Sally Kidd, Hearst’s national correspondent in Washington, D.C., handed in her resignation after 17 years covering “thousands of stories, interviews and live shots, 100s of congressional hearings and White House briefings, four presidents, two impeachments, one insurrection and a global pandemic.”
Kidd says she was thinking about doing something different as far back as the 2016 election.
“Everybody thought Hillary was going to be the first woman president,” Kidd says. “I thought wow, I can’t miss covering this, covering history, and then Trump happened and I thought well I can’t leave now.”
Then there was an insurrection, an impeachment, a global pandemic, and with the exception of the war in Ukraine, “I felt like it was a good time to go ahead and make the move,” Kidd says.
I’ve known Sally Kidd since the early ’90s when we both worked at WINK in Fort Myers, Fla. She was an anchor/reporter and I was the marketing director. We both worked together again at WESH in Orlando.
Kidd says in 2004, she resigned from WESH and moved to Washington, D.C. on a whim after vacationing there. “It was the craziest thing I have ever done, Paul.”
Kidd says she starting freelancing for the Hearst bureau and started “covering stories that are a little more intellectually satisfying. This was just something totally new covering the White House and Congress.”
Offered a permanent reporter/correspondent position by Wendy Wilk, Hearst TV Washington bureau chief, Kidd signed on, never imagining she’d stay for 17 years.
“It was great,” Kidd says. “I loved it.”
Kidd says in the beginning, she was covering all the big stories coming out of Washington, from the Iraq war, the war on terror, and the rise of Al-Qaeda.
“I was live at the White House or was live from Capitol Hill covering whatever President Bush was doing at the time,” Kidd says.
Then came the historic election of 2008 election with Barack Obama getting elected.
“That was an exciting time,” Kidd says. “I had just been a witness to history. I have had the best front row seat. It has been amazing.”
Kidd says she had a one-on-one interview with President Obama in the White House in 2011 and found him very personable and friendly. “We chatted about Hawaii because at the time Hearst owned a station in Hawaii,” Kidd says. “I was there to talk about his jobs plan, but I asked about everything else under the sun.”
Kidd asked Obama if the stress of his job “ever makes you want to pick up a cigarette.”
According to an article in the Washington Post, Obama told Kidd: “There are certainly days where I’ve got to grab a lot of celery sticks to make up for that bad habit I gave up.”
Kidd says there were many highlights in her 17 years as Hearst’s national correspondent. Interviews with Hillary Clinton, Jeb Busch, Marco Rubio and Vice President Joe Biden, who caught Kidd off-guard by asking her about being a private pilot, a fact she thought nobody knew.
After resigning, Kidd spent almost a month on the road as she described it on her Facebook page, “20 days, 6,278 miles, 17 states, seven National Parks, 12 hotels, two campgrounds, at least 250 gallons of gas, dozens of Diet Cokes.”
Next up, a trip to Europe.
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