On January 5 long time TV news anchor and reporter Karen McNew embarked on her new career as a “senior communications consultant” for Carilion Clinic. McNew, a Virginia Tech alumna and former Miss Virginia contestant, spent almost 17 years at WSLS-10 in Roanoke, winning a regional Emmy for her work as an anchor and a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for a series of stories she did on a very premature baby who survived to become a healthy child.
McNew, also an avid runner who helped spearhead a Carilion-sponsored tem-mile race at Smith Mountain Lake last year, will not be the public voice for Carilion, but will work internally. Her stories about goings-on at the Carilion hospitals, the Virginia Tech-Carilion School of Medicine, the Research Institute and Jefferson College of Health Sciences (a Carilion Clinic affiliate) will be seen on the Carilion website and various forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.).
For the time being a non-compete clause precludes her doing journalistic pieces about the regional health care giant over the TV airwaves.
McNew will work alongside others in the marketing and communications departments, “doing what I’ve been doing [but] as an in-house health reporter. They have a newsroom concept that is really exciting. I’ll be able to tell stories about the amazing research and advances in patient care – all that’s going on at the Carilion Clinic campus.”
She’s excited at age 40 to be part of the growing Carilion empire and its influence in the valley. McNew remembers when the medical school-research institute – specialty clinic campus on South Jefferson was mostly a “brownfield,” with a flour mill that has since been relocated to Roanoke County. “At the time I thought, what’s that going to look like? When you drive down Jefferson these days the landscape has changed so much. I think that’s only going to grow.”
Reporting from the field on health care stories, when not on the anchor desk, was often McNew’s focus. She always felt “honored” in being allowed to share those stories with the community at large, “in an attempt to create awareness and help others. I’m excited to still be able to do that with Carilion.”
McNew jumped right into her brave new world on the first day with a Top Ten list about transitioning from the world of television to her new role at Carilion, a production that could be seen on-line. She promised some humor: “I’m not exactly like David Letterman,” she chuckled.
A woman who contacted her about a melanoma that had spread to her brain as cancer once asked McNew to tell her story on television, so that other families would not have to go through the same thing. “We shared stories about getting those suspicious moles checked.” A thank you card from the woman with terminal cancer touched McNew. “I needed to be thanking her.”
The “teeny beanie baby story” about a girl born (at Carilion) so small her father could slip his wedding band on her leg won McNew the Murrow award, named for the pioneering CBS-TV newsman. That was a more uplifting story she admits. Her reports chronicled the baby’s life to the age of one year, when she was a “happy, healthy girl.”
“I’m not really changing who I am to go to Carilion Clinic,” promises McNew, who lives at Smith Mountain Lake with her husband Matt McGuire. “It just allows me to be who I have been and then grow in that role as a health reporter. [Telling] amazing stories that are happening every day in our communities.”
McNew says Carilion has a videography crew that rivals some television news rooms, so technology doesn’t seem to be an issue. “I am so excited – it’s amazing that it’s even happening. Here I am going to make this major shift in my life. Everything feels right about it.”
By Gene Marrano
