Kim Kalunian and Ted Nesi’s Excellent Adventure

Ted and Kim take Samantha for a walk in their East Bay neighborhood. Photography by Ryan Conaty

It’s a Thursday afternoon in late May, the time of year when careers are made and deals brokered at the Rhode Island State House.

In the House chamber, the state’s elected representatives mill about with the underlying buzz of the legislative session in the background. The week has brought plenty to talk about on Smith Hill, including the governor’s signing of a landmark bill legalizing recreational marijuana the previous day. The latest school shooting, at a Texas elementary school the day before that, has brought renewed calls for action on gun reform, and a surplus of pandemic relief aid has lawmakers fending off competing proposals for the money. Outside the State House, a contentious governor’s race is heating up, and a mental health crisis is hitting local emergency departments, renewing calls to address Rhode Island’s struggling health care system.

As the jacketed and high-heeled representatives take their seats, House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi leans into his podium at the front of the room and declares that he has an announcement.

“Some of you may know, I’ve just been informed that Kim Kalunian and her husband — some guy named Ted, I don’t know who he is — on the birth of their beautiful daughter Samantha this morning, and I want to on behalf of the House congratulate Kim,” he says, to general applause.

Kim Kalunian and Ted Nesi, both broadcast journalists with WPRI, share a moment at home with their daughter, Samantha, on a recent Sunday. Photography by Ryan Conaty

It’s not every day that a new arrival to Women & Infants Hospital is greeted with an ovation at the State House. But this is no ordinary arrival. Samantha Anne Irene Nesi — born weighing six pounds, eight ounces — is the daughter of Ted Nesi and Kim Kalunian, WPRI reporters and two of the most recognizable faces in Rhode Island broadcast journalism. The latter, a quickly rising star who left her Broadway dreams behind for a reporter’s mic, is a regular presence on the evening anchor desk, and the former’s weekly news column is essential reading for any Rhode Island political buff. Despite divergent starts, their careers crossed paths at WPRI just as the industry was reinventing itself, creating new opportunities and dredging up old fears in the midst of an uncertain media future.

In 2022, these local television icons took on their biggest story yet — becoming parents to now-two-year-old Samantha. Though the path ahead was paved by generations of working parents, the unique pressures of the twenty-first century have complicated the role, from navigating the twenty-four-hour news cycle to adapting to the world of parental leave. Behind the glossy finish of the TV screen, the job looks easy. In reality, it’s anything but.

The couple’s home is in a quiet corner of the East Bay, where the water meets the sloping shoreline. It’s here on a Friday evening in March that I find Ted and Samantha in the living room doing the bunny hop. Ms. Rachel, an educational YouTube star with a devoted toddler following, encourages viewers to hop along as she sings a song from the TV. Samantha, returning to the screen in between bites of strawberries and pepperoni, happily complies.

Ted, who just returned from the station wearing a light blue shirt, navy pants and floral-patterned tie, pauses his bunny hopping to remark about the woman on the television: “The New York Times actually did a really good piece on her.”

The front door opens and Kim, still in the purple dress she wore to anchor the 5:30 p.m. news, walks in. It’s a familiar shuffle for any parent working alternate shifts. Kim, who recently turned thirty-five, reduced her hours to part-time after giving birth and spends her mornings with Samantha before heading into the station for the afternoons and evenings. She also frequently fills in on late-night broadcasts, making these precious two hours at home a short reprieve before she returns to work. Ted, forty, works a standard daytime schedule but teaches at Wheaton College, his alma mater, two nights a week during the spring semester, and family helps fill in the child care gaps. Both parents keep their cellphones close at hand, never knowing when a breaking news item will command their attention.

“The twenty-four-seven news cycle is not family friendly,” Ted says as his phone lights up with a text from the station.

Their home, purchased in 2019, sits in a suburban neighborhood just a short drive from the WPRI station. A pink plastic swimming pool filled with stuffed animals dominates the dining room, and a “Sesame Street” album bearing an image of Cookie Monster sits ready on the record player in the den. Beneath it, jazz records by Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett — a shared passion now relegated to second place behind children’s show characters — sit next to a copy of Ted’s undergraduate thesis on Ted Kennedy. Though it’s not visible from the windows, a gravel path outside connects the backyard to the waters of Narragansett Bay.

“It was our dream to live by the water, and we never thought we could do it with our first home,” Kim explains.

