To some people, an ideal life would include the perfect balance between family, work and hobbies. Work would involve pursuing a career that feeds into life goals and passions, yet still give time to make the ballgames and dance recitals that go along with being in a family.
Many people work hard for that balance, and Liz Massey, the new director of communications for the Cabot Public Schools, said she feels this new chapter in her life allows her to be an involved mother and wife while working alongside an industry she loves.
Massey started with the Cabot School District in September after an almost year-long stint as a stay-at-home mother. Before that, she was a television reporter for nearly 16 years.
While Massey spent the early part of her life moving around as part of a military family, she said she has been in Arkansas since the seventh grade and considers herself an Arkansan. She was born in Camp Springs, Maryland, and lived there for nine years before moving to Japan. Then she and her family moved to Jacksonville, where she graduated from Jacksonville High School.
Massey said the idea of becoming a television reporter started to form in her mind when she was in high school.
“My parents actually put the thought in my head,” she said. “I was real active in clubs and did a lot of public speaking, and my parents thought communications might be something I should consider in college. I did, and the rest is history. Now I’m proud to say I’m an Emmy Award-winning journalist.”
After high school, Massey went to Arkansas State University. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1998, and she did not waste any time jumping into her career with a job as a general-assignment reporter with KAIT Channel 8 in Jonesboro.
“I graduated on a Friday and started on Monday,” she said. “I was a one-man band and did everything. I shot, wrote and edited my own stories.”
Massey stayed at KAIT for two years before deciding to move back to central Arkansas to be closer to her family. She married Keith Conrad in her early 20s and said at that point, her dreams started to change.
“When I was younger, I thought that if I went into TV, I saw myself as a network anchor in some place like New York with a penthouse,” she said. “When you’re young, you envision those things. Then I got married, and I just wanted to be around family. Your priorities change.”
Massey said she almost took a job outside of the media industry when THV11 offered her “an opportunity I couldn’t refuse.” She started reporting for the television station in 2000. In 2002, she was promoted to weekend anchor, and in 2004, she was promoted to the main anchor desk.
“To be able to have that chance to live out a dream in my home state doing what I love, that was just a wonderful opportunity, and I’m so grateful for it,” Massey said.
During her time with THV11, Massey said she enjoyed using her career to make a difference in people’s lives. One memorable example, she said, came out of her Fishin’ With Liz segment.
“We had a contest where people had to write in their fish tales, and the one who had the best fish tale would win a fishing trip with me,” she said. “There was a little boy who wrote in. His dad worked a lot and was raising the boy kind of on his own, and the boy didn’t have a fish tale. He never had a chance to go fishing and have a fish tale.”
Massey said she contacted the boy’s father and set up a surprise fishing trip for his son. She and several of her fishing buddies went to the family’s house at 4 a.m. to tell the boy he had won a fishing trip with them.
“He rubs his eyes and looks at me and just says, ‘You’re Liz Massey,’” she said. “It just tickled me. … He was ready in two minutes. We took him to Lake Dardanelle, and he caught the first fish.”
In 2012, Massey was contacted by an old high-school peer to see if she could help coordinate a surprise reunion. The woman was stationed in Iraq and sent Massey a message through Facebook asking if Massey could help her surprise her three children when she came home. The story was called “Secret Mission,” and Massey ended up winning an Emmy Award for the package.
“I contacted the school. It was around Halloween, and we came up with a spirit pep rally,” Massey said. “Craig O’Neill and I were coming down there because they had spirit. Since it was Halloween, we had several teachers — and the mom — dress up in full Halloween costumes to play a game called Who Am I?”
Massey and the school officials picked one of the woman’s sons to participate in the game, and the boy ended up unveiling the soldier to find out it was his mother. As soon as he found out it was not a teacher under the mask, he gave his mother a hug and was soon joined by his brother and sister, who were just as surprised as he was to see her.
“At the end of it, everyone was chanting USA! USA!” she said. “It was really sweet.”
In October 2013, Massey said she surprised herself when she decided it was time to step away from the anchor desk to spend more time with her son, Cruz.
“It was something I’d been quietly thinking about for a while,” she said. “I had worked the night shift for more than a decade and was craving a little normalcy in my life, especially with a small child.”
Massey stayed home for almost a full year until this past September, when she was hired by the Cabot Public Schools. She said there were other opportunities to get back into television, but with the school district, she has a regular schedule and is able to be more flexible with her time. Cruz is 4 years old and not in school full time yet, but he is down the street during the day at preschool, and Massey said she is able to stop by for lunch or school programs.
“It was a perfect fit,” she said. “I knew he’d also eventually be in sports and athletics, and those are going on around 4 or 5 [p.m.] when news is on.”
While thinking about going back to work after staying at home for a year, Massey said it was important to her that she pick a place where her co-workers would feel like family.
“I knew that I’d be there every day,” she said. “I wanted them to know my family. I wanted to feel like it was a second family, not a job.”
She said she has already felt that at the Cabot Public Schools, and she has still been able to keep up with her friends in television through her new job.
Also in her new role, Massey has started producing “Panther Proud,” stories about people in the Cabot Public Schools that are shown on Cabot High School TV Channel 3, online, on the school’s Panthertron during football games and on the video board during basketball games.
“I still get to tell real stories about people — I call them real stories about real Panthers — so I still get to do what I love,” she said.
Even now that Massey is a working mom again, she said she gets to spend plenty of time with Cruz and Keith and can still participate in some of her hobbies. She said she has always enjoyed fishing — she learned to fish on her grandparents’ pond when she was young — and she sometimes takes Cruz fishing with her.
“He’s getting more and more into it, but he’s more into the worms right now,” she said. “The attention span of a 4-year-old is not very long.”
Massey and her family are spending a lot of time together through this career transition, and they are about to experience another life change when their daughter is born in February.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.