Alissa Krinsky
TVNewser Contributor
Carol Lin is “entering a universe I’ve never been in before.”
A post-CNN career. “I really have discovered what’s possible. There’ve been bits and pieces of my story out there, but not the complete story. How do you transition from a network career to the great beyond?”
You start with CarolLinReporting.com.
The site officially goes ‘live’ Monday. “It’s my way,” Lin says, “of connecting with my audience, of getting feedback from people.”
People in the “cancer community,” as she calls it — who, like her, have had their lives affected by the disease. Lin’s mother is battling lymphoma. Her beloved husband, Will Robinson, a former CNN producer, died in 2003 of sinus cancer.
The site will feature excerpts of a journal Lin kept while Will was sick, as well as news reports from Lin and from other contributors. The goal is to provide cancer patients, their families, and caregivers with “solutions”, she says, so people can “ask questions and get answers that they aren’t necessarily going to find on traditional networks.”
(photo courtesy of Carol Lin)
It’s the type of central resource she wanted when Will was diagnosed. “It was a bolt of lightning out of nowhere… You want (answers) so bad that it’s a feeling of turning yourself inside out with desire for solutions.”
When Will died, “my world changed.” She became a single mother of a baby daughter. She says she eventually left CNN (in December, 2006) to return home to Los Angeles and take her career in a different direction.
“I was surprised that there was (so) much attention when it was announced that I was leaving,” she reflects. But life, Lin says, is “about making brave choices, like leaving a traditional network career and doing something new and taking a chance.”
The ‘chance’ is a larger project — her website is but one component of it — for which she’s seeking venture capital funding. She’ll only describe it as “an operating system that enables cancer patients and their families to find immediate solutions to the most pressing problems in their daily lives.”
Her new professional endeavor, along with raising her four year old daughter, and being by her mom’s side, Lin says, is rewarding and exciting. Kind of like the rush of live television. It’s “as close to breaking news as you can get. I get my rush every single day.”