Samantha roams freely from room to room, pausing by the TV where red foam pool noodles babyproof the sharp edges. Along with Ms. Rachel, her favorite shows include “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” and the Charlie Brown TV specials, a preference inherited from her dad. (“We’ve read all the screen time stuff, we’re very guilty about it, but we’re actual real human parents in 2024,” Ted says.)

At the moment, the TV is tuned to “Newsmakers,” the current affairs show Ted hosts alongside Target 12 investigative reporter and managing editor Tim White. At one time, Ted says, Samantha would let out an enthusiastic “Dada!” after spotting him on television, but now the toddler hardly notices. A commercial for the station follows, and the couple spends several minutes replaying it to see who got more airtime.

“We’re very competitive,” Ted says with a laugh.

Ted, Samantha and Kim in the living room of their home.” Photography by Ryan Conaty

Kim, still in her anchor attire, grabs dinner from the fridge as she prepares to head back to the station. Lately, there have been tears when mom leaves for work, so Ted cues up “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” as Kim fishes her phone from the couch cushions. Mom closes the front door behind her, and Samantha, intent on the show, doesn’t notice a thing.

Kim and Ted met, in true Rhode Island fashion, at a pension reform meeting.

In 2012, former Governor Gina Raimondo called a gathering of municipal leaders as part of the state’s effort to tackle unfunded liability. Ted, already a seasoned digital columnist at WPRI, attended, eager for a scoop on how the state was handling the looming financial crisis. Kim, a young reporter at the Warwick Beacon, rushed in late after searching for parking at the Warwick CCRI campus. Sitting down in the only open seat, she noticed the man next to her typing furiously on his computer.

“I have a blank notepad. And all I can think is, ‘What am I missing here? What is he taking notes on that I just can’t seem to comprehend?’” she recalls.

As the meeting drew to a close, Ted took a break from notetaking to offer a reporter’s version of the classic pickup line: “So, do you cover these things often?”

Kim never ended up filing a story. (“All I got out of that was a husband,” she says.) But she did connect with the reporter later on Facebook, and the two discovered they had several mutual friends from the local theater community. Both had been active in stage productions through high school and harbored a continued love for jazz music and the arts. For Ted, the hobby kept him busy as he prepared for a career in media. For Kim, it was much more.

Her passion for theater started as a child growing up in Warwick, where one of her earliest memories was traveling with her family to California to watch her mom, Karen Kalunian, compete as Mrs. Rhode Island America in a national pageant. As a toddler, Kim was fascinated by the stage and what went on behind the curtain. Around that time her parents enrolled her in dance classes at Carolyn Dutra Dance Studio in Warwick, where Dutra recalls teaching a “perfect little girl” who performed with grace and poise.

Kim as a child. Courtesy of Kim Kalunian.

“She always remembered the choreography, so she was very dependable in that way,” Dutra says. “She didn’t need the spotlight. She was happy to be there.”

By age eight, she was performing in musicals with youth theater companies. At nine, she got her first professional role in a production of Nine Armenians at Trinity Rep. Rachel Ladd Vale, a childhood friend and the maid of honor at her wedding, says Kim was “notorious” on the children’s theater scene for her talent and lack of nerves.

“She had this really great confidence where she would command a room just by walking into it,” Ladd Vale recalls.

Karen, who often accompanied her daughter to rehearsals, says that despite her outgoing reputation, Kim had a reserved personality at home and was prone to ask questions rather than steal the spotlight. Her mother joked that someday she’d end up hosting a talk show instead of being on Broadway.

“I think her first words were ‘Why?’ and ‘How come?’ She would ask all the time, and I was like, ‘I don’t have the answers to all this stuff,’” Karen says.

Kim during a production of A Christmas Carol at the Hanover Theatre in Worcester in 2010. Photo by ERB Photography. 

In high school, Kim secured starring roles in musicals at both Moses Brown School, where she attended, and Bishop Hendricken High School. As graduation approached, she applied to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was admitted, but opted to defer. Instead, she launched into the cutthroat world of professional theater, traveling to auditions in New York and unsuccessfully trying out for a role at Disney World. She had more success on the local scene, picking up roles at Theatre by the Sea, New Bedford’s Zeiterion theater and as a tap-dancing flight attendant in Arlene Violet’s Raymond Patriarca-inspired mob musical, The Family.

At home, a high school assignment morphed into a way to keep the cash flowing. As part of her senior project for Moses Brown, she entreated local media icon John Howell to let her write theater reviews for the Warwick Beacon. Howell was more interested in a reporter to cover local happenings, and by the end of the internship, she was filing stories on business openings and human-interest topics. She stayed on as a freelancer after graduation, typing up assignments backstage between scenes.

