Alex Lepe
CBS 11 anchor Karen Borta swapped a 2:30 p.m. start to her day for 3 a.m. when she gave up the evening newscasts and took over the station’s morning show in January.
But on most days, that means her new work day is over before noon, which gives her time for something that got pushed aside for years: her family.
“I just love having the most important part of my day done the first thing in the morning,” said Borta, who’s on air weekdays at 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 a.m., and 11 a.m.
Borta, 50, and her husband, Jim, were newlyweds when she started at the station in 1995. She took over the three evening newscasts starting in 1996. Last year, she added the 4 p.m. newscasts.
The couple now has three children, two daughters ages 13 and 15 and a 17-year-old son. Borta’s husband is a regional sales manager for a surgical supply company. They’ve managed childcare with a nanny, but as the children have grown older, Borta says her time away from them chafed.
“My son played junior high school soccer for three years; I never made a soccer game,” Borta says.
He now plays high school football. “I’ve been to one of his football games, and I took a day off to do that,” she says. She’s also missed her oldest daughter’s volleyball games.
“I was guilt-ridden the entire time,” she adds. Not only for her family, but “I felt like I was letting my team down here.”
Borta says she’d been thinking about leaving the station - “I’d honestly been looking at retirement; I’d been talking to my financial adviser about when can I retire,” - when station management approached and asked Borta last year if she’d consider taking over the morning desk. Those shows had been destabilized after the station fired Brendan Higgins last summer over his disorderly conduct arrest in Colorado.
Borta anchored her final evening newscasts in December and became the morning anchor in January. The timing has proven even more fortuitous, with the recent diabetes diagnosis of Borta’s youngest daughter.
These days, Borta awakens at her Arlington home at 2 a.m. and is in the station an hour later.
After the 30-minute, 11 a.m. show is done, “for the most part, if I’m caught up in my correspondence, I’ll leave,” she says.
She shoehorns some travel into her schedule, such as when President Obama offered interviews at the White House with various regional media, including CBS 11, on foreign trade. Borta, an executive producer and a cameraman showed up at the White House at 8 a.m. for a five-minute, five-question interview in mid-afternoon.
Extra time with her family has come with some adjustments.
“I did (the nightly newscasts) for so long, my kids never knew anything else,” she says. So when she began turning off the TV for family dinner, “they didn’t like that, at all. But I’m not going to get any do-overs as a parent.”
Her sleep schedule remains erratic. “I shoot (to get to sleep at) 8:30 most days,” she says, “but, again, that mom thing.”