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 HEART'S CONTENT:
Ursula Pari on embracing work,
motherhood and life’s surprises
By SUSAN SPEER
Photography LIZ GARZA-WILLIAMS
Years ago, if you’d told Ursula
Pari about the job she has
today, she’d have insisted that
you must be thinking of someone
else.
As the 5 and 10 p.m. TV news
anchor for KSAT, Pari is familiar to San
Antonio viewers. Delivering the day’s
top news stories, she’s articulate and
confident, yet friendly and accessible.
She’s impeccably suited, her brunette
hair styled to perfection with a complexion
that stays flawless, even under
the hot studio lights.
Nobody who knew Pari back in her
hometown of Lafayette, La., would have
pegged her for a job in television.
Growing up, she was a rather plain
tomboy who wasn’t the least bit interested
in doing anything she couldn’t do
in jeans and a T-shirt.
Attending Louisiana State University,
she pursued a degree in broadcasting;
her first reporting job after graduation
was with a small affiliate station in
Lafayette. Pari didn’t feel like an especially
talented reporter. She was self-conscious
and shied away from attention.
She also had a habit of freezing up on
camera. When she moved on from that
job, she remembers thinking that they
must have been relieved to see her go. “I
made a lot of mistakes,” she recalls. “I
missed deadlines, I froze up on camera — how could they have thought I was a
good reporter?”
A couple of years later, Pari was
reporting for another station when she
had a chance meeting with a woman
who was then working for her former
employer. Pari made a self-deprecating
comment about her reputation with station
management there and got a surprising
response. “She told me that
everyone loved me there, that they
talked about me as being the most tenacious
reporter,” Pari says. “I had no idea
that’s the reputation I had. I was focusing
on what I did wrong at that job.”
The experience helped Pari see herself
through the eyes of others, and it boosted
her confidence. By the mid-1990s,
she’d reported for stations in several
markets and was working in Austin
when she learned that a station in San
Antonio was interested in her, not as a
reporter, but as a news anchor.
“KSAT was offering me a five-year
contract. I’d never heard of that before,”
she says. “In this business you never
expect to stay in one place very long. Five
years seemed like an eternity.” Pari
sensed the undercurrent of such a commitment:
For KSAT to offer this contract
meant they had a lot of trust in her. For
her to sign it meant that she felt the
same way about them.
TURNING POINT
Pari had built a solid career as a
reporter, but it was when she signed on
with KSAT that she accepted the whole
of what she was doing. “Up until that
point, reporting was just a job I was trying
to do. It was when I got the job here
that I embraced the total commitment to
broadcast journalism,” she says.
Joining KSAT’s news team in 1996,
Pari underwent a metamorphosis. A
reporter’s “look” is more sensible than
stylish, and for years, Pari had been comfortable
without any focus or fuss on her
outward appearance. “I was always a
plain Jane, a real tomboy. I was never
one to wear makeup, fancy clothes and
heels, and suddenly it was part of my
daily routine,” she says.
The real changes for Pari, however,
were more than skin deep. She explains, “When you’re one of the main anchors,
you’re expected to take a leadership role in
the newsroom and in the community. You
can’t dabble in it. You have to be that
leader.” Pari’s approach was simple: “When people asked me to do something,
I said yes. I didn’t think about it, try to figure
it into my calendar, I just did it.”
WELL-GROUNDED
Nearly a dozen years later, Pari, at 45,
clearly has transferred her reporter’s talent into strengths as an anchor. Her
tenacity still shines through. “I go at
everything pretty hard, and I commit to a
path,” she says. “In broadcasting it’s
easy to give up on a story, or a job,
because it’s so hard.”
She made the right move, she says,
but she still likes to step back into reporting
as often as she can. “I get a good
rush of energy from reporting,” she says. “It’s the backbone of what we do, and it
keeps me connected to the audience,
which is worth its weight in gold.”
Pari doesn’t deny the pressure that
accompanies the work she does. “This is a
career that will use you up and spit you
out,” she says. Her advice to young
women interested in broadcasting is simple: “If you really want to do this, things
like pay and hours can’t matter.” She
shrugs off the sort of superficial tabloid
commentary that targets her looks or anything
else that’s not relevant to her job. “That’s more of a side effect than a representation
of what I do,” she says matter-of-factly. “My first instinct might be to
rush to see what people are saying, but
really, I know that it’s not important.”
EQUAL FOOTING
Pari describes her relationship with
KSAT as “a good fit.” She recently
signed another five-year contract with
the station, a sign that the feeling is
mutual. Now, after more than 20 years in
the business, she looks at her profession
with a broader view. Old enough to
remember the days when network affiliates
created a sensation with viewers by
bringing women into the news lineup as
Weather Bunnies, Pari has watched
women evolve in broadcasting.
“People used to think that a woman
who wanted a job in TV news was ego-driven,
looking for attention, with no regard
for intellect or credibility,” she says.
Back in the beginning, Pari had to
confront that perception firsthand, with
her own family. “It was a big deal in my
family that I was a reporter,” she remembers. “They thought it was a glam job,
certainly not that I had something to
offer as a journalist.
