After praying on it, Charlotte news anchor is leaving WBTV. Next stop? The YMCA.
The days — or, more accurately, the extremely early mornings — of Mary King working as an anchor for WBTV News are coming to an end this month, she announced last week.
After a run of 17 years as a fixture of morning-news teams that started in Hagerstown, Md., and wound its way through Columbia, S.C., King will sign off from the Charlotte station on April 17, then step away from journalism entirely. But while she’ll no longer have to wake up at 2 a.m. for work, she says she’s not done sharing stories with local audiences.
Where is King headed next? To the YMCA of Greater Charlotte as its new director of donor relations, responsible for generating stories, impact reports and content aimed at current and prospective donors.
“Really, I think the heart of it is, ‘How do we share stories so that the community knows why we’re here?’” King tells The Charlotte Observer of her newly created post at the Y, which has roughly 45,000 members and 4,500 donors.
“There have been so many pieces in my journalism career of getting to lead (fundraising) campaigns through our station partnerships, and tell stories in that way: ‘This is what’s happening at organizations in our community that make where we live better.’ And so it’s really exciting to think about getting to share in that way, and hopefully continue then to pour back into our community.”
King — who says she has been contemplating a career change since the sudden, tragic deaths of two colleagues 2-1/2 years ago — acknowledges she’s stepping out of her comfort zone.
But Ed Paat, chief development officer at the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, sees her as a natural for the job for multiple reasons.
“Mary has this talent of connecting with people,” Paat says, “and the ability to tell stories, those personal stories, about how the YMCA has really impacted lives.”
In creating the position, “we thought, ‘How do we do this?’ And, ‘Does that person exist out there that has the talent to do this?’ Then we got introduced to Mary and we were like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is perfect.’ ... At the YMCA, because we have a faith here, we would say that that’s one of those God things that He kind of dropped in our lap.”
Which is fitting, because King also believes that God has been guiding her career from the start.
‘In that moment, it just all came together’
As a newly minted college graduate in 2008, King took a job as a reporter at WHAG-TV in Hagerstown — and almost immediately thought she’d made a mistake.
The first week she was there, the news director told her she was being assigned to the morning shift. “‘We’ll need you here around 2 a.m.,’” she remembers being told. “I was like, Wait, WHAAT? I just got out of college, so I was going to bed at 1 o’clock. I remember, like, bawling, and calling my mentors and saying, ‘What have I done??’”
Ultimately, King decided to give it a shot. But it was a struggle.
Her parents lived 1,500 miles away, and because of her odd schedule and the long hours she was putting in, she made few friends. She quickly felt lonely and isolated.
“I had felt really led to take that job,” King recalls, “so I kept being like, God, did I hear you wrong? I really was kind of in this place of like, Is it journalism? Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?”
It was almost a year into her time in Maryland, she says, when she got her sign.
A Washington County commissioner called her to say a young boy at his church named Christopher Lewis was losing a battle with terminal brain cancer, and that the commission was planning to issue a proclamation naming April 30 — which in 2009 marked the boy’s ninth birthday — “Christopher Lewis Day” in the county.
King, both touched and intrigued, contacted the boy’s mother, who invited King to visit Christopher at their home. But when the rookie reporter arrived, he was too weak to even open his eyes, much less speak.
So the mom cued up a VHS tape to show King a video of Christopher at Vacation Bible School, shot a year or so earlier, talking to the congregation about the radiation helmet he had to wear during his treatments. “The person on the stage asked him, ‘Is it hard to do those treatments?’” King recalls, “and in this sweet little voice, he says, ‘It is. But when I’m in those treatments, I just look up and I think, God is good all the time.’ Then he just started singing, ‘God is good all the time.’ The congregation joined in. And I am weeping in their living room at this point.”
Her eyes fill with tears in her own living room — in the Indian Land, S.C. home she shares with her husband and their two young sons — as she recounts this early episode in her career.
