Jamie Shupak has what The New York Times calls a “high grunge-to glamour imbalance” job. The traffic reporter — who also moonlights as a dating columnist for Complex magazine — has settled at NY1, New York City’s 24-hour cable channel, after a path that included stints at WNBC and WTXF:
The first job she was offered came from News 12 Traffic and Weather, on Long Island. “I was like, ‘I don’t know any roads in New York,’ ” she said, but she took the job. She left after a couple of years to do freelance work for other stations, still determined to do “the hard news thing.” But she had a constitutional problem. “Every boss I had, they were like, ‘You cannot stand in front of a house that just burned down and you’re smiling. You have to stop smiling.’ I was like, ‘I can’t.’ I just couldn’t.”
“Stick with the traffic,” she was told.
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