‘A hard decision’: Top anchor leaving Fox 46 Charlotte — to carry on a family tradition
“I made some pound cake this morning,” Page Fehling announces from her kitchen, as she prepares to sit down with a guest to discuss why she’s leaving the TV business after more than seven years at Fox 46 Charlotte.
“Do you want some?”
And in hindsight, it was probably inevitable that any conversation about the career change she’s about to make — or the inspiration behind said change — would involve this particular type of baked good.
After the conversation moves to the living room of her Marvin home, she explains: “I’m from D.C. I grew up my whole life with my grandmother, my mom, and my uncle doing training seminars on soft skills for the federal government. My grandmother would always bring pound cake to classes, and my mom did, too, so it’s a family tradition. ...
“Around the age of 12, I was faced with the decision of either stay home with no babysitter ... or go to work with them, or my dad, who owned a hardware store. So I kind of did a combination of both. I would run the cash register at my dad’s hardware store, and I would bake my mom’s pound cakes ahead of time and go listen in on these daylong seminars. And loved it. Knew that’s what I was gonna do. Seemed like a perfect schedule for a parent. You could have control over your schedule, et cetera.”
This fall, after two decades of detours that found her mostly working in local-TV newsrooms, the 42-year-old wife and mother of three is stepping away from the anchor desk at WJZY to finally do what she knew as a girl she was going to do.
Fehling’s last day at the station is somewhat up in the air; although it was originally to be Oct. 1, due to scheduling issues, she says “it’ll be sometime that last week of September or possibly the week before.”
So, starting in October, she’ll more fully shift her focus to becoming a trainer like her mom, her uncle, and her grandmother before her.
But she has other big plans in the works, too.
A winding road to Charlotte
It took Fehling a while to find her way into the TV news business in the first place.
After choosing to pursue a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — in part because a friend thought she was a good writer but also because Fehling thought it would give her “a good, broad education” — she joined the Peace Corps upon graduation and spent two years in Honduras.
When she returned to the U.S., she moved to New York City with her college roommates and landed a paid fellowship in NBC’s Page Program (which meant that, yes, she was Page the Page), then was quickly promoted to a talent coordinator position with the network.
“My boss was in charge of finding all the talent for the NBC-owned and -operated stations,” Fehling recalls, “so I saw all the behind-the-scenes of how the GMs worked, and the news directors, and the producers. Thought I wanted to be a producer. Ended up getting called in to do something on camera ... and I loved it.”
She didn’t love New York, though, and her new husband, Jake, was on board with finding jobs in a more livable city.
They decided on Raleigh, bringing Page back to the Triangle area, where she landed a job as a reporter and web anchor at NBC 17 while Jake was hired to work in media operations at USA Baseball.
Within a couple years, the Fehlings started having children. By the time they stopped — two boys and a girl later — they were feeling a strong pull toward Charlotte. The main reason: Her older brother Casey Crawford lived there, having founded a successful mortgage company after a brief NFL career that included a season with the Carolina Panthers (2000-01).
When they were growing up, although they were just two years apart, they never really hung out.
Once they both were married with children, however, maturity and a fresh appreciation for familial bonding helped Page and Casey develop a closer relationship.
‘Is this gonna work? Is it not?’
“Move to Charlotte, let’s raise the kids together. We’ll get a big piece of land, we’ll build houses,” Fehling recalls Crawford saying. “And I was like, ‘It would be really fun, but what are the chances that’s ever gonna happen? The only way that I would move to Charlotte to do this is if a morning show opened up on a Fox station.’”
Fox-affiliated TV stations, by the way, have nothing to do with Fox News. What she meant is that unlike ABC, CBS and NBC — whose affiliates all broadcast national programs “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning” and “The Today Show,” respectively — Fox affiliates air their own local morning shows.
Like the national programs, after getting through the news of the day, Fox’s local shows typically do lifestyle and entertainment segments and human-interest stories. Those were the elements that interested Fehling the most.
As fate would have it, Fox 46 Charlotte was looking for a co-host for its “Good Day Charlotte” morning show in 2014. And as fate would have it, the day the station offered her the position, a house on her brother’s street went up for rent.
The job turned out to be perfect in every way ... except for one: the 2 a.m. wake-up call.