“It was so beautiful,” King continues, her voice shaking. “I was so humbled by the fact that his family had let me in their home to be a voice for him, as they were going through the hardest thing that they’d ever walked through in their life. And I remember rushing back to the station, and she let me take the video ... to include in the story. ...
“God was re-framing everything in me. (He was telling me) ‘Mary, this was never about you. This was always about being a voice for others.’ Through that whole period of time, of wondering, Is this what I’m supposed to do?, I’d been praying a lot, and reading a lot, and looking through scriptures, and I kept seeing Proverbs 31:8-9: ‘Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves. Ensure justice for those who are perishing.’
“In that moment, it just all came together.”
That purpose and that passion was unwavering, as King moved in 2011 to WIS-TV in Columbia, where she memorably helped steer coverage of the Charleston church shooting in June 2015 and the historic South Carolina floods just a few months later; and as she relocated to Charlotte for the WBTV job in August 2019, not long before the dawn of the global pandemic.
But she can pinpoint the exact day she started slowly shifting toward making some sort of change.
‘Is this still what you want me to be doing?’
At around noon on Nov. 22, 2022, shortly after leaving the station for the day, King started receiving notifications about a helicopter crash near Interstate 77 at the Nations Ford Road exit.
She and the entire news team at WBTV would soon be dealt a devastating blow, when it became apparent that the only two occupants were WBTV pilot Chip Tayag and meteorologist Jason Myers — who were engaged in a training exercise together at the time — and that both had died in the wreck.
“There were no words,” King says. “They were our colleagues and friends. As a journalist, when we cover horrific stories your heart is always with the people who are suffering and a part of that suffering, (but even more so) to feel it so personally, because we were all so close with them. And to watch their families walk through that ... you just can’t ever imagine.”
In the days and weeks that followed, she says she spent a fair amount of time praying for their families, talking with her husband about what happened and how she was feeling, “and just realizing how precious and how short life is.”
“We know that, because we’re in news all the time — we’re always talking about it and covering it,” King says. “But when it hit that closely and that personally, it really was like, Lord, with the time that I’m given, I want to be doing exactly what you want me to do. ...
“That started that prayer process, (of asking) Is this still what you want me to be doing, God?”
Over the course of the next year and a half or so, she felt confident the answer was yes. She had mostly set the notion aside.
Then around this time last year, her husband, Curtis Miller, was asked to be the pastor for Transformation Church’s new site in Lake Wylie. They knew the several months of preparing for opening would bleed into the evening. They also had kids (Jaxon, 6, and Luke, 3 this month) who needed and wanted her attention, and she likewise wanted and needed to be giving them more of it.
Going to bed at 8 p.m. and getting up at 2 or 2:30 a.m. was feeling less and less constructive. So she started praying on that question again.
And at the start of this year, a friend told King about the YMCA opening and asked if she’d be interested in applying.
“Most of the time, people coming out of news go into communications, or PR, or into marketing,” she says, “and so this (opportunity seemed like) such a ‘wow.’ I never thought of being able to tell stories in that way, as part of a donor relations or fundraising team. But ... if it’s gonna go right back into our communities and be able to uplift where we live, that gets me excited.”
On top of that, King saw a way to do that while also being able to “pour into my family and have the opportunity to have those later nights, and not be watching the clock.”
“I don’t think I was like, Oh, I have to get out of news,” she continues. “I think it was, Okay, Lord, confirm for me this is what you have, because I want to serve my family the best, and I want to serve this community the best, and whatever that looks like — to marry those two and to be present in all the spaces — that’s what I want to do.”
King’s first day with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte is Monday, April 28.
One of the first things she’ll do is head with brand-new colleagues to St. Louis, Mo., for the North American YMCA Development Organization’s “Gateway to Giving” conference, which will open on a date that King continues to hold dear.
April 30th, which is (insert God wink here, she says) Christopher Lewis Day.
This story was originally published April 7, 2025 at 6:30 AM.
