When you are a young kid growing up in a small town, you’ll never know what might inspire your career choice.
For some, it’s following in mom or dad’s footsteps in a business they have been in all their lives.
Or maybe it’s joining your buddies in starting up something that you all grew up doing together, like fixing cars.
Sitting at the kitchen table eating her Froot Loops every morning, a young Dakota City girl grew up watching the morning news on TV, never realizing that one day she would not only BE on the small screen in her family’s kitchen, but would be working alongside some of the people she grew up watching.
So goes the story of Katie Copple, who was an avid watcher of KTIV’s morning newscast growing up as the daughter of Jerry and Cheryl Copple, and is now the co-host of the Sioux City TV station’s morning newscast.
“I remember growing up, I’d wake up in the morning and we’d get up and have breakfast and the news would be on and it would be Al Joens and whoever else in the morning, and that led into Katie Couric with the ‘Today’ show,” Copple said while finishing up her day on Signal Hill, a place she has called home for the last two years after spending several years working behind the scenes at KCAU and in front of the cameras at KMEG. “I never thought at the time that it would be my career, but looking back on it, it all makes sense now.”
The 2011 South Sioux City graduate originally went to college at Morningside University to become a psychologist — that is, until she was bitten by the journalism bug.
“I had to take an intro to mass communications class my freshman year, and I just fell in love with it,” she said.
The change served her well.
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