In 2011, after her return from a stint performing in Virginia, Howell approached her with an opportunity. A staff member was leaving and he needed someone to fill in full-time in the newsroom. Would she come on board for two weeks?

“Two weeks turned into two years,” Kim says.

Howell, at the helm of the newspaper for more than five decades, took the young reporter under his wing. Kim, he recalls, was a quick learner. A stickler for accuracy, she produced on-time copy with little need for editing.

“She asked me at one point, ‘Do you think I need to go to college?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘If you’re going to stay in journalism, I don’t think you need to spend the time or the money to do it because you know what you’re doing.’” (Kim, who never attended college, says she went to the “John Howell School of Journalism.”)

The hometown gig offered flexibility, with Howell allowing her to take time off for shows, but as 2013 approached, she began to feel the pressure of her divided career. She’d been struggling to make it in the theater world for six years, with little sign of the big New York roles she’d dreamed of as a child.

Kim plays Peggy Sawyer in a production of 42nd Street at the Wohlfahrt Haus Dinner Theatre in Virginia in 2010. Photo by Michael Hill Photography

“A lot of people who are in theater have to make that decision,” she says. “Are you going to continue to put all your energy into something you’re not getting a lot back from? So I thought to myself, ‘Can I marry my love of journalism with my love of performing arts and do something in broadcast?’”

During her time at the Beacon, she completed an internship at Rhode Island Public Radio (now The Public’s Radio), where political reporter Ian Donnis remembers her as the only intern to ever deliver a fruit basket to the newsroom as a thank-you. In 2013, she took another step into radio and secured a job as a digital content producer for WPRO. The online field was still relatively new, and she spent most of her time assembling listicles and checking up on the leading stories that day. A year into the job, she got her first big break when the afternoon news anchor slot opened up.

“We had an emergency situation where we needed someone to go on the air,” recalls WPRO News Director Bill Haberman. “The minute she turned on the microphone from her news desk it was like, ‘Wow, this is the person right here.’”

In 2015, she decided to leave the station. By this time, she was engaged to Ted and set up a meeting with WPRI News Director Karen Rezendes. The meeting led to a freelance opportunity, and within a few months, she’d secured a full-time position as a general assignment reporter.

Though she worried about the optics of an established reporter’s fiancee getting hired, Kim, like all general assignment reporters, started at the bottom. Contrary to public assumption, most fledgling news reporters go on assignment not with a photojournalist but on their own, setting up shots before appearing in front of the camera. Kim recalls Steve Nielsen and Susan Campbell, another newsroom couple now living in Arizona, teaching her how to use a camera for the first time. In those early years, she often received comments about her voice, with staff and viewers telling her to lower her pitch and not sound like Minnie Mouse.

“For me, it was really about comfort and not trying to pretend to be an on-camera news reporter, but embodying that,” she says.

Despite the comments, Kim proved a natural, and in 2019, she was promoted to the anchor desk. Today, she anchors the 4 and 5:30 p.m. broadcasts. Navigating the studio in three-inch heels and a blue dress during a recent broadcast, she steps over wires and chats casually with co-workers as a producer counts down to the upcoming show in her earpiece. She stops at the full-length mirror by the door for a quick spritz of TRESemmé hairspray. Once the broadcast begins, she says, she’ll touch up her hair every thirty to sixty minutes. (“When I smell hairspray, I think of her,” Ted says.)

Flyaways successfully tamed, Kim stands ready at the anchor desk. As the broadcast’s theme music plays, she straightens her posture and lets her voice drop into the familiar anchor cadence.

“We’ve got lots to cover on 12 News at 4. Next week, the DOT will be grilled on the bridge breakdown and the fallout from the bridge’s closure.”

WPRI moved to its current location on East Providence’s Catamore Boulevard from downtown Providence in the early 1970s. From the street, the beige two-story looks like any other office building, except for the oversized satellite dishes that blast the news out to thousands of Southern New England homes each day. The studio consists of a large room with a carefully controlled climate and constantly buzzing machinery, giving the impression of an oversized refrigerator. Cameras, newly automated during the pandemic shutdown, track the anchors as they move about the studio. In a separate room, producers control the teleprompter and adjust the video feed that appears onscreen. The red light hanging from the ceiling turns off to indicate a commercial break, and Kim and her co-anchor, Kayla Fish, engage in casual chatter. Kim, a skilled cook, scrolls through recipes by Ina Garten, her favorite chef, on her phone.

