WSB’s Courtney Francisco wins awards while easing pain.
Courtney Francisco brings empathy with her microphone and a camera operator as she chases breaking news from Athens to West Point for WSB-TV.
“I’m not there to just get your story; I’m there to check on you,” Francisco says. “I’m not one of those reporters that shows up with a camera and says, ‘Will you talk to us about your pain?’”
Her approach to Troup County tornado coverage in January 2023, her second month in Atlanta, helped WSB win a pair of Southeast Emmys in June. “That felt great, validating,” she says. “But I don’t want to overlook the fact that it’s because so many people lost so much.”
No one was killed in Troup, but 24 died in 2013 when a tornado ravaged Moore, Oklahoma. Three years out of the University of Kentucky, Francisco was there.
“There were dads digging their dead third-graders out, crying,” she says.
Such stories take an emotional toll. Francisco says the TV industry is getting better at helping reporters cope with such stress. From her own experience, she touts the benefits of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, therapy.
“We’re making change, and (reporting) is what I turned out to be good at,” Francisco says. “It’s such a fragile, important job.”
A native of eastern Tennessee, Francisco followed a professor’s advice to launch her career in the starter markets of Texas in 2010. After three months of being told her voice was “too country” or “too flat,” she caught a break when a pool-side stranger in Houston offered to connect her to a reporter friend in Tyler, Texas. Francisco was hired to cover Waco as a “one-man band”— working alone with the camera.
She then moved to Beaumont, Texas, where she had to buy her own testing kit for an award winning investigation of a toxic waste disposal site.
After Oklahoma City, Francisco spent five years in Charlotte, where she enjoyed her first taste of regular weekend anchoring.
Then she did something different: She moved to El Salvador, where her brother was in the Peace Corps, to investigate the migrant crisis. If nothing else, she knew she would learn Spanish, which helps now in covering stories such as the abduction of 12-year-old Maria Gomez-Perez of Gainesville.
She left El Salvador when her money ran out after four months, but a Cincinnati station came calling.
She loved the city and had no intention of leaving. “Then WSB called, and I can’t turn that down. It’s WSB,” Francisco says. “Every insider in this industry knows that if you work for WSB, you can do anything. It’s just an honor.”
At 36, she’s settled personally as well as professionally. Her boyfriend made the move with her to Buckhead, and with no children, she has time to window-shop at Lucy’s Market and paddleboard and birdwatch at Lake Acworth.
She also gets to look out for younger reporters, especially oneman bands. She’s paying forward the mentorship veteran reporters provided in 2011 while covering the case of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
“It can be dangerous out there, and we have to watch out for each other,” Francisco says. “While we all want to scoop each other, we’re all in this together.”
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