“As you can imagine, I would never have done that for this many years had I not loved what I was doing,” Fehling says. “I mean, 2 a.m. is like waking up yesterday for work, right? ... There were so many days I would come home and I was just always so tired and, but I would be like, ‘I can’t believe I get paid to do this! This is just the most fun thing ever, it checks so many boxes in terms of fulfillment for yourself, and feeling like you’re doing some good in your community.’ Then I would fall asleep and wake up and go, ‘But how long can I keep this schedule up?’
“I tossed around the idea of going back to what I thought I would always do — speaking and training and things like that — throughout the years. ... Every couple years you have a contract up and you kind of go, ‘Is this gonna work? Is it not?’ And it just always kept working. ... It just made sense.”
Then finally, this year, it didn’t anymore.
Giving journalism one last shot
In fact, she wasn’t merely thinking about being a keynote speaker or an emcee at events and serving as a facilitator of corporate training sessions on public-speaking skills and work-life balance. She was doing those things, periodically, on the side.
Meanwhile, Fehling also over the years had built a reputation in other forms of media besides television.
In 2016, she started a podcast called “Couples Therapy” that evolved into another that today is known as “Date Night With Jake & Page,” which she co-hosts with her husband. She also teamed up with her husband to (slowly) write “Holy Crap, We’re Pregnant,” a book about their pregnancy journey that they finally published last November, more than a dozen years after their oldest child was born.
She would daydream about this new career, a blend of all of these gigs, the things she’d imagined doing as a girl paired with a parade of creative projects with her husband. And as the pandemic dragged into 2021, she began steeling herself to make the leap.
But TV made one more run at keeping her in the business: Last winter, WJZY shifted Fehling to a new job, as solo anchor of the noon and 4 p.m. newscasts — meaning her workday would start at 9 a.m. and end at 5 p.m.
“It was almost like, ‘I’m gonna be a science experiment,’” she says of her initial reaction to the switch, which took effect Feb. 1. “‘I get to see what it’s like to feel like a normal human.’ ... So I was just excited, although even at that point, it was in the back of my mind, like, ‘I think this is when I’m gonna do this. This is when I’m gonna make this change and move on to start my own business. But this is a wonderful thing to try before I make that call for sure, because it’s the best of what TV can offer in terms of having it work for your life. And if I don’t still want to do it in this setting? Then I’m ready to move on.’”
Just over five months later, she was walking into her news director’s office to tell him — through tears — that she would be stepping away from TV after her contract expires on Oct. 4.
‘I’ve always wanted to do this’
Fehling will not be leaving the Charlotte area anytime soon.
In 2017, after a years-long search for the perfect plot, her brother Casey bought roughly 30 rolling acres with lots of green, lots of trees, and a picturesque little lake in Marvin (just south of Ballantyne). Then he parceled it up and sold three lots on it: one to his sister Page and her husband, one to his wife’s sister and her husband, and one to a close family friend. It’s a gated community with just four houses.
It’s like a family reunion that never ends, full of laughter and cookouts and fishing days.
There’s also the possibility that Charlotte hasn’t seen the last of Fehling on Fox 46. She says WJZY is interested in keeping the door open for her to come back as a contributor to an occasional — or perhaps, eventually, a regular — news segment.
In the meantime, she’ll hit the ground running with her new career.
Wells Fargo has invited her to speak to its “Women Go Far” group on Sept. 30, which is why she moved up her last day at the station slightly. She also recently completed proposals to lead training sessions on public speaking and diversity, equity and inclusion for “one of the big banks in town,” and if she lands the deal, participants in the sessions can be sure — there will be pound cake.
Longer-term, Fehling is planning to get the podcast on a more regular schedule (and figuring out how to monetize it). On top of that, she’s mulling possible ways to turn her and her husband’s “Holy Crap” book idea into a series.
“I’ve always wanted to do this. It’s a miracle I haven’t done it yet. But TV was so great, and I loved who I worked with and what I was doing for so long, that the push and pull, it was like this,” she says, moving her clenched hands back and forth in equal measure. “And now it’s just kind of like this,” she says, moving them in one direction.
“It’s still a hard decision. But —” she pauses just for a second, then smiles and says, in a voice that’s almost a whisper:
“I’m ready.”
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 11:28 AM with the headline "‘A hard decision’: Top anchor leaving Fox 46 Charlotte — to carry on a family tradition."
