The Airport Ride That Opened the Door to CBS News

In early 1982, I was producing the 11 o'clock news at KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco. Diane Sawyer, then an anchor at CBS News, came to speak in our newsroom. I don't even remember why. That's the kind of thing that happened back then. When the event ended, someone asked whether anyone would drive her to the airport, and my hand was in the air before the question was finished.

During the drive, I told her I wanted to get on the network and asked how to do it. She answered without hesitation. CBS was launching a new overnight program that would run from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and the network was about to begin hiring its staff. I should apply, she said. So I did. They needed someone who knew how to produce a live television news broadcast, which was exactly what I had been doing. They contacted a CBS News correspondent in San Francisco who knew the program I was running and thought highly of it. I got the job.

I was 27 when I arrived at CBS News, and I was stunned by how much I loved the place. It fit me in a way I had not expected. I worked from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and was responsible for two hours of the overnight broadcast, while a colleague, Sue Trieman, handled the other two. At the time, my wife Melinda and I were living on a houseboat in Sausalito. We left it for New York just before we got married. My college pal Brock Greene, who later founded Oligo Nation, found us a good apartment there, and we stayed in it for three years.

The job paid twice as much as I had earned as a local news producer. By then, I had five years of experience writing and producing radio and television in Boston and San Francisco, starting right out of college. Even at 27, which was young for CBS News in those days, I felt I had the background to do the work properly. CBS hired 65 people to staff the overnight broadcast. The audience was not large. It was made up of shift workers, new mothers, and people who happened to be awake at strange hours. Still, I have always believed it was a great way to enter the network. Once you're in, you're in. Some of the people hired in 1982 remained at CBS News for decades. A few are still there.

I stayed on the overnight program for about a year and a half before I was recruited to the CBS Evening News, which felt like a dream come true. Roughly a year and a half later, a position became available at the Evening News bureau in London. I asked Melinda why we would not do it. Why wouldn't we? We said yes, and before we knew it, we were living in London.

Over time, I came to believe that the London posting was the best thing that ever happened to me at CBS News. It was there that I learned some of the lessons that shaped the way I thought about broadcast journalism for the rest of my career, including one from our founder, Bill Paley, that I still think about today.