. Her desire to explore beyond her borders and her keen interest in journalism and international affairs drove her to pursue a career in media, highlighting the impact of early aspirations on professional choices.
• Professional Growth Through Experience: Carlson’s transition from a television producer to an evening news anchor was facilitated by her extensive experience and deep understanding of journalism. Facing challenges such as covering major events early in her career helped her develop the foundational knowledge necessary for her role as an anchor, illustrating how diverse experiences contribute to professional development.
• Managing Stress and Uncertainty: The podcast discusses the unpredictability and high-pressure environment of live television news. Carlson’s approach to managing stress and remaining composed, especially during last-minute changes, reflects the importance of adaptability, preparation, and a calm mindset in high-stress professions.
• Life Challenges and Perspective: Carlson shares insights into how personal challenges, such as dealing with cancer within her family and friends, have shifted her perspective on stress and the importance of living in the moment. This takeaway emphasizes the role of personal experiences in reevaluating one’s approach to work and life stresses, advocating for resilience and a positive outlook in the face of adversity.
• Evolving Landscape of Journalism: The conversation touches on the challenges modern journalists face, including the pressure to deliver news quickly in a digital age filled with misinformation. It raises concerns about maintaining objectivity and the blurred lines between journalism and personal opinions on social platforms. This reflects the ongoing struggle within the profession to adapt to new technologies while upholding journalistic integrity.

1% Better Episode 10 Transcript

[00:00:00.130] – Craig
I’m Craig Thielen, and this is the 1% Better Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Kelcey Carlson. Kelcey is the Evening News Anchor at KMSP Fox 9 in Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota. Kelcey, welcome to 1% Better.

[00:00:14.770] – Kelcey
Hi, Craig, thank you so much. I love this podcast. I love what you’re doing. I love the idea behind it. I just listened to Tarek Tomes and that conversation goes from talking about living in Germany and growing up there to building teams and state government, and then his advice at the end was great. You’re just doing a great job and I love these conversations.

[00:00:35.220] – Craig
Well, thank you. I feel like the newbie here talking to the professional, so hopefully I’ll do okay interviewing you. I’m really excited about that. Speaking of Tarek, he did tell us about growing up in Germany and how that influenced his life. So tell us about where you grew up. It wasn’t quite Germany. It was east of Minnesota, I know, but tell us about that and a little bit about the journey that led you to be a news anchor at Fox9.

[00:00:58.000] – Kelcey
I grew up in rural Indiana, in Lafayette, Indiana, in the shadow of Purdue University. It’s where my family immigrated from England and Sweden and settled. So, both sides of my family had been in Indiana probably since the late 1860s. And not a lot of movement outside of Indiana. I had an uncle who went to Iowa, for instance, to start an ice business, but most of my roots are there. Great place to grow up. In fact, my two grandfathers graduated from high school together – That’s how closely tied everything is there. But it was a great childhood, great place to grow up. I went to Indiana University and majored in journalism and political science and minored in French. And as a kid, I always just wanted to see what was beyond the borders. I just wanted to see things. I loved my French classes, and I have this grand idea that maybe I could go overseas and be an international correspondent of some kind. I just wanted to really just see what was out there in the world, and I think that’s what led me to journalism. But also, I was the kid that loved research. So if you put me in a library, I was very happy. And my dad, seeing that at a young age, used to take me over to Purdue’s libraries if I ever had a research paper. I just remember feeling like, this is so cool to be with all of these books and all of this information because I love learning about anything and everything.

I went to Indiana University, majored in journalism there, and the job board back in the day, before really the Internet, the jobs were posted on a bulletin board, and there was a job for a television producer when I graduated from college in Florence, South Carolina. So I got an interview and I got that job, and that’s when I started as a television producer. It was a fast introduction into the business because the first six weeks I was there went through two hurricanes, TWA Flight 800 crashed with a local teenager on board who was headed overseas for an exchange program. We had the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, and we had a crew there at the time. And I thought, if this is the business, I’m not sure I have enough adrenaline to survive it all. And things quickly slowed down.