“If someone wants to give me a cooking show, I would find the time,” she tells me.

The couple occasionally anchors the evening news together at WPRI. Photography by James Bartone.

Though she and Ted occasionally anchor together — including, earlier this year, on Valentine’s Day — they operate separately at the station, only seeing each other in passing or when an anchor role needs filling. Kim’s contract allows time for reporting original stories each week, and she still covers events in the field on occasion, such as the governor’s annual State of the State address. Though most of her words as an anchor are read from a teleprompter, she reviews each script carefully before going on air. Often, she makes edits, as in the case of a recent report that included a disparaging comment without giving the subject an opportunity to respond.

Before entering the studio, she makes a final stop at the makeup room, where she trades her pink sneakers for heels. Anchors and reporters at WPRI receive no clothing or hair allowance, and there’s no stylist on-site. Kim cuts her own hair — a skill picked up years ago from YouTube — and sets it in hot rollers for the drive to the station. Then it’s back to the studio, where it’s business as usual for the evening broadcast.

Except when it isn’t. On a May evening two years ago, Kim — just shy of Samantha’s due date — started having contractions in the makeup room while getting ready for the 4 p.m. news. Though her co-anchor at the time, Brian Yocono, urged her to go home, the women at the station knew it would be several hours before she had to worry. She finished the broadcast, got a pedicure and headed to the hospital later that night. At 11:37 a.m. the next morning, she delivered a healthy baby girl who would change her world forever.

Unlike Kim, Ted always knew he wanted to be a journalist. A native of Attleboro, Massachusetts, he grew up in a news-watching family with subscriptions to The Sun Chronicle and The Boston Globe. His father, a lawyer, had a long career as a court administrator and judge for the Bristol County Probate and Family Court, leading many to suspect the younger Nesi would study law. But, Ted says, his dad was honest with him about the frustrations of the law field.

Ted as a child with his parents, Anthony Nesi and Anne Lee Nesi. Courtesy of Ted Nesi

“My dad would take me into work during school vacations. At least once, I made a fake newspaper on the word processors at his office,” he recalls during a recent interview at Borealis Coffee Company, a favorite haunt close to the studio. Sitting on the patio, he keeps a close eye on his phone and pauses to chat with a resident about the latest on the former Metacomet Country Club.

In the summer of 2003, after graduating from Attleboro High School, Ted was set to begin a promising career as a freshman at Boston University’s School of Communication. Then, his world came crashing down.

“My mother died in the summer between high school and college, and so I just didn’t really find my footing,” he explains.

Five weeks earlier, his mother, Anne, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma — the same aggressive brain cancer that claimed the lives of Ted Kennedy and John McCain. Vivian Humphrey, the former artistic director of Triboro Youth Theatre, recalls the impact the illness had on Ted and his close group of friends, all of whom participated in a youth theater program in high school. Ted, who’d been involved with the program since childhood, was playing the role of Adam in Children of Eden.

“Everyone was very affected by her illness,” Humphrey recalls. “She passed away the day of dress rehearsal, so we assumed that he would be out. And he said, ‘No, I want to go on because it gave my mother so much joy to see me and all my friends perform.’”

After a rocky first year, Ted transferred from BU to Wheaton College, whose small Norton, Massachusetts, campus allowed him to be closer to his father and sister. While there, he majored in political science and wrote for The Wheaton Wire. A semester abroad in London, where he took a course taught by a BBC correspondent, cemented his interest in journalism, and he secured a summer internship with The Sun Chronicle following his junior year. A year later, after sending his resume far and wide (“None of those glamorous jobs were interested in me,” he says) he ended up back at The Sun Chronicle, where he spent his first night after graduation reporting on the police beat.

Though it wasn’t the glamorous Washington job he had envisioned, like most small-town papers, working there was a crash course in local news. Craig Borges, who served as managing editor at the time and is now executive editor of The Sun Chronicle, recalls one of Ted’s first stories reporting on the murder of a Norton woman whose boyfriend also shot her two daughters and the family dog before turning the gun on himself. While most young reporters need a warming-up period, he says, Ted’s hometown kid-status meant he entered the newsroom ready to go.

“It always makes a difference because he knew who the players were,” Borges says. “He knew the city; he knew the streets. Any time when you get a reporter who’s totally green it takes a while to learn. There’s a learning curve there, and he didn’t have that learning curve.”

