Old men love waking up with NBC 10’s Lori Wilson and if you could muster up enough energy at 5 a.m. to turn on your TV and keep your eyes open, so would you. By Rosella Eleanor LaFevre.
Lori Wilson has only been awake for eight hours and she’s yawning. But then Wilson got up around 2 a.m. “My first alarm goes off at two, and then I have one at two-ten. The very last possible alarm goes off at two-fifteen,” laughs Wilson, co-anchor of the 5 a.m. morning show on one of Philadelphia’s most-watched news stations.
Doe-eyed Wilson sits on a large comfortable couch in an edit booth in NBC 10’s Bala Cynwood headquarters at 10 a.m., willing to tell us all about her job in the fourth largest broadcasting market. Most days, her work is done by now and she’s headed home where, on days like today, she takes a nap.
So sometimes it’s hard to deal with getting up that early, but at least the drive is only seven minutes long. “The goal is always to be very close to the station, because it’s the middle of the night,” exclaims Wilson, who did morning shows at the last two stations she worked at.
Around three a.m., Wilson arrives at the station to prepare for the show. First she reads through the two hours of copy, which she splits down the middle with co-anchor Terry Ruggles, in a half-hour or 45 minutes. In addition to checking the copy for accuracy and up-to-date information, Wilson pays close attention to the wording. “There are times when I have to make changes just because of the way that I speak – sometimes something is written formally and I’m a little more conversational in my delivery,” Wilson says.
After reading through the copy, Wilson reads a few newspapers – usually done online. “You never know when breaking news is going to happen and you’re going to have to give background about it, be able to vamp about it,” says the anchor.
By 4 a.m., the beautiful, petite TV personality must be in the makeup room where, in about 20 minutes, she does her own face. This isn’t something that came easily to Wilson, who had never before worked at a station with its own professional makeup artist on staff. NBC 10’s Carie Brescia taught her everything she knows. “I just sucked the life out of her,” Wilson says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ She gave me lessons and hopefully it works!”
It sure does, most viewers would agree, getting a load of her mile-long eyelashes and blindingly white, perfect smile. The whole package is even more stunning in person. It’s no wonder that she got her start in commercials when she was in third grade.
A Columbas, Indiana native, Wilson starred in a commercial for Indiana Bell’s call waiting service, which was the latest innovation. “I’m generally a shy person by nature so the camera was easier,” Wilson says. “I could hide behind the camera; it was just me and the camera one-on-one, even if millions of people are watching so I fell in love with that aspect of it.”
The moment she realized how important television could be, she was watching Ronald Reagan make a State of the Union address. The whole entire country is probably watching the same thing I’m watching right now, she thought. It was powerful, she says, realizing that “we could all be connected at one time and getting information.” TV, that’s the way to go, she thought.
Television is what gives her the opportunity, after all, to do what she loves, and that’s telling stories, inspiring people to act, and giving them the information they need in their daily lives, like “traffic, weather, what’s safe, what’s not, medical news,” she says.
The “idea that we’re all kind of in it together” is one that continues to move Wilson. “We all come in different packages but we’re exactly the same underneath so I think stories that connect us all really draw me in,” Wilson says. “If I can tell a story about an 89-year-old grandmother that you relate to, then I feel like that’s having purpose in your life.”
Since earning a B.A. in Journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Wilson has worked at four stations. Her first two stations were in smaller markets: Champaign, Illinois and Shreveport, Louisiana. Her third station, and last stop before Philadelphia, was WGCL in Atlanta, Georgia.
At WGCL she worked as a morning anchor, weekend anchor, entertainment reporter and general assignment reporter until her boss decided not to renew her contract, which is “essentially being fired from your job.” To hear her tell it, she was the “victim of circumstance,” having had four bosses in three years, with the last deciding she was just “a little too sassy,” Wilson says. “And that’s fine. We just butted heads, so I left that job and then had the opportunity to look for another job.”
Wilson, who believes “everything was divinely ordered and led,” got a few offers closer to home but in the interest of moving toward a network job in, say, New York City or Washington, DC, came to NBC 10 in Philadelphia. It’s a “great city that’s close to everything and has so much to offer,” she says, voicing the love she has for where she’s at.
She says one of the deciding factors was The 10! Show, the station’s morning talk show, which she hosted when she arrived here. Also, she loves her current boss, someone who “looks you in the eye, who tells you what’s happening,” she says. “It’s nice.”
That’s not all there is to love about her job, and despite the fact that she’s yawning today, that includes waking people up, she says. “I think there’s a way to do it. There’s a temperament, there’s an energy, there’s a seriousness and then there’s a little bit of light.”
One of Wilson’s favorite parts of the job is the off-air stuff she gets asked to do. When you’re on television, “There’s a lot of stuff that you’re gonna be asked to be a part of in the community,” Wilson says. “Going and mentoring young girls, emceeing events that raise money for fundraisers. Those are the things that matter to me and the only reason that I do it is because I have a platform. The only reason they care about having me come out is because I’m on TV. That’s an honor.”
As with any career, of course, it can be very challenging at times. “When you stop connecting to stories or stop being affected by things, then you probably need to do something else with your life,” Wilson says. “Like whenever harm comes to a child, it’s hard to deal with. Stories like that, when people come up missing or dead, it’s hard because I always try to put myself in the place of the families.”
Sometimes the challenging part of the job is keeping your lips zipped on controversial topics. “It’s hard being objective in such a heated political climate,” Wilson says. And then there are times when it’s not what you say but how you say it that can cause trouble. “It’s all in your inflection when you’re a TV journalist,” Wilson says.
One of the things industry watchers have often lamented is the shift away from hard-hitting news and toward entertainment. While it can be hard for some to accept that celebrities are making news daily or that citizen journalists are making waves with YouTube videos, Wilson looks at it this way: “Those things, based on my definition of news, which is what people are talking about, those are things you have to include in the conversation.”
So will she be staying in Philadelphia, where her co-anchor Tim Ruggles has been for 30 years? “I’d like to be on a national platform, but I am completely satisfied and happy if Philly is my last stop,” she says.