But that’s how I started. TV producing behind the scenes, then into reporting. I did get a job as a morning anchor at one point, but went back to reporting when I took a job in Raleigh, North Carolina. And then they had me do weekend anchoring and then anchor the morning shows there, and then eventually got the job here in Minneapolis. I’ve been doing this for twenty-some years, 25 years at this point, probably more, if I do the math correctly. But I’ve been doing this for… it seems like a long time.

[00:03:45.970] – Craig
Well, it’s interesting. You remember the stories of your first six weeks of your career and how so much was happening and how so much is just always happening. I mean, it’s an incredibly fast-paced, changing world, the news, because it’s unpredictable. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and you have to roll the punches. So, one of the things I’m really curious about having a chance to know you a bit and spend some time with you is that I think a lot of people think about TV personalities, the anchors, the people we see on the TV, have this big personality and almost like attention seeker, ‘I want to be in the limelight’… I found you to be quite the opposite. I found you, as you said, ‘I love being a book worm’ and being very private, very reserved, and yet you are in the limelight. Just curious, am I reading that right, first of all? Then what drew you to this dichotomy of I like my privacy, I like being a bookworm, but I’m going to be in front of thousands of people every day in the limelight?

[00:04:42.620] – Kelcey
I know it’s funny, I think about that myself because I initially did want to go into magazine, but my advisor at IU was in charge of the broadcast program, and he had me take one of his classes, and I really loved the ability to be able to tell stories with interviews and actual moving video because I think that can be very powerful. And I do think of myself as this, I’m slightly introverted, slightly extroverted, but I’m also from that old school mentality. When I was going through journalism school, it was drilled into us. You are never part of the story. You are an observer, and the story is about the people that you are interviewing and talking to. So I still have that ingrained in me, but I think I moved into some of these anchoring positions because when I was in Raleigh, I had been reporting there for a long time. I really knew the subject matter. I understood government. I understand federal indictments. I understood the law enforcement, and I had all of this foundational knowledge, I think, that they trusted me on the set with anything that would come up.

The weekends and in the mornings, you don’t have a lot of management around, so you’re also a pseudo manager. Oftentimes, you’re the most experienced person on the shift, so I think just that foundational work I did as a reporter for so many years, then my bosses felt like they wanted me to move into an anchor role because I did bring all of that experience to the table.

I consider myself a good sidekick. I think I try to support the people around me when we’re on the set and we have those lighter moments. I feel like I’m sometimes the person who is really good at teeing something up for somebody else or just reacting to somebody else. I feel like I’m a good supporting cast member in a lot of ways.

[00:06:30.020] – Craig
Well, I know you’re a great team player and I think what you’re describing is leaders don’t always have to lead from the front or from the top, they can lead being part of the team. That’s probably your style and probably what helped you be very successful and have people working around you that love working with you. So speaking of that, I think a lot of people would be curious, I know I am myself, just what is a day in life in the news business, in particular in your role? How does that work and walk us through a day in life.

[00:06:58.180] – Kelcey
It’s a funny job and it’s a job of extreme highs and lows, if you think about what we cover on a daily basis, we get to see just fascinating characters and interesting stories. But we’re also around a lot of really traumatic events too. We start every day with an editorial meeting for each shift. And so for my shift, it’s the night shift. So we start at 1:30, we come in, we meet with the management team, the reporters, the photographers, and the producers. We all sit around in a conference room. Some people join via Zoom if they’re already in the middle of going to their story. So modern day now, not everybody has to be there in person. We talk about what needs to be covered. If we have a breaking news situation or developing story, what do we know so far on those stories? And then people like myself who’ve been in this business 20, 30 years, we come in and we’re part of that editorial process where I take my experience and I think, Okay, well, have we answered this question? Have we answered that question? We probably need to find out about X, Y, and Z… bring some of that experience to the table and help the reporters fine-tune whatever story they’re going to work on that day.

We first talk about what we need to cover, and then the reporters bring their pitches for the day too. Kind of like an advertising…

Craig
Yeah, like a Shark Tank…

Kelcey
Yeah, exactly. Here’s what I think would be a good story for today. And we as anchors also can pitch stories. Everybody in the room is invited to pitch a story for that day. And then we take those 15-20 possibilities and we whittle them down into what we can realistically cover with our resources for that night. And then everybody is often moving about 2:15 in the afternoon. Sometimes things change. We have breaking news. We have to move crews away from what they were working on into something else. And sometimes that breaking news can even happen at 9:00, 10:00 at night. So there’s constant motion in a newsroom, and it’s sometimes loud. We all sit really close to one another on top of each other in cubicles. So it’s a lively, active place all the time. So by mid-afternoon, we start to get ready for our early newscasts. We have a 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, 6:30 newscast, 7:00 newscast, and that…

Craig
You have four newscasts?