Ted spent a year at The Sun Chronicle before moving on to a position at Providence Business News. The biweekly has frequently been a launching-off point for young reporters, and he quickly built up a network reporting on energy, technology and the environment that included some of the state’s biggest players.

At the same time he was ascending the journalism ladder, the industry as a whole was struggling. The widespread introduction of the internet into homes over the previous two decades had eliminated newspapers’ hold on written journalism and sent advertisers running, and a series of corporate buyouts were upending operations at many of the country’s major newspapers, including The Providence Journal. With an economic recession well underway, newsrooms — including PBN — were turning to layoffs even as the online shift pressured them to provide more and frequent news.

“I didn’t realize then that I was there for really the end of an era, before the whole business model was turned upside down and the paper would become just one part of a larger set of daily news efforts,” Ted says.

The young reporter saw an opportunity in the growing online blog culture. He approached Jay Howell, then-general manager at WPRI, and pitched the idea of a new kind of journalist, one who would write exclusively for the station’s website and cover the day-to-day happenings of the state’s political scene. To his surprise, Howell said yes, and “Nesi’s Notes” was born. The blog, which would eventually become the name of a weekly roundup of statewide political news, quickly put him on the journalistic map, landing him on a Politico “50 to Watch” list in 2011 and attracting the attention of Ezra Klein, then a columnist at The Washington Post.

It set him apart in the newsroom, as well. Tim White, managing editor of WPRI’s Target 12 investigative team, recalls noticing the bright young reporter around the station and seeing his potential beyond the digital role. Within a few months, Ted was assigned to live fact-check the gubernatorial debates White was moderating at the University of Rhode Island.

Ted and Tim White moderate a debate for Rhode Island’s Second Congressional District seat in October 2022. Photography by Corey Welch

“It was very clear to me he was savvy in terms of covering politics, and he had a real interest in it,” White says.

White lobbied to bring Ted onto the investigative team, and his role at the station expanded. Newsroom friendships are common in the industry — “We spend more time with our co-workers than our own family,” White says — and in White, Ted found not only a mentor and editor, but a confidante, best man and, eventually, godfather to Samantha. It was White who taught Ted the finer points of broadcast journalism, instructing him to slow his speech and admonishing him when he went on the air without a jacket. White was also one of the first people at WPRI to meet Kim, who showed up to dinner at his house with light-up stuffed animals for his children. Despite her wholesome exterior, White says, Kim’s reporter’s instinct extends to a whole range of gruesome topics, and her cold case series is among the best at the station.

“She’s a mom first, who just so happens to like to cover murder cases,” he says. (Kim’s mom confirms she wanted to be a medical examiner as a kid.)

Today, White and Ted host “Newsmakers,” the long-running interview series that White’s father, legendary investigative reporter Jack White, hosted before him. The show tapes on Friday mornings, when a rotating cast of state power brokers visits the studio. On a recent Friday in April, the guest is Congressman Seth Magaziner. An hour prior to the taping, Ted and White can be found in the investigative room, firing off practice questions while Ted adjusts a red-and-blue tie, one of about fifty in his collection. Six reporters work out of the small room on the second floor of the station. Ted’s desk, in a corner, is cluttered with a mix of campaign memorabilia and newspaper clippings alongside photos of Samantha and the couple’s 2017 wedding at St. Mary’s Church in Bristol. His taste in books is distinctly political, with a biography of Walter Cronkite and eleven-year-old budget documents rounding out the bookshelf above the desk. At the center of the room is a full-length mirror, where Ted carefully dabs powder on his face — another skill, he says, picked up from White when he started going on air.

Kim and Ted during their 2017 wedding at St. Mary’s Church in Bristol. Ryan T. Conaty photography

“Go on TV without makeup, you’ll wear makeup the next time,” he assures me.

In the studio, both men appear poised and ready, leaning into the news desk as the red light clicks on. Despite a warm welcome in the hallway outside, they hold little back before the camera, pressing Magaziner on the war in Gaza and interrupting when he tries to deflect. As they return from a commercial break, White steers the conversation to parental leave. It’s a hot topic for all three. With his second child on the way, the congressman plans to take six weeks of paternity leave — a new standard, Magaziner explains, among members of Congress.

“This has been a fairly rapid change in society with men taking time off,” Ted observes during the broadcast. “Tim and I have talked about it. When his kids were born in the late 2000s, it wasn’t really even a discussion that dad would get leave.”

