FEATURE:

Leslie Wilcox

Interview by Michael Egan

Most of us remember Leslie Wilcox from her news-anchor days on KHON2 5 p.m. evening newscast. She was the pretty one. But a year ago, as many also will recall, she abruptly quit her post to become CEO and President of PBS Hawaii. Today she’s a stylish, self-possessed executive, more business professional than celebrity, and clearly a woman in full possession of herself.

I met with her in her unostentatiously furnished office at PBS, down the road from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Unlike most top managers, her space is dominated by a large oblong table and straight-backed chairs, not by a heavy desk and big computers. The table is the focal point, she says, of the collaborative meetings that are the heart of her executive style. She speaks warmly of her colleagues and their mutual creativity.

The success she now enjoys didn’t come easily to Leslie, who grew up in a financially straitened home in Niu and Kuliouou Valleys. ‘My family lived in a nice middle class neighborhood,’ she says, ‘but frankly we were broke. It may not have looked like it from the outside, but we struggled to pay our bills every month. We had some issues! But no one ever really knew about it. As time went on I learned that there’s a difference between the way things appear from the outside and how they really are. This really shaped my life.’

Later in our interview she admitted that exploring the distance between appearance and reality was among the driving forces of her interest in journalism. It was a fascination with the facts and presenting them precisely that attracted her to the world of newspapers, communications and TV. That and ‘curiosity about other people.’

An early turning point, when she was just 18 years old, was her parents’ divorce.

A born writer?she’d already won a national writing competition held on the mainland, her first visit?she was forced to turn down a lucrative journalism scholarship at the University of Southern California so she could support her mother and young siblings.

After a spell waitressing ‘and almost everything else,’ she laughs with some embarrassment, one day Leslie simply walked into the offices of the Honolulu.

Star Bulletin and asked for a job. And got it. Initially she was given a variety of small tasks, but then came a sudden break: the chance to write a real story for a reporter who was sick. ‘An editor noticed and I was given a temporary reporting job.’ When another colleague went on maternity leave she became full-time, a job she combined with being a student at UH. ‘It was very hard,’ she recalls. ‘I just didn’t sleep at all!’

Another big turning point came when she was sent to report on an industrial accident where someone had been killed. It was then she realized that she was a person first and a journalist second. She became conscious too ‘of the power you wield when you have a pen and access to a printing press.’

This sense of responsibility has always characterized her reporting. ‘You often meet people at times when things are just raw.’

What Leslie liked about her profession was what she calls ‘enterprise reporting,’ digging out the news and communicating it without embellishment. She wasn’t interested in the ‘feel-good’ writing most women journalists were steered towards in the Seventies. She wanted to deal in hard facts, and the sense that if she didn’t report them with integrity important things would not be known.

‘Even as an anchor I insisted on going out every day and reporting. Because of studio pressures I had this small footprint of reporting time, but I still went out and found my own news items.’

She loved ‘crafting stories’ for TV. Visual reporting is ‘a very different animal’ than print because so much information is immediately apparent to the viewer, what she calls ‘the woman in the green dress.’ TV news makes adjectives and adverbs superfluous. But after adapting to the medium, she adds, ‘I really liked the puzzle part of putting together a story,’ the blending of words and images.
In time came marriage, the adoption of a child, divorce. She married ‘for the right reasons,’ Leslie says, and continues to maintain a good relationship with her ex. A decade-long spell of being single followed until she met her second husband, Jeff Brown. They now live happily together on the North Shore with one of their four children (the others are grown and flown).

She says Jeff is enormously supportive of her. ‘I’ve always tended to overwork, especially at the time when I was helping with the Lokahi drive and also working professionally. I was sleep deprived but he helped me immeasurably. He’s a good guy.’

What did she mean by ‘a good guy’ I wondered, a phrase she’d also used about her first husband. ‘Someone with integrity,’ she said, ‘and sense of humor. A lot of other things help, of course, but those two are really big with me.’

I reminded her that this interview would appear in GH’s Valentine’s Issue. What did she think about love, and what advice would she give to someone about to marry, or even remarry? ‘Well, I really believe in marriage,’ she answered, ‘but you need to appreciate the importance of the little things. So many little things are really big things. Also, you have to find inspiration and happiness on your own, and share it. You can’t depend on the other person to give you that. It has to start with you. Someone else can help you expand it, but for me it really helps to be flexible and understanding and non-judgmental.’

She feels that her capacity to be non-judgmental helped her as a journalist. ‘I was just interested in the facts, the value of the information. My job was to just get the story and write it up. It seemed natural to do that.’ From her early days as a reporter she’d always begin with the imaginary question, ‘Hey, Auntie, guess what happened today?’ And then answer it, in conversational style. She used it to help figure out what was most important in the day’s events for her readers/audience. ‘I delivered my stories as if I were talking to my good friend or family members,’ she says. Her view is that if anything lies behind her journalistic success it was that strategy, together with the ultimate realization that she didn’t have to be like so many of her charismatic male colleagues. She just had to be herself.

So does that mean that her political and ethical values affected her reporting? Leslie says not. ‘I don’t have deep political stripes, I’m independent, I choose based on singular issues. I ask myself, does this make sense? Then I make up my mind. Also like many journalists, I find that if I don’t like someone I bend over backwards not to discriminate against them. I never had to fight hard to keep my opinion out of it.’

Why did she decide to leave TV news and join PBS? ‘I decided to leave journalism in part because of what it is slowly becoming. News used to be specialized. There were news companies. That was their product. Now in many news companies the product is simply profit.’

I commented that everyone has to pay their bills, and she agreed. ‘But the new emphasis creates a whole different look at how you make decisions. It got uncomfortable for me towards the end, the pressure to put say Anna Nicole Smith as the headline rather than other things that affected more people. One wonderful thing about working for PBS Hawaii is you’ll never see lurid stories about the latest pop-idol scandal, unless it’s an examination of our celebrity obsessed culture.’

Leslie obviously loves her new position and feels she is making a real contribution. ‘The owners of public television are the best owners in town?the citizens of the state. Today, our donations are up, community outreach is up, we have more visits to our web site, we have some momentum going because people, our community, embrace what we’re trying to do. All our key metrics are up.’

Leslie’s Facts & Stats Name: Leslie Wilcox Born and educated: Oahu Age: 53 Children: Four Married: Twice Professional: Reporter, Honolulu Star Bulletin; anchor and assistant newsdirector, KGMB9; executive producer and anchor, KHON2; anchor ‘Asia Now’; co-director, Lokahi Giving Project; CEO and President, Public Broadcasting Service, Hawaii.

What about the future of public TV? ‘I think public television is more valuable than it has ever been,’ she responds. ‘We’re an uncluttered environment that is not driven by commercialism. And we believe in education, excellence in education.’ The airwaves are ‘precious’ and can be a significant way to help improve education generally.

Leslie feels she was partly prepared for her new managerial role by the work she did with the teams she helped lead when in TV news and as co-founder the Lokahi Giving Project, a multi-million-dollar charitable drive. She enjoys working with others ‘in pursuit of an ambitious goal.’

And at PBS that goal is...? ‘To serve the community. We’re not trying to sell you cereal or influence your vote. We are trying to create an informed citizenry. That means we’ll take on issues that perhaps commercial television would say are too boring or not visual enough. This is the place where we can tell the stories of the Islands.’

Leslie Wilcox is that rarest of media presences, a pragmatic idealist. I left with the strong feeling that the future of public television in Hawaii is in the safest of hands.

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