By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
Former WCSH-TV Channel 6 reporter and weekend news anchor Jennifer Rooks has worked weekends for the last 18 1/2 years. In her new post, host of the weekly public affairs series “Maine Watch,” Rooks has free time at the week’s end.
Now, if she can only let herself relax.
The Cape Elizabeth resident joined the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) on June 4 after 13 years at Channel 6 in Portland and WLBZ-TV Channel 2 in Bangor.
“With every show I learn something,” Rooks says during an interview at the MPBN radio building in Portland. She splits her time between the radio station and MPBN’s television studio in Lewiston.
As host of a weekly series, Rooks’ schedule has changed a bit – she’s not racing out to cover traffic stories – but there’s still plenty of room for the unexpected. The Nov. 30 show was ready to air, but then a hearing examiner’s report to the Maine Public Utilities Commission was released, recommending against the proposed sale of Verizon Communications’ landline telephone business to Fairpoint Communications Inc. So Rooks and her producers scrambled to put together a new show about the debate.
“For the past couple of years there wasn’t a regular host for the show,” Rooks says. “MPBN really wanted someone who would really focus.”
Previous “Maine Watch” hosts include former Maine Gov. Angus King, MPBN radio news producer Barbara Cariddi and former Channel 6 co-worker Don Carrigan.
Rooks says “Maine Watch” gives her the opportunity to tackle in-depth reporting every week, a style of journalism she has always favored. In 1998, Rooks traveled to Hungary and Bosnia to cover deployed Maine National Guard and Reserve soldiers. Her reports earned her a Edward R. Murrow award.
Last summer, Rooks interviewed people connected to World War II, ordinary people put in extraordinary circumstances, she says.
“[They’re] the kind of people if you could meet one of them in your life, you’d be lucky,” she says. “It sounds corny, but I could do that all my life – interviewing fascinating people.”
Rooks’ documentary, “Citizen King,” about the former governor earned her a second Edward R. Murrow award in 2003.
When she first started working as a reporter in Maine, Rooks says she was afraid no one would talk to her. Having grown up in suburban Atlanta, she says she worried there might be some truth to the stoic New Englander archetype.
“There’s no such thing as this Yankee reticence,” she says. “It’s a myth.”
No doubt it helped to receive a warm welcome from her new colleagues at Channel 6.
“Susan Kimball said, ‘Oh, you must be Jennifer’ and gave me a hug,” she recalls.
Rooks earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. While in college she landed an internship at CNN, which was then headquartered in the basement of the Turner Broadcasting System’s (TBS) building in Atlanta and nothing like the large-scale, world-wide operation it is today, she says.
Her first “real” job was at KPIX-TV in San Francisco, where she worked as a news messenger for $6 an hour. The job largely entailed driving to the airport to pick up footage and interview subjects.
“Here I have this college degree and internship at CNN and I’m doing this humiliating job,” Rooks recalls thinking to herself.
The job, however, gave Rooks a chance to see how the newsroom operates. She quickly realized the reporters and photographers were the ones who got to go out into the field. Rooks went on to become a weekend assignment editor, reporter and producer in San Francisco and Monterey.
While in California, Rooks says she had an experience that showed her how important the news can be during a time of uncertainty. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale rocked San Francisco, killing several people and causing major infrastructure damage.
“You’d walk down the street and see people with portable TVs and you’d realize they were getting the news from your station,” she says.
Rook says she went through a similar experience while covering Maine’s Ice Storm of 1998. While there may be a lot of cynicism in the business, when it really matters, the news becomes a powerful tool informing someone’s day, she says.
She met her future husband, Mike, while in graduate school. Rooks says her husband has a large extended family in Maine, but when they decided to move to the state, they didn’t think it would be for more than a couple of years.
But then they got settled in and as Rooks puts it, “Maine gets in your blood.”
Rooks says her new position is not so different from that of news reporter in that both require her to make her guests feel comfortable. For her own part, Rooks says she has to become comfortable asking her questions on camera rather than behind the scenes. Before it didn’t really matter how she phrased her questions, but now Rooks is finding she has to speak more clearly and be more articulate.
Tonight, Rooks will forgo articulate for goofy as she reprises her role as master of ceremonies at Holiday Fest 2007 in South Portland’s Mill Creek Park. The mother of two says the hardest part of the job is finding fresh holiday jokes appropriate for all ages.
Rooks says daughter Julia, 6, and son Sam, 9, aren’t impressed by her celebrity. She remembers coming home and asking if they saw a story she was particularly excited about and finding out they didn’t even watch the broadcast.
When it comes to seeing mom on TV, “they don’t think it’s a very big deal,” Rooks says.