by Ashlee Sadler

Seven years, three jobs and countless experiences later, UNC-Chapel Hill alumnus Fred Shropshire, 29, has returned to the Triangle to continue his career as a broadcast journalist.

After three years of working in Chicago for WGN-TV, Shropshire said he was ready to cross the Mason-Dixon line again. Shropshire has moved back to Durham to work for WTVD, a television station owned by ABC and Disney.

Shropshire grew up in Jacksonville, N.C., home of the second-largest Marine Corps base in the world, where he said his love for journalism began.

“My dad is a retired Marine, and my mom worked in an elementary school,” he said. “At 6 o’clock, it was as quiet as a library in our home. We’d watch the local news and the national news, and on Sunday we’d watch ‘60 Minutes.’”

Shropshire, who was graduated in 2000, said he got most of his experience working with Carolina Week, a TV program featuring newscasts produced by students in the school.

“We were laying the groundwork and experimenting a lot at the time,” he said. “We really wanted to be taken seriously. We had fun – but you look at The Daily Tar Heel, a news source that people turn to for information – we wanted the same thing for Carolina Week.”

Participating in Carolina Week meant making sacrifices, Shropshire said. He had to forfeit his role as co-captain of the UNC cheerleading squad. Shropshire said that a conversation with Charlie Tuggle, a broadcast professor, ultimately pushed him toward his decision.

“He said ‘You’re not going to go to the pro cheerleading league,’” Shropshire recalled. “You have those pipes that you can use to deliver news and pursue your career, or you can become a professional cheerleader.’”

Jay Eubank, director of career services for the school, said Shropshire showed dedication to broadcasting from
the beginning.

“He was just so mature and poised,” Eubank said. “You could tell he had the journalism part of it. He’s always been good about watching to help others. A person with his talent could be a prima donna, but he doesn’t seem that way at all.”

In his first years out of college, Shropshire worked for a small ABC-affiliated station in his hometown and then an NBC-affiliated station in Greensboro, N.C.

Shropshire then moved to Chicago to work for WGN-TV, where he said he started doing more anchor work and
9 p.m. newscasts.

Living in the urban area presented Shropshire with opportunities to cover nationally recognized stories.

“Over the past year, we have had a baseball team, the White Sox, go to the World Series,” he said. “We had a football team (the Chicago Bears) go to the Super Bowl, and we’ve had a local, virtually unknown politician be catapulted to a presidential candidate.”

Moving back to his home state will allow him to see it with a fresh pair of eyes, Shropshire said.

“Sometimes when you grow up in a place, you’re passive about the way things work,” he said. “When you leave, you have to learn. So when you go back, you take that experience and hope that you can appreciate the complexities and simplicities of North Carolina. I’m looking forward to that.” ♦

Ashlee Sadler is a senior in the school’s news-editorial sequence.