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How We Got Started: Angela Davis

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Graduation season is upon us, and a number of students are getting ready to leave either high school or college and move on with the next step in their lives.

For some people, deciding what they want to do next is easy. For others, this is a moment filled with unanswered questions.

All week, the WCCO Morning Show team is sharing how they ended up doing what they're doing. Previous installments covered the beginnings of Mike Augustyniak and Natalie Nyhus's careers. Now it's time to take a look at how Angela Davis got started.

Davis says she had a very early inspiration that not many know about -- she was raised by her grandparents. She grew up on their farm in southern Virginia.

Her grandfather was a minister and the pastor of a Baptist church, so she spent Saturday nights watching him write his sermons for Sunday morning and practice them. Davis's grandmother loved to watch the network morning news shows before putting Davis on the bus to go to school.

By the time she was 12, Davis knew she wanted to be a TV reporter. She majored in journalism at the University of Maryland, graduated in 1990, and then went to work at CNN in Atlanta behind the scenes.

From there, she went to the CBS affiliate in Washington D.C., where she served as a writer and producer.

It was there that Davis was able to put together a resume tape. Her job was to go out and get additional interviews for reporters, but the photographers would let her shoot on-camera standups that she later used to edit together a resume reel.

Davis's first on-air reporting job was in Lexington, Ky. in 1992, covering City Hall and anchoring on a fill-in basis.

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