WRAL reporter leaving the station after 16 years, looking for adventure on the road
WRAL reporter Bryan Mims, who came to Raleigh in 2006 via South Carolina and Arizona, is leaving the station at the end of June.
Mims told The News & Observer on Wednesday that he and his family — his wife and their three sons, ages 10, 12 and 14 — are moving to the Atlanta area, where they’ll be closer to family.
He has a plan beyond that, but the details aren’t exactly concrete.
The family’s ultimate goal is to hit the road and travel around America for at least six months to a year. Mims says that plan would require him getting a remote job in public relations or marketing and working from the road (his sons are already enrolled in Virtual Academy in Georgia). He’s had a few offers, but so far nothing that quite fits his needs.
In the short term, the South Carolina native has some freelance work for local news outlets in Atlanta lined up, and the family can still hit the road in late summer, even if only for a couple of months. If the remote PR job and longer term travel plan doesn’t work out, Mims says he’ll likely end up working in TV news in the Atlanta area and settling there.
But travel — for some period of time, at least — is going to happen: “If nothing else we want to go for a couple months and fund it from our savings,” Mims said.
The aim, he says, is to have an adventure with his family and tell stories from the road, if not for a network or news outlet, then on his own social media sites.
“I would just love to go out there and tell stories about America,” Mims said. “We want to go across the country and tell stories about how Americans are indeed kind to one another, that we’re not as divisive as always portrayed in the media. We’re hoping to tell some stories about the goodness of people, united in America.”
Mims does all of his own photography and editing at WRAL, and he’s an accomplished documentary producer, so that part will come naturally.
He stresses that his decision to move on has nothing to do with wanting to leave WRAL specifically.
“I’ve been here almost 16 years and I just feel like there’s another move in me, another adventure,” he said.
Mims has worked as both a reporter and a weekend anchor at the Capitol Broadcasting Company-owned station.
“WRAL has been a terrific place to work. I have nothing negative to say about WRAL. I think it’s a terrific television station, it’s very community-oriented, and this has nothing to do with my working environment at WRAL. It’s about my desire to try something different. I want to try this on-the-road adventure and if that doesn’t quite work out, then I’ll at least have something in Atlanta.”
A storyteller out on the road
As Mims talks about his plan to become — at least for a time — a roving storyteller, a section from his WRAL bio page suddenly seems prescient: “My hero in the industry is the late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt, a Carolina native himself,” Mims wrote of the “On the Road” journalist. “From the time I was 15, I knew I wanted to do what he did. I longed to travel America — and the world — in pursuit of news (or just a good, compelling story).”
In fact, according to his bio, this isn’t the first time Mims has gotten the urge to ramble. He and his wife have done this before, in 2004, before their move to North Carolina.
“We bought a raggedy 1982 Fleetwood trailer, only 15 feet long, and hauled it across 10 western states,” he wrote on the WRAL site. “During that time, we also traveled with a church in Phoenix, Ariz., to shoot documentaries in Paraguay, Brazil, Honduras and China. In 2005, my wife and I spent three months in Honduras to produce documentaries on church missions there.”
During his journalism career, Mims has won three Regional Emmy Awards. In 2010, he won for his coverage of the Haiti earthquake (he traveled there with an engineer and photographer, embedded with the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg) and for his “Main Street North Carolina” political series, in which he traveled across North Carolina talking to voters. In 2003, he won for a feature called “Spirits Anyone?” about “a supposedly haunted tavern” in Tempe, Arizona.
No matter if the topic is caring citizens, earthquakes, politics or ghosts, it’s all about the story for Mims.
“I love to tell stories. I love crafting stories with words and audio and video, and I’ll always do that in some capacity — I just don’t know what it looks like yet,” he said.
“I’m taking this leap of faith and discovering what the road looks like as I proceed along it. I don’t know what’s around the bend and I don’t really know exactly what I’ll be doing two or three weeks from now, but I’m just trying to keep the faith.”
Follow Bryan Mims’ adventures on social media
Facebook: facebook.com/bryan.mims.90
This story was originally published June 24, 2022 at 3:43 PM.