[00:09:10.520] – Kelcey
We have so many newscasts. We are on the air from 5:00 to 8:00 PM, and then again from 9:00 to 10:30.

Craig
Ok.

[00:09:18.780] – Kelcey
We have about five anchors that cover that stretch. Of course, people have vacations and those sorts of things. I do the 5:00, I have a segment in the 5:30, I do the 6:00, and then I do the 9:00 and the 10:00. So three to three and a half hours of news a night, depending on the day. But we also do a streaming newscast at 3:00 in the afternoon. And we’re trying to expand our content online as well. So we take turns doing the streaming newscast in the afternoon. We have some production things that we have to do, things that we have to record for the newscast. And then we start really getting into the scripts because we are, as anchors, we are the last line of defense before that information goes on the air, so we’re checking to make sure it’s all updated, checking for typos, grammar issues, factual information. We’re like editors going through…

[00:10:11.620] – Craig
You’re like the quarterback, right? You’re orchestrating and reading… Now, how much are these different shows, the same exact replication, or they’re slightly different? Like you said, one of them, you’re just a segment, but you’re not the anchor. Is it try to be as consistent? This seems very chaotic on a day-to-day basis.

Kelcey
It’s organized chaos.

Craig
Obviously, this is what you do, but is it pretty consistent on all those shows? Or can it… Obviously, there could be really a late breaking story then you’d have to update it, but it’s pretty consistent across those?

[00:10:44.290] – Kelcey
Well, yes, we do a lot of the same stories. If you were to watch every newscast from 5:00 to 10:30 at night, you would see a lot of the same stories, a different version of the way that it’s told, sometimes with a reporter, sometimes without. We use national correspondence for national stories.

But just to give you an example of the other day, we had our newscast set, and then all of a sudden, former President Donald Trump was indicted. I remember running into the dressing room to grab something before I went out at 5:00, and we had people yelling at us from down the hall, ‘We’re going to try to take this press conference, so get ready. They think they might be ready at the top of the 5:00, but we’re not sure.’ So we run out there and we’re trying to decide, do we go ahead and start with weather and watch… We had a video screen with the press conference podium in the background as we’re watching out the corner of our eye to see when the special counsel would come out. And finally, it was about, I don’t know, 5:10, 5:12 before they came out. But there’s what you see on TV, and then there’s all of the moving parts behind the scenes. That’s a pretty regular thing because we just have stories that happen that we didn’t plan for, of course, because that’s life. So being able to be flexible, being able to work together as a team, those are very important qualities.

[00:11:58.690] – Craig
Communication, right?

Kelcey
Communication, yes.

Craig
I’m sure you have many channels of communication. Well that’s fascinating, a lot of what we do and a lot of our audiences in the corporate world, and it’s quite the opposite. In many cases, we’re planning things for weeks and months, and in some cases, years. So these big programs, these big change. This is the opposite end of the spectrum. It is managed chaos and it’s fluid. But obviously, you and your team are… I mean, this is normal. I mean, you do it every day. I’d like to come back to that because I think there’s some real interesting lessons there because the rest of the world is starting to be more like a news operation in terms of how real time and how fast-moving things are with technology. It’s catching up in some ways, so I think there’s some lessons learned. I want to shift a little bit from that. It’s fascinating. I could talk to you for a long time about just how that whole process works. But one of the things that I want to talk to you about is in that context, you’re incredibly busy. As you said, you start early afternoon until 10:00 – wow! You have to be on. You have to juggle things. Things can change. So you’re very focused. In addition to that, of course, you have your family life and you’re very busy with your family. And you always find time for other things, which I’ve always been very impressed by. For example, you and I served on the board of the Minnesota Positive Coaching Alliance. You’re always juggling multiple things. You always find time for other things. So first, I wanted to get some clues from you. How do you manage your day-to-day schedule, knowing that how intense it is and stressful it is? Then I also observed in person how you’re the doc. It doesn’t matter what’s going on, you’re cool, calm, and collected. One time we were doing an event for the Positive Coaches Alliance. It was a sizable event. There were thousands of people there and it had a keynote speaker. Here you are, you’re the emcee and five minutes before the big show starts and there’s no keynote speaker. You’re just as calm and as cool as collected, just as if everything was on track. It ended up no one knew the difference, person showed up. We don’t have to talk about who, but person showed up 60 seconds beforehand. I assume that’s just the world you live in. I’d love to hear your perspective on how you manage that day-to-day, your schedule and that stress, how do you do that?

