WBAL’s Tim Tooten to retire from TV news after 35 years

Even before Tim Tooten knew what a reporter’s job was really like, he was pretending to be interviewing his middle school classmates in the back of the class, holding a pencil in place of a microphone and asking pointed questions. Ta.

Tuten never stopped asking questions, and after almost half a century, he probably He is one of the area’s best-known faces and the longest-serving reporter in the education industry, having worked for WBAL for 35 years.

However, on December 15, he plans to say goodbye to viewers on air and retire as a journalist. He will continue to be busy as an adjunct professor of media communications at Loyola University Maryland and founder and pastor of Harvest Christian Ministries, a nondenominational church in Nottingham, Baltimore County. He will also have more time to spend with his two grandchildren and his three children.

Tuten’s departure comes nearly 18 months after another veteran reporter, Jayne Miller, left her job at WBAL TV after 40 years.

Tuten, 65, said he slipped into the world of education reporting simply by pitching a bunch of education-related stories until the station started calling him an education reporter. He never had a beat assigned to him. Most of his stories came from area schools, but he also wrote sports stories and stories so large that they required most of his staff’s time.

“I was very interested in education. So somehow it happened,” he said.

Tuten was so well known that in January, an hour after multiple people were shot, as he stood on a street corner outside Edmonson Westside High School, parents and students tried to tell their stories. I was drawn to him. they trusted him. Reporters nearby looked skeptical.

Mr. Tuten was the first reporter this spring to publish an article identifying candidates for Baltimore County school superintendent, instantly exposing each candidate to public scrutiny.

His first vacation was in high school, when a teacher was looking for young black teenagers to record a public service announcement for the NAACP urging people to register to vote. It only took him 15 seconds, but when he heard his voice on the air, he was hooked. He took every opportunity to read the news on a small-town radio station in Florida, worked at a college radio station, and then entered the profession as a radio station. Among three young college graduates selected for a one-year paid internship in Washington, D.C. DC is affiliated with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

His first full-time job was out of the Huntington station. West Virginia. Although he had never been there, he got the job and stayed for five years, where he met his wife. He moved to the larger metropolitan market of Baltimore and worked as a general assignment reporter for WMAR. The job lasted only 15 months and he was fired.

He started working for an insurance company to support his family, but did freelance television work, which led to a full-time job at WBAL in 1988.

Tuten said his most memorable assignment was working on a 30-minute documentary filmed in Liberia, West Africa, called “Maryland in Africa.” Tuten said the documentary details the colonial-era story of the movement of freed slaves from Fells Point to Liberia. He won both the National Edward R. Murrow Award and the National Headliner Award for Best of Show for this work. He also won the National Headliner Award for his documentary “East is East,” about his life as an African American growing up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Tuten said she has enjoyed most of the relationships she has built over the years with parents, teachers and administrators. He often encounters people who want to talk to him and enjoys after-hours conversations. “It’s more important to meet people, connect with people and try to remember where I know them,” he said.

While he still loves his job, he said it was time to take the next step. “I never thought that one day I would retire from this job. Who would think about that?”

liz.bowie@thebaltimorebanner.com