Mara MacDonald is saying goodbye to WDIV after 20 years in the TV news pressure cooker

Mara MacDonald had an unforgettable moment during her 2004 job interview with Detroit’s WDIV-TV.

As the Local 4 News reporter wrote on the station’s ClickOnDetroit site, “When they inevitably asked why they should hire me, I gave them 2 reasons: My family is here and I'd rather be dipped in a vat of hot oil than embarrass them, and what happens here matters to me. It's not just another story.”

During a phone interview about the job she started 20 years ago and soon will leave, MacDonald says her answer was from the heart.

“It all seems so much more important when it’s your hometown because most of the people you love are here,” she says. “You want to excel. You want be the best you can for the newsroom. But you also want the best possible outcome for your community.”

MacDonald, whose final day at Channel 4 will be July 1, is among a number of on-camera and behind-the-scenes staffers who are taking a buyout from the Motor City’s NBC affiliate. The on-air veterans departing under a voluntary severance package include sports anchor Bernie Smilovitz, business editor Rod Meloni and reporter Paula Tutman.

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For MacDonald, who was born and raised in Michigan, her interest in journalism goes back to being immersed in news as a child.

“I grew up in a house where the Free Press was delivered every day and you read the paper,” she says. It also was a place where her family watched the local and national news and subscribed to Time magazine.

“I was probably the best informed kid at Detroit Country Day,” she says. “I had parents who were informed. There was just no other option. That was simply presented to me as how you were. You were informed about what was happening around you.”

MacDonald mentions her parents, who are both in their early 90s, often on social media. She tells the story of how her father, Modris Pudists, immigrated from Latvia as a refugee after World War II, later served in the U.S. military and earned a degree in architecture through the G.I. Bill.

Her dad became a design principal at world-famous architect Minoru Yamasaki’s Troy-based firm. There, he met her mother, Ruth, who was Yamasaki’s office manager and secretary. MacDonald says he kept working full-time until he was in his 80s.

MacDonald has taken lessons from her parents on integrity and commitment and applied them to her handling of difficult stories. She has covered everything from the traumatic 2023 Michigan State University campus shooting to the complex details of Detroit’s filing for municipal bankruptcy in 2013.

“I always went out there to try to do the best I could with the information I had and to be decent and fair,” she says.

After graduating from high school at Detroit Country Day, MacDonald earned a degree in diplomacy and foreign affairs from Ohio’s Miami University. She credits Cheryl Chodun, a former lead reporter at WXYZ-TV, with helping her land her first TV news internship.

“She made me call her every day for a month and leave her a voice message,” says MacDonald, who always left a polite request for help in finding a way to work in the industry. “And only after a month of leaving that voice mail did she do it.”

MacDonald wound up interning with WKBD-TV's news assignment desk, where she soaked up everything she could about TV news while keeping the Channel 50 staff caffeinated.

”I was told by the assistant news director, 'Mara, your chief job is to make sure the coffee is ready in the morning.'" Her response? "Yes sir!"

She worked at WLNS in Lansing, WRIC in Richmond, Virginia, and WITI in Milwaukee before coming to WDIV. The Detroit station was the home of one of her earliest TV news role models, Anne Thompson, who moved in 1997 to NBC News, where she is the chief environmental correspondent.

Says MacDonald of Thompson: “I was right out of college sitting at the assignment desk on Channel 50 following the competition … watching all the shows at night. And I thought she was the best. I thought she was the best writer. I thought she had the best on-air presence. I  believed her. I thought she was so credible. I thought: 'That’s what I want to be. I want to be somebody people trust and believe.'”

When asked about being a woman in the TV industry, which has had its fair share of sexism, MacDonald says: “I guess because my mother raised me to put up with no nonsense from people like that, I never felt the burden of being a woman in a newsroom. I felt the burden to perform. I also never had a problem telling someone who stepped over a line to step back. That’s out of a basic sense of fairness.”

As a lead reporter for WDIV's evening news shows, MacDonald has experienced both the intense pressure of breaking stories and the long, slow simmer of stories that take weeks and months to reach a conclusion.

She dealt with the latter while following the Detroit bankruptcy, a lengthy saga with high stakes and an uncertain outcome. She remembers seeing her competition from the Free Press and Detroit News day after day as they all sought the same scoops while tracking the city’s financial woes.

“When people’s livelihoods and their retirement and the basic solvency of the city is on the line, that was an ongoing pressure cooker,” she says. “My doctor said my cortisol level is perpetually high. That is probably why.”

MacDonald also has had to gather information and confirm facts quickly for live coverage of unfolding tragedies, including the Michigan State University shooting that left three students dead.

“My father had an absolute fit that night because I was out walking the campus,” says MacDonald, who recalls going up and down Grand River Avenue in East Lansing with her photographer, Eric Yettaw. “And (anchor) Devin (Scillian) was like, ‘Are you guys OK out there?’”

MacDonald says she and Yettaw didn't have to discuss how to proceed. Both were acutely aware that parents in the viewing audience were desperate to find out what had happened. “It was never going to be, ‘Oh, we’re going to hide behind this tree.' It was never that. It was: 'Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!'"

According to MacDonald, the professional bond she has forged with photojournalists like Yettaw has been one of the best parts of her job. “The hardest part about leaving Channel  4 will be leaving my photographer, Eric. There’s no question. ... It’s like cutting off a limb."

On a lighter note, MacDonald is also known as someone whose job requirements include reporting outside through rain, sleet, snow and hail. During a 2019 "Stateside" radio interview with departing host Cynthia Canty that aired on the NPR outlet Michigan Public, her friend Canty cited MacDonald’s “amazing collection of hats and coats for the 11 o’clock live shots in the  middle of a cold Michigan winter.”

Said Canty during the episode, “I know you’ve got a couple of coats that make it look like you are North Pole bound.”

MacDonald, who’s 55, admits it will be hard to leave the newsroom where she has spent the better part of two decades. “I love those people. We’ve been through a lot together,” she notes.

In fact, MacDonald says the station offered her a three-year contract to stay at Channel 4. She spoke to her financial adviser and accountant about the buyout. In the end, the most influential advice came from her mother.

“I didn’t take (the buyout) until I told my mom, ‘You know, I think I’m going to do the practical thing and stay at the station.’ She told me to sit down and get a legal pad and essentially look at this dollars-and-sense-wise as well as lifestyle-wise, about what I wanted for me going forward. She said, ‘The practical thing to do is to take this buyout offer and reimagine the second part of your professional career.’”

MacDonald says she is contemplating the future with an open mind. “I always thought I’d die in a newsroom with my boots on. … I really did,” she says. “Only now can I imagine a life where I can have something different. And I don’t know if it will be better, but I think it could be.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.