White, whose children are now sixteen and seventeen, grew up in an old-school journalism culture in which breaking news, particularly for men, was always considered superior to family life. Today, by contrast, WPRI offers new fathers six weeks of paternity leave to be used within one year of the child’s birth, a growing practice that experts say is beneficial for both parents and babies. For Ted, that meant taking a month and a half of leave prior to Samantha’s first birthday, much of which was spent driving between stores hunting for baby formula. The experience, he says, opened his eyes to a shortage that was then making national headlines and ultimately helped inform WPRI’s reporting on the issue.

“It was a classic example of how you need different perspectives of people in the newsroom,” he says.

For Kim, the transition marked an important crossroads in her career. Though she initially planned to return to the station full-time, she realized she had no desire to resume the long hours of journalism as a new mom. She approached management and worked out a schedule that would allow her to spend mornings and most nights at home with Samantha.

“You have an idea of what motherhood is. And then you actually do it,” she says. “I just think the reality of how much time and energy I knew I wanted to devote to Samantha, I knew I couldn’t do both the way that I wanted to if I was working until 11:30 every night.”

For women journalists in particular, the field remains challenging. In the past three years, several high-profile women broadcast journalists left the industry in Rhode Island, many of them citing the difficulties of parenting on a chaotic work schedule. Women broadcasters have also historically been subject to scathing comments from viewers on their bodies and appearances. Though Kim says she hasn’t received too much negative feedback from viewers, everyone in the newsroom has seen emails critical of female colleagues. During her pregnancy, her growing belly was frequently discussed by viewers, even before the pregnancy was publicly announced.

Kim, Ted and godfather Tim White with an unhappy Samantha during her baptism. Photo by Ryan Welch.

White, who helped advise the family through the transition, says Kim’s ability to negotiate with the station speaks to her value as a journalist.

“I like to think it’s also a better understanding of how poor work-life balance is in our industry and how there’s a bit of an awakening in that and how we have to address it, because it’s getting harder to hire in news,” he says.

In the summer of 2020, Ted received an offer that diverged sharply from the broadcasting life the couple had built at WPRI.

A year earlier, The Boston Globe had launched a Rhode Island bureau, challenging the territory The Providence Journal had held for nearly 200 years. The privately held Globe was looking to expand its team, and editor Brian McGrory wanted Ted. The bid from his home-state paper was all the more tempting because he’d started out in print journalism before moving to broadcast.

“It was this moment where I had to decide was I a print reporter who had taken an extended detour into broadcasting but was inevitably headed back to newspapers, or was I someone who was going to stay in broadcasting?” he recalls.

The demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle means Ted and Kim often keep their phones close at home. Photography by Ryan Conaty

Ted had worked his way up to become one of the state’s most prominent political reporters. Shekarchi, the House speaker, calls Ted and Kim “the power couple of Rhode Island news” and says “Nesi’s Notes” is a “must-read for every political junkie in Rhode Island.”

“When Ted Nesi calls you, it’s usually because he’s very well-prepared, he knows the answers to the questions, he has the facts, and he’s just calling you for comment to confirm what he already knows or to get your reaction to a story he’s about to break,” he says.

The Globe team fought a hard case — including, Ted says, a personal phone call from Linda Henry, the company’s CEO — but in the end he turned it down. Though he’d still be reporting in state, taking the role would mean leaving the station where he and Kim had found their journalism footing together. It would also mean leaving White, the on-screen partner whose mentorship had put him on TV in the first place.

“I never regretted it,” he says.

Though both know they’d have potential in larger markets, Kim and Ted say they’re passionate about covering Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts and have no immediate plans to leave the area. A more divisive question is whether they’ll have more kids. Ted, who has learned the art of “no comment” in marriage, defers to his wife.

“I’ll let you talk to Kim about it.”

Kim, for her part, grew up an only child and has long envisioned a family of three.

“Samantha is everything that I’ve always dreamed of,” she says, adding, “I’m not going to say never. But I like the way our family is right now.”

Parenting disagreements aside, the couple says they both feel lucky for the routine they’ve settled into on the East Bay. It’s a life not so different from many other working parents, except that for these two, a part of it is always playing out onscreen.

“We’re just a normal family, and we’re just trying to prioritize each other and do a good job,” Kim says. “I feel like there are so many other families who are working harder and doing harder jobs. And we just feel lucky to have fun, interesting careers and a beautiful, healthy daughter. And like everyone else, we’re just figuring it out day by day.”

Ted, Samantha and Kim in their front yard. Photography by Ryan Conaty