Sometimes getting fired really does open up a new door. For Shannon Bream, now 41, it turned out to be a stutter along the path that led to her current gig as FOX News Channel's Supreme Court reporter, a frequent guest anchor of America Live, Special Report and FOX News Sunday. Bream arrived at FOX with both a law degree and two tiaras. No, you don't need to rub your eyes--you read that correctly.
While down at the RNC in Tampa, I spoke to Bream to hear about her amazing career track from pageant to politics, and had to share with you.
Here's Bream covering the RNC on the ground on Tampa for FOX News. Go Shannon, go!
A seventh-generation Floridian, Bream headed to Liberty University in Virginia for college. "While I was there I had a hairdresser who ran a local pageant and said, You really should do this. It was a whirlwind. I never competed as a kid. No Toddlers and Tiaras in my family, but within six months I had won the local pageant and Miss Virginia. Miss America paid for my junior and senior years in college." Bream returned to Florida for law school and then someone suggested she enter the Miss USA pageant, a different system from Miss America. "I ended up competing and became Miss Florida. And it paid for law school."
Shannon moved to Tampa where she practiced employment law, mainly sexual harassment cases. She also was newly-married and participated with her husband in a story the local ABC affiliate was doing about marriages. It turned out to be her a-ha! moment.
"I've always been a news junkie," she told me. "Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention. I got a secret gig where I would practice law during the day and whenever I could get out at night I interned at the ABC station.
"I absolutely fell in love with the newsroom even though I was doing pretty basic tasks there. I just tried to capitalize on every little window of opportunity they would give me. I relied on the kindness of my coworkers too because I had no training in media so I would ask the different reporters if I come in on a day off to shadow you and see what you do and find out how you find sources and put together a story.
"I learned on the job. I would go to the boss every couple of weeks and say would do you mind looking at these scripts that I've written and give me your honest feedback. You have to wear them down. I refused to take no for an answer and eventually maybe out of sheer exasperation the boss said 'OK, I'm going to let you start doing some stories and put you on air and we'll see how it goes.'"
And It went OK until that boss left a new one took over, who fired Bream instead of giving Bream the chance to hone her skills.
Bream now calls getting fired just a "stutter" along the way to the job she loves; she spent months cold-calling until she landed other local TV jobs that eventually led to FOX. "It's a challenging business. It always stretches you intellectually. No two days are ever the same, so if you're usually bored it's a great business to be in. I'm fascinated by current events and the privilege of trying to share it with other people and tell a story."
And she's found her beauty pageant training a plus for network television.
"Live television is just like competing on live TV. You're never going to be perfect. You just try to prepare the best that you can and execute the best that you can and try to be in the moment. Sometimes people think there is only one track to get to whatever your particular dream job is. But I do think there are benefits to every experience you have professionally and personally, and we don't always control the turns and twists that our life takes, so I think if you focus on the positive that you take from that it will always benefit you in the next step and there will always be another step."
She says the key is being comfortable in your own skin. And that includes doing live television in the heat and humidity of Tampa and Charlotte where you saw her over the past two weeks covering the conventions for FOX. And that includes bad hair days. "Hopefully people listen to me and [ignore] how my hair looks," she laughs.
(Editor's note: I got into politics later, too; so hey, it's never too late to get Inspired! --MT)
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