For the past couple of weeks, KDFW/Channel 4 has had a series of digital billboards around DFW, honoring veteran anchor Clarice Tinsley on her 40th anniversary with the station. The billboards change daily, each one showing a different phase of Tinsley’s career.
On her Twitter feed, colleagues, competitors and viewers have been congratulating Tinsley, who will also be honored with a half-hour special, “CT 40: A Broadcast Life,” airing at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday (Dec. 4) on Fox 4. All the attention is sort of a flip for Tinsley, who says that one of the reasons she’s in the business is to tell other people’s stories.
“I’m very grateful,” says Tinsley, who currently co-anchors the 5:30 and 10 p.m. newscasts on Fox 4. “It makes me happy. It’s very humbling. And it’s a time of reflection, because it’s about the work. It’s doing the work every day, every newscast, every story, and there really isn’t an opportunity to sit back and take a breath and look at what happened in the past.”
In the late ‘70s, Tinsley was working for a Milwaukee TV station when she was contacted by Allen Levy, then the producer of the 6 p.m. mews at KDFW, who was calling friends around the country looking for a reporter good enough to fill an opening at a station in the No. 10 (now No. 5) market in the country. A Milwaukee friend suggested Tinsley.
Her demo tape included some anchoring footage along with field reporting. Levy liked the anchor footage, and suggested to KDFW’s then-news director that he consider Tinsley if they had an anchor opening. It turned out to be a timely suggestion, and Tinsley was brought in. She liked the hospitality of DFW and the opportunities she got at the station, and it didn’t take long before she decided that it would be a good place to set down roots.
She didn’t immediately think a long career in DFW was a lock, because there were factors she couldn’t control. Now she often runs into people who say that they’ve been watching her since they were children, or that they’ve watched her for more than 30 years.
“I think maybe sometimes some people think, ‘Oh, those are too many years to talk about’,” she says. “ I’m like, ‘No, no, no — I love hearing that.’ First of all, thank you for watching for all these years, but that’s part of what you want to hear that you’ve been part of someone’s life for years or decades. “
Tinsley was at the station less than 10 years when she won a George Foster Peabody Award for “A Call for Help,” a 1984 report on response flaws in Dallas’ 911 system. In 1995, she launched the “Hometown Heroes” series, a series of reports on volunteers and people who give of themselves; it continues to air during the Monday newscasts.