[00:14:19.040] – Kelcey
It’s a work in progress. I’m still learning how to manage stress because my life is evolving while my job is evolving. I have three kids. Their needs and their lives change. Our life as a family is changing daily. So I don’t think I’m doing it well, but I’m trying my best. I think that is the message. Every six months, I think my husband and I sit down and we talk about, Okay, what’s working and how we’re doing this and what’s not? Because our kids’ lives and what they need and what they have going on with school and activities and what we have personally too, that we have to just manage in our life… it changes. I think I’m hardwired where I like organized chaos. I think I’m just that type of person that I work better, a little bit under pressure, and I think I just have realized that from a young age too.

But there are days when I think, Can I do all of this? I’m not sure. My head feels so full, Craig. It just feels so full of information. I do wake up every day and I think about, Okay, just make sure you don’t forget anything that you have to do today. But it’s not going to be like that forever. My kids are getting older. As they get older and a little bit more responsible for themselves too, that helps. But yeah, that day with the keynote speaker, that was funny because that is what I live at work. Everything –

Craig
Oh, I believe it. Are they going to show up? Are they ready? Just everything is last minute, last second. Kids is a whole other dynamic. I assume you have some pretty good boundaries. They can’t text you and say I need to talk to you when you’re going to go on air in 30 seconds.

[00:15:54.450] – Kelcey
Oh they do, Craig. They do.

[00:15:55.270] – Craig
Because I know my kids, it doesn’t matter. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t work. It doesn’t matter what meeting I’m in. If they text me, they expect immediate response, right?

[00:16:06.020] – Kelcey
Yeah. They’ll call because they’re not looking at the time. They’re not thinking about what time it is or what time I need to go on the air. They’ll call and I’ll be ready to go out on the set. But they know… I do have my phone out on the set with me. It’s a mobile computer, and so I can look up something quickly on my phone in a commercial break. And if they call, I just text them back and say, Hey, remember, I’m on the air. If you need anything, just text me if it’s an emergency. If not, I’ll get back to you in 45 minutes or something like that.

[00:16:33.440] – Craig
So you have your day to day stress and schedule, and then at some point you have some personal adversity that you have to deal with. Everyone does at some point in their life, and then that adds a whole other level of stress and perspective. So can you talk a little bit about how did that change your life, what you went through? And has that reframed anything? Are you back to normal? Talk through that a little bit.

[00:16:57.440] – Kelcey
Yeah, I’m getting older. And as you age, there are a lot of things in life that will start to change for you. Parents age, I have friends who’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and you just really gain some perspective with age about what is really important and what really matters. And I think working in television has actually helped me with that perspective from a young age because I’ve been around a lot of people on their worst day. And so I think I’ve seen and I’ve been around a lot of different kinds of people dealing with a lot of different types of diversity for a long time. And then when it starts to happen to you, I think it just changes you as a person. My husband has lost both of his parents in the last few years, and his mom had an illness that required round the clock care for about a year. So, he was traveling two weeks out of the month for about seven months. And we have some complicated things with one of our kids, and this is all outside of the 11 hours a day I spend at work. And then last year, my husband was diagnosed with two forms of lymphoma, so going through that. But I will say my husband’s doing great.

[00:18:03.690] – Craig
That’s so great.

