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It’s Home Again in Little Rock for KATV Anchor Chris May

4 min read

Little Rock’s Chris May has news for Thomas Wolfe: You can go home again.

After nearly two decades as a big-market news anchor, he returned to KATV in August, and last week reflected on being back where he started.

“This is the station I grew up watching, the station where I started my career and the station where I’m wanting to end my career.”

It’s also in the town where he grew up, attended Catholic High School and met his wife, Lea. And unlike George Webber, the character in Wolfe’s novel, May says his homecoming has been joyful.

“I left here for Boston [where he worked at WHDH-TV and WBZ-TV] in September 1998. I was away for 18 years — nine years in Boston and nine years in Philadelphia [KYW-TV, a CBS-owned and operated station]. I loved those places, and they have a lot to offer, but I’ve never found myself wanting for anything in Little Rock. You can’t go home again? After a month back at KATV and two months back in town, I’d point to my experience and say it’s just the opposite.”

The family is also on familiar ground. Lea moved to Little Rock as a girl and graduated from Pulaski Academy and the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. Children Owen, 11, and Mary Evelyn, 7, spent summer months with Little Rock grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. “It’s the only city we could have moved to that wouldn’t have felt like a new home for them,” May said.

Of course, no hometown is frozen in time. “When you’ve been gone, you look at things with fresh eyes. I love driving around the thriving downtown and River Market, and then to west Little Rock to things that I remember as a kid being the absolute end of the city. Now you blast past them and keep driving another 15 minutes to where you’re going to. I have a brother-in-law living in the Quapaw Quarter, and it’s incredible the options they have for food and entertainment.”

Back at Channel 7, among many new faces he found bedrock traditions. “I’m 46, and for the first time I’m twice as old as some of my colleagues. But I’m enjoying learning from them. One thing that hasn’t changed is the newsroom culture. It’s a smart group, very confident, and they come in every day and set their own agenda. They discuss stories and issues intelligently, then go out and execute. It’s comforting to come back into that familiar commitment to being great.”

Some changes have been industrywide, he said, including a shift to online reporting first. “Yes, we’re working harder to keep people informed online, but we also have an obligation to make sure newscasts present the news of the day in a way that seems fresh. I’m sort of an old-school guy, with great faith in the value of the 5, 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts.”

May said that no matter how technology evolves, viewers will always be interested in “what’s going on in the community, the city, the state.” He added, “There are only a few places you can go for that — local newspapers, television stations. So even if there’s more contraction among national news outlets, I believe the local element is going to last, to be around for a long time, and it should be.”

The homecoming opportunity was a surprise for May, who found himself a “news anchor on sabbatical” after a KYW personnel move that also led to the departure of colleagues Beasley Reece, the former NFL star, and chief meteorologist Kathy Orr in June 2015. May, a graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State, was bound by his CBS contract until August 2016.

“Last Christmas, thinking about my next opportunity, I heard the possibility this job was going to come open for the first time in 13 years,” May said. “Scott Inman [who left the anchor’s job in March to join GenWealth Financial Advisors] had done a terrific job for a long time. He made a change in his life that I don’t think many people expected.

“So I had a conversation with my father-in-law, and he said that out of all the places I could possibly go, there was no place where I could have a bigger impact than in Arkansas. I think deep down I knew that, but to hear somebody say it was really meaningful. So here I am, and it’s been greater than I could have imagined.”

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