Longtime anchor Jean Enersen says farewell to KING 5 after working 48 years at the anchor desk and covering the important stories in Western Washington for decades.
Enersen began working at KING 5 in 1968 and became an anchor in 1972 – the first female local anchor and one of the first woman anchors to hit the airwaves.
"The newsroom used to be fueled with cigarettes - and perhaps a wee drop of whiskey! Really!" she said.
In addition to numerous reports about Western Washington, Enersen traveled around the world for KING 5 viewers. She was a part of the first television news crews to report from China after the U.S. resumed trade relations.
In 1988, Enersen was the first American journalist ever to report directly to Soviet viewers, broadcasting live from Moscow.
She has covered major events, from the first man on the moon and the Mount St. Helens eruption to the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle.
She has interviewed hundreds of people - Pres. Jimmy Carter to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.
Enersen built a reputation as the most popular, respected and most trusted news anchor in the Northwest.
Enersen retired from the anchor chair in 2014, but continues to work on HealthLink and specials including Northwest Newsmakers, as well as KING 5's award winning political coverage and major news events.
A true pioneer for women in television, Jean Enersen's resume includes these notable firsts:
- First Local TV reporter in China as U.S. and China re-established diplomatic relations in 1979
- First Local American TV host to anchor a TV news program in the Soviet Union and to host a series of broadcasts between the US and USSR
- First Local reporter to travel with the Gates Foundation to Africa, for which Enersen and the KING 5 team produced a ground breaking documentary "Sharing the Wealth"
- First American to host "Asia Now," a weekly TV program seen in 13 Asian countries and 75 U.S. markets
- First Chair of the NW AIDS Walk and produced a documentary called Sexual Survival, which became the station's highest rated documentary and another called Living with AIDS
"Life always goes forward, rarely backward," she said.