[00:18:04.760] – Kelcey
He has a wonderful prognosis, and he will continue to do well. I’m confident of that. We are very, very fortunate. We are very, very lucky. But I have friends who’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer and uterine cancer. As you age, these sorts of things start to set in. I will say in a strange way, as stressful as all of those things could have been, I feel like they’ve actually reduced the stress in my life because I think I’ve just gained so much perspective about what really is important and also just knowing it tests you in a way. You can get through hard things. I realized that. Remember with my husband situation and the diagnosis, I just felt this inner strength that just built up and I don’t know what it is. I talked to a lot of spouses who’ve had to go through something like this, and we all felt the same way. You just instantly become a problem solver. You gain this inner strength that you never knew you had. You feel almost like a gladiator like, Okay, bring it on.

Then nothing at work stresses me out anymore. That is the honest truth. I’ve come out of the other side of some of these things that we’ve had to deal with personally. And you talk about somebody coming in late. It’s like, we’ll figure it out. I feel like things just do not stress me out in the same way anymore because I’m so grateful for every moment of my life. I do truly, I think I was trying to live in the moment before a lot of these things happen, but I feel like I truly do live more in the moment now. Things just make me laugh. I’m just so happy about each day. I don’t really get rattled anymore about anything. I think there’s some good maturity that comes with age and dealing with life. Everybody will deal with challenges.

[00:19:57.450] – Craig
Right. Oh, for sure. Yeah, you can’t get through this life experience without it. It’s such a timeless, profound life lesson when you’ve been through tough things around people that go through tough things that you gain just a different perspective. Is it just that you have to experience it and you have to go through life and as we get older, we gain that knowledge from experience. Or do you think there’s a way that people… Because wouldn’t you want everyone to have that, don’t sweat the small stuff, just take it easy on someone who’s having a bad day, less judgment, those kinds of things? Do you think that there’s something that people can do to get that to click in or is it no, you have to experience it?

[00:20:35.650] – Kelcey
I almost think you have to experience it before you can truly have that mindset. I think you can work toward that and you can be aware. But I think until you go through something, I think it doesn’t fully set in. A former coworker of mine, Jeff Baillon, suggested a book to me when Dave was diagnosed with cancer, and it’s truly the best book I’ve ever read in my life, it’s called Falling Upward. It’s about the two-halves of life. And really, when I read that, things started to make sense to me because I think before I read that book, there were moments when I thought, Am I going to be living an emergency for the rest of my life? Because we had gotten in this pattern where we were just constantly in some personal emergency. I had those feelings like, Is this the rest of my life? Do I have the ability to handle all of this? You come out of that book realizing that, No, this is just the deal. Everybody is going to have to deal with trauma, tragedy, medical issues.

Craig
And death, right?

[00:21:34.810] – Kelcey
And death. But you can do it, and it builds our character. It teaches us important lessons. It makes us better people in the end. It makes us appreciate life so much more. There are benefits to even the most difficult things that we go through. It brings us together as a people too. It makes you more empathetic for all of those people around you. It definitely have a greater understanding, and that comes with age. Just understanding what people are going through and giving people the benefit of the doubt always.

[00:22:05.620] – Craig
Right. You don’t know what’s going on in their life. People can see you on the news and they have no idea what’s going on in your life. That goes for everybody. Somebody has having a bad day and they cut you off and they yell and scream or whatever at you on the road. You don’t know what they’re going through. Maybe someone in their family just died or maybe they’re going through a traumatic event. It’s so true. I heard this statement that I just think it’s also very good. ‘Comfort and growth can’t live in the same place.’ We are all presented with all these challenges in life and that’s how we grow. It’s by doing something that we’re not comfortable with or is hard, whether it’s emotionally, physically or what have you. I think that’s largely true. Although you’d never wish it on anyone. You never wish adversity or difficulty, but there’s always something to be gained from it.

Let me ask you about running. I know you’re an avid runner. Is that part of how you destress? And how has that impacted you as a person and just your professional life? Because I know it’s a big part of what you do.

[00:23:03.180] – Kelcey
Looking back, running became my first coping skill. I didn’t know it was a coping skill, but it certainly was. I was young and single and working in this business, and it was like drinking from the firehose every day. I’m 23 years old dealing with these very difficult issues, complex. Just figuring out government is a challenge when you’re that young…

[00:23:22.790] – Craig
If you ever figure it out, let us know, please.

