Alison King spent three decades working as a reporter, spending most of her career at New England Cable News and NBC10 Boston. During that time, King cultivated respect by leaders on both sides of the aisle for her tough but fair questioning style. A resident fellow in the Spring of 2024 at the IOP and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center, King sat down with The HPR to discuss the unique nature of New England politics and the future of journalism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You had a 30-year career covering Boston and New England Politics. How did you get your start in journalism? What inspired you to pursue this career path?
Alison King: When I was a kid, there were three TV stations — NBC, ABC, and CBS — and I loved to watch TV. Specifically I loved watching talk shows: The Phil Donahue show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Merv Griffin Show. I was genuinely interested in everybody’s story, always curious to know where someone came from, and how they got to where they ended up. I would watch these shows and think, “that is the coolest job in the world.” So I went off to college. Liberal arts, no journalism degrees there. After college I went to New York City because all my friends were going there, working in advertising and later on for the Olympics at ABC Sports. I did that for a year and realized, “I’ve got to pursue this TV thing, even though it’s a long shot, I gotta go for it.” So I got a master’s in journalism at NYU, and I sent my resume and demo tape out all over the country and as soon as I got my first job, I was like, “Yeah, this is what I want to do.” So it came back to being 12 years old, just watching TV and thinking “Wow, that would be so fun.”
HPR: Boston, Massachusetts, and the entire New England region, is home to a one of a kind political climate. What it was like to have a front row seat to it?
AK: I can’t imagine for me a better city to cover politics and a better state, a better region, than Boston, Massachusetts, New England. First of all, there’s the historic element of this region. I mean, the shot heard around the world was a few miles from here. Everything about the Revolutionary War, that’s sort of steeped in the tradition of this whole area. It’s part of who we are here. All of the academic institutions, the research and medical institutions, the tech industry, there’s just so much in this area.
There’s always been this presumption that Boston was always that progressive city ahead of the curve. And it still is in a lot of ways. It’s not always as liberal and progressive as people think it is. There’s definitely sort of a very moderate, slightly conservative aspect of this area too. And so to cover politics here, to have New Hampshire next door where every four years every presidential candidate comes marching through living rooms and diners, and we have access to all these people.
Then there’s just the quirky New Englanders. There’s just the great stories about people who, I remember I did a story once about a woman, a nun from New Orleans, who moved to a New Hampshire goat farm with her 71-year-old mother to start making cheese. I mean, they’re just like these crazy, quirky stories. So put it all together. It’s just been a really fun place for me to work.
HPR: What are some stories that you are always going to remember?
AK: First of all, covering the gay marriage decision that was around 2004. I remember because I gave birth to my daughter that year and I was pregnant and trying to run around the state house. But it was hugely contentious, as you can imagine, and no one in a million years thought that that would ever happen. It was unbelievably exciting to cover, and we kind of lived in the state house, and it was just swarmed with people, constantly. And it was national news.
All the presidential stuff, I mean, covering John Kerry’s presidential bid, and Howard Dean from Vermont was also running that year. And I spent a lot of time on the campaign plane with him and flying around.
But of course the Boston Marathon bombing, even though that wasn’t a political story, everything has a political angle to it. So it became, you know, there was the court system and there was everything that was going on with legislation and that was unbelievable to cover. And on 9/11 the planes took off from here. There were a million stories to be done about the whole 9/11 situation and the tragedy that that was. But those were just some of the exciting stories that I did.
I mean, honestly, it was some of the quirky characters that I met. I used to be sent to other parts of New England — in Maine to cover a shipbuilder, or an artist’s community colony, or the ice cream place that sold lobster ice cream, or all these quirky little stories that were amazing.
HPR: During your time at NBC10 Boston, you embarked on a tradition of a Christmas sing along with elected officials. Could you tell us the story behind that?
AK: I love to sing. In college I sang in an acapella group. It was one of my favorite things ever to do, and I missed singing. So I had this idea to get various politicians to sing a line from The 12 Days of Christmas. I asked around, no one would do it. Then I asked Ted Kennedy to do it. And Ted Kennedy, the late great senator, loved to sing and perform. So he’s like, “Oh, I’d do that,” and I said awesome, you do five golden rings.
Then all of a sudden, because Ted Kennedy did, everyone started calling me back. The first one was hilarious. And then every year, you know, some are better than others over the 20 years, or whatever, but then it just took on a life of its own.
Also, it was my way of like, I can’t tell you how much goodwill I got out of that. You have to trust someone to do that and that they’re not going to make a complete ass out of you. I know, I love relationships with people that way.
HPR: What’s the current state of journalism? Do you have any advice for aspiring journalists?
AK: I do worry about local journalism in general, especially local political journalism. I hope that young people are not discouraged by the fact, or turned away from it, because there’s no opportunities.
There’s so much about fake news. When I started in this business, it was kind of considered a noble profession, and I still think it very much is. It’s just that it gets dumped on. I don’t want to point to Donald Trump specifically, but for the first time in my life I had screaming crowds of people yell at me “fake news” at one of his rallies. Yeah, there are people who write crap and you’re always going to get duds, but individuals should do their homework and figure out who the people are that you can trust and they can rely on, the people who are really just trying to tell it like it is.
I encourage young people to just go down the path of journalism. There’s so many different ways, nowadays with social media. There’s so many different outlets to go to, to pursue, and I do worry a lot about it because local news is struggling all over the country and things are becoming more and more national. I think communities are at risk of being frayed and you lose that gel that holds them all together, because people don’t know what’s going on in their school systems and their police departments, in their court systems. And they don’t have a really robust group of reporters covering that stuff. So it does worry me.
