Morning TV reporter leaves KMPH in Fresno. ‘If you are not growing, you are not living’

Christina Lopez has never seen the screen test she did when she was hired by KMPH Fox 26.

She's not sure she wants to. She was a reporter with a master's degrees in journalism and a résumé that included stints with newspapers as well as television and radio news. She was working at ABC30 at the time.

But she was applying to do the weather — an area with which she had zero experience. She admitted as such during the job interview in full disclosure, and they wanted the screen test anyway.

Still, she wasn't sure she'd get the job, and it didn't help that the job offer got lost in her email spam folder.

It took several weeks to figure the whole thing out.

But she eventually landed at the station, where she's spent the past three years splitting time between the weather desk as a weekend anchor and reporting for the morning show Great Day.

Lopez did a final broadcast the station Thursday.

"It was an awesome opportunity," Lopez said in an interview in advance of her last day.

"It was a little nutty."

Lopez is a Visalia native who graduated from Immanuel High School in Reedley and got her start in journalism while attending College of the Sequoias. That schooling was paid for by tips she made working as a waitress at the Vintage Press restaurant in Visalia.

She jokingly calls it the Vintage Press scholarship program.

Lopez wanted to study theater, until she found the campus newspaper and discovered that journalism combined two things she really enjoyed: "I love talking to people. I love writing. What job is going to allow me to both those things?"

And broadcast journalism was kind of like performing.

Lopez got a degree in broadcast journalism from Point Loma Nazarene University and her master's from the UC Berkeley. She worked in several markets before landing back in the Central Valley, working at the news station she watched as a kid.

"I grew up watching the '10 O' Clock News' with John Soderman," she said.

"And Kim and Kopi."

She counts the FOX 26 crew as part of her family and said the station was there for her during critical moments in her life, including a miscarriage and then the birth of her second child, a daughter.

Lopez can't talk about her next gig yet, but said there is something in the works and she isn't leaving broadcast journalism.

"It's prepared me to catapult to the next level of my career," she said of KMPH.

"It's really time for me to grow. If you are not growing, you are not living."