[00:23:25.630] – Kelcey
I just felt in over my head every single day that I went to work. It was so overwhelming. And the responsibility you feel when you hold people’s lives and reputations in your hands and then put them on the air every night, you don’t want to make a mistake. You want to make sure you have everything in the proper context. And it’s really overwhelming for a young person. I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the time, as a reporter. And really the only people I knew because of my odd wonky hours were the people that I worked with. And there were a lot of young people and I had great friendships from that television station. But when you only hang out with the people you work with, what do you talk about? Work. And that can be very negative because people go out and they complain about work. And I just couldn’t do that all the time. And I was running on the side because gym memberships are really expensive. You can just go out your door and run outside, and it was a pretty affordable way to just get some exercise.

I was approached to be on the board for an organization called Girls on the Run. And it’s a great nonprofit after-school program for girls. They run a 5K. But the owner of a running store was part of that. He said, You need to come join my marathon training group. And so I did. And I met all of these really positive peppy people who had other types of jobs. It was just such a positive place. I just became addicted to it again because people fascinate me. I love talking to people from different walks of life and learning about their lives and their jobs. Out of this, I joined this running group of a lot of young people who were either single or newly married. It was in the same place in life as all of these other folks and started running marathons. I just became addicted to that because it helped me process a lot of the stress, sweat it out. At the same time, just be around something different. I didn’t have to talk about work. I could talk about other people’s work, and it felt good.

So I’ve done a lot of marathons, traveled to a lot of different places, and I carried that with me. When I lived in Raleigh for 10 years, I had a great running group there. And at that point, I met women who were just starting families. So we were all going through pregnancies together and raising young children. And then when I moved here, I work at night. So having a social life is not really that easy when you work a night shift. But I have these great friendships with these women that I run with. And I think because you talk about really deep things on a run, the strangest thing, stuff just pours out of people. They can be shallow conversations about movies and books but can really turn to really deep life stuff because you’re not really facing people. As you’re running, you’re starting to think about things really deeply. I just have these really wonderful friendships with people I’ve run with over the years. And it has helped me to, again, just shake off the stress of the day, the stress of life. It gives me people to collaborate with. Okay, here’s what I have going on. What would you do? Or vice versa. We help problem solve together with kids, family, life, work, all of that. And it’s just been… It’s been one of the best things that I’ve done for myself in my entire life. And again, it was my first coping mechanism.

[00:26:52.130] – Craig
Well, that’s a great one. You’re way ahead of the game. It only took me 50 years to find running. And I was trained growing up playing sports that running was punishment. Running was what you did to either get in shape or you did something wrong and we’re going to make you run. It was very negative. I’m so glad that I did because now it’s very meditative at the end of the day or whenever I just go, I need to run because I need to just sweat some stuff out and idea. So it’s a pretty cool thing.

Let’s talk a little bit about the world. The world is changing so fast and there’s so much going on. It just goes faster and faster. Now we’re in the digital age and artificial intelligence. So a lot’s changed in the last 10, 20 years. How has the news business changed and how have you adapted what you do as you see the world changing around you?

[00:27:40.690] – Kelcey
It’s wild to think when I started there were no cell phones. There was barely internet when I started. If we had to call back to the station, we had to stop at a payphone. And then we had one bag phone, a cell phone that you plugged into a lighter that all the reporters could share so whoever needed it the most got it that night. So that’s how much it has changed. And now everything is just so immediate. We can get information so quickly. But we have a responsibility to vet that information. So it’s very difficult because the time constraints and the pressure to get something on the air or to get it confirmed and get it on the web, there’s just so much pressure to move faster. But it’s hard because you don’t want to put something that’s incorrect out there. And so those pressures because we can get information so quickly, because people can put false information out there so quickly, and then the amount of time it takes to figure out if that’s true or not…

[00:28:39.090] – Craig
Guess that’s one thing I wanted to ask you is, do you feel like 10, 15 years ago you were breaking news, literally back then? Is that even possible now? Are you trying to catch up and keep up with news because it’s already been on Twitter six hours ago? Or it’s already been… Now, whether it’s right or wrong, that’s a whole different question. But is that shifted as well?

