KPIX reporter Maria Cid Medina said she’s leaving the business after nearly 20 years.
Cid Medina posted the news on social media saying she was hanging up her “full-time reporter hat” after nearly seven years at the San Francisco CBS owned station.
“After losing my son a year and a half ago, I started to look back on a career that didn’t give me the life-work balance my family deserves,” she wrote. “I’ve missed so many family dinners, school events, birthdays, weddings, holidays and have worked weekends, mornings and nights. I can’t turn back the hands of time. But I wish I could.”
Cid Medina said that what sticks in her mind most is a conversation she had with her son when he was five where she couldn’t take the day off for his Mother’s Day event at school.
“It was ratings month and my boss at my former station had a strict policy that we were not allowed to request vacation days,” she said. “I was new and I felt pressured not to play hooky. My son turned to me and said, ‘Maybe you should get a new boss. She’s not nice.’ It broke my heart.”
Cid Medina said she’d be on-air for “a couple more weeks, and will hopefully continue to be able to tell stories now and then … so this isn’t ‘goodbye’ forever.'”
She started working at the station in 2015 after working at KOVR in Sacramento. Cid Medina has also worked in Albuquerque, N.M. and Yakima, Wash.