These are the things I take away from meeting Dawna Friesen. She doesn’t own a TV set at the moment, but that will change. Her only appliances are a kettle and an iron. Her six-year old son is something of a soccer fanatic and supports Fulham.
She feels like she has attention deficit disorder but she doesn’t, obviously. It’s just that she’s been a reporter for so long, exploring one issue at a time, that now she feels she’s not giving an issue its due as a TV anchor person, whose job is moving from one news item to another.
Also, she’s an introvert, and she has dissociated herself from “that woman” on all the billboards promoting her presence as anchor of Global National.
This last point is significant. There can be few people in Canada unaware that this Dawna Friesen lady has returned home to Canada to anchor the news on Global. The broadcaster has made rather a point of letting Canada know in a major marketing campaign. It could give you the impression that Friesen is a superstar, and you’d better remember that.
“Seeing yourself on all these posters and billboards is a shock,” she says. “They told me they were going to do a campaign, but until you see it, you have no idea what it means. I’m not sure it’s me up there.”
Her down-to-earth manner comes as something of a relief. Arranging a chat with Friesen on this Vancouver trip proved to be a small ordeal, one that descended into comedy. At one point, I was busy declining, very politely, the opportunity to talk to her for a few minutes while she was in makeup for Global National. She was oblivious to all the fussing.
The slight, 46-year-old Friesen has told other journalists that she was quite shy when she began a career in radio and TV. This seems entirely plausible when she arrives to meet me at a hotel lounge. She’s only a couple of minutes late but is shyly apologetic. Then she disappears with the Globe photographer for a while. Little wonder. She has one of those faces, with compelling eyes, that a camera, any camera, likes.
I start by asking her how she came to be hired by Global National this past summer, an extraordinary time because CTV had announced the upcoming retirement of anchor Lloyd Robertson and his replacement by Lisa LaFlamme. Suddenly there were major changes afoot in the usually stable world of network news anchors in Canada.
“They called me, asked if I was interested,” Friesen says.” I asked for time to think about it, did that and said, ‘Yes.’ I had some worries at the back of my mind, but I got the answers to allay any fears.”
At the time, Friesen was an NBC correspondent in London, and had spent 11 years with the U.S. network. Her career had begun in her home province of Manitoba and, after periods reporting for CBC in Vancouver and CTV in Ottawa, she joined NBC. “I had just signed a new four-year contract with NBC this year, and it was going well there. But when the offer came, I knew that in the back of my mind the return to Canada had seemed inevitable. I would be going from a very big news operation at NBC, to Global, so I asked questions about that. I also asked questions about CanWest Global’s financial situation, which everybody was doing then. Everything has worked out.”