[00:28:59.500] – Kelcey
It’s very difficult, yes. Information can be out there, and by the time you figure out the deal with one piece of information, something new has started. So yeah, you feel like you’re constantly chasing this ball around, trying to figure out what is what. There is information overload. You think about all the platforms that we have now for things where people can disseminate information too. So there’s a lot out there.

I will say the biggest thing that I have seen beyond just how quickly information can flow is there’s just so much more editorial content out there now. And it’s like entertainment editorial content. You tune in to hear what somebody’s take is on something. And that, I think, is difficult because I feel like as somebody who’s striving to be an objective journalist and create a space for objective journalism where people can get information that’s not biased, it’s challenging because we just have so many platforms out there. And I think the lines have been blurred as to what is journalism and what is just people’s hot take on something.

[00:30:04.740] – Craig
Entertainment, right? Whether it be right or left, it’s how do you get the facts?

[00:30:09.990] – Kelcey
What are the basic facts of this story? And it’s sometimes hard to sift through all of the noise to find that. And I guess a good example of that, a way to describe that is sports. If you just tune in for that Monday morning show where you’re listening to all these commentators talk about a game and what they think of the players and the coaches, etc. and that’s how you base, how you feel about a team without ever watching a game, if you’re only tuning into that editorial content where you’re listening to people call into a show with their opinion about a coach or that player or what happened in a game, but you never watched the actual game to make a decision for yourself, I think some of that is happening in news as well. Those editorial shows can be very entertaining. And so sometimes that’s the only thing that people are tuning into for their information, and they’re not seeking out the actual general story that lays out the bullet points and the facts as to what happened. So we’re in a whole new world. I don’t know where it will go. We’re all figuring this out as we go along, but it’s different, Craig. It’s very different than when I started as a young…

[00:31:20.570] – Craig
Well, we could do a whole show and maybe we will someday, about how the news world has changed. It’s a whole topic. I think it’s actually quite controversial as far as is there news? Is it biased? Who’s controlling it? There’s a lot of information, as you said. Maybe that’s a whole episode on its own.

Time is flown here. I do need to ask you the last question here on 1% Better, which is if you can go back to yourself as an 18-year-old, or maybe perhaps you have a grandchild someday and you sit down and say, Here’s my best 1% Better advice about life. What would it be?

[00:31:54.740] – Kelcey
Do I have to just choose one thing?

[00:31:56.320] – Craig
No, you can do as many as you want.

[00:31:58.300] – Kelcey
Okay, I have three.

[00:31:59.870] – Craig
Okay.

[00:32:00.450] – Kelcey
Number one, I would have had children sooner. I think I waited too long to have kids, and I would have wanted them to know their grandparents more. I was so worried about being able to afford, manage work and kids, and I think just being nervous about being able to handle it all, I waited longer than I should have maybe. We have a great life, and it’s perfect the way that it is. But I would tell a younger version of myself, You don’t have to wait as long. Just jump in and just get your life started.

Number two, I would have done some overseas study when I was in college. That was a dream of mine. I didn’t do it because I couldn’t figure out financially how to do it. I worked two jobs in the summer, and I worked a job 20-25 hours a week during the school year. And I thought if I don’t have those two jobs in the summertime, I won’t have enough money going back to school. There’s always a way to figure it out. And I needed to be a better problem solver in college and just have that experience because that is something that I wanted, I never did it, and you can make it happen.

Number three, prioritize sleep. For about 20 years of my life, I pushed myself and cut sleep out so that I could get a certain amount of things done every single day. I really did not think that sleep was all that important. It was getting things done. I have to get up and I have to accomplish all of these things in a day. I realized in my 40s, sleep is very important. It is very important for your brain. Absolutely. And if you want to live a long life, you do need to actually sleep. So do not think that you are tough by cutting it out and drinking more coffee. Just make sure you get a good night’s sleep more than you’re not getting a good night’s sleep.

[00:33:45.110] – Craig
That’s excellent advice. Kelcey, thank you so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule. Thank you for everything you do and providing us with news and fact-based and cutting through the clutter. It’s very much appreciated. Everything else you do outside of work in the community. I know you’re very active as well, so thank you so much.

[00:34:04.880] – Kelcey
Thank you, Craig

[00:34:05.880] – Craig
Take care. Bye-bye.

[00:34:07.060] – Kelcey
Bye.