Shannon Bream Profile…

The Charlotte Observer’s Matt Washburn profiles Shannon Bream…

Bream was practicing labor law in Tampa when she got the TV news bug. She talked a local news director into letting her have an internship, then an entry-level job writing scripts on the overnight shift.

When a new news director arrived, he decided to clean house and called in Bream.

“He told me I was terrible. He said, ‘You’re the worst person I’ve ever seen on television.’ He said, ‘I hope you’re a better lawyer than a reporter, and you need to go back to that.’”

Bream had a good weep in a soundproof edit bay, summoned the strength to make a dignified exit and went looking for her next job. She found it in 2001 at Channel 3 alongside longtime morning anchor John Carter.

Carter remembers Bream as smart, poised and hard-working, but most of all funny.

They were doing a newscast from Channel 3’s old Center City studio beside Bank of America when one of the robotic cameras went haywire.

“She’s reading this serious story and the camera pointed at her starts going up and down and sideways, and then spinning around while the video part of the story was running.

“She just lost it laughing and she fell out of her chair. Its was spinning around like nobody’s business, like it was possessed. She was on the floor, and I had to finish reading the story, then we went to commercial.

“From that day on, there was never a day there wasn’t a production person there in case those cameras went wrong.”