“Today, women like me are demanding
parity. We are toe-to-toe with our
male counterparts. I remember feeling
insecure, like men had the advantage,
and that no longer exists; it’s a distant
memory now. Women are moving into
management and making decisions
about what viewers will see.”
KSAT is owned by The Washington
Post Company, where one of the world’s
best-known women in journalism —
Katharine Graham — was at the helm of
the iconic newspaper for decades. Her
leadership forever shattered notions of
women in the media. “It was amazing to
have worked for her,” Pari says. She
credits the organization for an environment
where women don’t spend their
days dodging gender traps. “The glass
ceiling has never been part of the culture.
Women are promoted in this organization,”
she comments.
VIEWER’S CHOICE
Pari has also seen the evolution of how
the public defines news and how they
want to receive it. “A long time ago, I went
to a seminar where everyone was talking
about how journalism was becoming infotainment,”
she says. “When shows like
Entertainment Tonight went on the air, all
the credible journalists were appalled that
people thought this was journalism. That
was back in the 1980s. Today, those programs
are part of the mainstream.”
The current shift, of course, is the
constant availability of online news and
information. “People don’t have to
wait until 5 or 10 p.m.,” says Pari. “Our
job today is to put out a really good
newscast as long as people want to
watch, but the way we do it now may
not last forever.”
She believes that the traditional TV
newscast won’t go away any time soon,
but adds that the harder edge of traditional
news has merged with viewers’ taste for
entertainment and the style of online
media. “What you can’t get online is the
personality, the flow and pace of a newscast,”
she explains. “We have to make it
pop, give viewers the experience.”
 OFF-CAMERA
Pari is also a mother of two young
children; son Jackson is 6, and daughter
Georgia is 2. Pari embraced motherhood
the same way she goes after a news
story — with passion and commitment.
“I can hardly picture who I was before
I had kids,” she laughs. “It’s a distant
memory.” A lifelong animal lover, Pari
jokes that when she was younger, she
always thought that having children must
be similar to having pets. “It’s not!” she
says. “It’s like somebody scrapes out your
insides and puts something completely different in there. Your heart changes.
Your brain changes. The things you
thought were important really aren’t.”
Her job demands long, unusual hours at
times, and Pari has to respond at the drop
of a hat. For her, having a support network
that’s ready to help around the
clock is a necessity. “It’s my cross to
bear,” she explains. “But when you have
small children, you’re constantly maneuvering,
adjusting and compromising.”
When the long hours are getting to her
kids, Pari gets a pretty strong signal: “My
daughter will climb into bed with me
when she hasn’t seen much of me. That’s
my cue that she needs more of me.”
As much as she prefers to keep her
family’s personal life separate from her
professional life, those worlds came
together for Pari at a crucial time. KSAT
became a media sponsor for the local
chapter of the American Heart
Association at about the same time that
Pari’s son was born with pulmonary valve
stenosis, a heart defect that obstructs
blood flow from the heart to the lungs.
On top of the challenges of being a
first-time mom, Pari was struggling to
understand the complexities of her
son’s condition, and the AHA provided
an abundance of support. At work,
only a few people were aware of her
son’s condition and the significance of
her involvement with the organization
until she was asked to speak at a station-
sponsored Association event. “In
the course of my speech I talked about
my son,” she says. “People were
floored — they had no idea.”
When Pari’s daughter was born with
the same condition, she was better prepared
for the challenges. “What are the
odds that you’d have one child with this
condition, let alone two?” she asks. Her
daughter’s condition is much less severe,
and she has, in all likelihood, already outgrown
the defect.
Her son had an angioplasty in 2007,
and she expects that he will need a second
operation when he’s older. “His condition
worsens as he grows,” she
explains. “The valve won’t grow with the
rest of his body. When he reaches his full
growth, we’ll do another angioplasty
and hope that it holds.”
Pari continues to be an active supporter
of the American Heart Association, for
her family, her employer and also for the
community. “It really strikes a chord in this
community,” she says. “There is so much
support here, but there is also so much
need. Heart disease is rampant in San
Antonio, especially amongst women,” she
says. “It’s connected to so many other
health problems, and I’ll continue to do
whatever I can to help.”
 Motherhood has also taught Pari the
importance of finding time for herself.
For her, that means getting away from
the trappings of her professional life.
She’s ridden horses for as long as she can
remember and was a competitive barrel
racer as a teenager. “I was a card-carrying
rodeo competitor,” she says. “I can
catch and tie down a goat in seconds.
I’m still looking for a way to apply that
skill in a real-life scenario.”
Pari has become an avid polo player,
which is a far cry from rodeo, but she’s
quick to explain that the different riding
styles offer a balanced fitness routine. “Each style of riding works different
muscle groups,” she says. “You can also
find me on the softball field, playing
badly,” she jokes.
“People often describe me as ‘athletic,’
which is a nice way of saying ‘She’s
not feminine, she’s a tomboy,’” Pari
laughs. She’s comfortable with the characterization,
and out of all of the ways
one might describe her, she keeps her
focus on her job and family. “I care that
I’m a good reporter and a good mom,”
she says. “Other than that, my hope is
that people think I’m sincere.” |
