Cory James dreamt of Fresno.<\/p>\n
Years after he left to pursue jobs in bigger markets \u2014 New York City, Washington D.C., Atlanta \u2014 he’d randomly dream he was back with friends in his apartment on Fulton Street. He took those things as a sign.<\/p>\n
But it was a conversation with former ABC30 anchor Liz Harrison<\/a> that planted the seed for his return. He told her about the dreams. “You could come back,” she told him.<\/p>\n “It hadn’t crossed my mind,” James told The Bee in an interview at ABC30 this week, following his return to the station as its A.M. Live and midday anchor.<\/a><\/p>\n James left ABC30 in 2020 after four years as a reporter and weekend anchor. Some might remember, on his final broadcast, he cried. “Like, I didn’t want to go,” he says.<\/p>\n The interim jobs were James ticking off a to-do list.<\/p>\n He moved to New York City because it was the No. 1 news market and an opportunity too big to ignore. “If I said no, I might not see it again.”<\/p>\n In D.C. he got to be a main anchor on Nexstar’s CW station.<\/p>\n In Atlanta, he worked for the top news station in his hometown \u2014 a longtime career goal.<\/p>\n But none of it made him happy. Or, as happy as he was in Fresno.<\/p>\n “Home is truly where you make it,” he says.<\/p>\n “This is home for me.”<\/p>\n In the footsteps of Warren Armstrong<\/p>\n If it seems odd, a TV news personality ditching out on the “big leagues” for a smaller TV market, James is following in footsteps. “Warren did the same thing,” he says.<\/p>\n That’s Warren Armstrong, who, in the mid-to-late 1990s, was a mustachioed news anchor at KJEO Channel 47. Until he left Fresno for Sacramento.<\/p>\n He returned four years later to take an anchor position with ABC30 Action News.<\/p>\n The mustache was gone.<\/p>\n “I have always thought of Fresno as my adopted hometown,” Armstrong told The Bee at the time. ” I have always enjoyed the community and felt welcomed here.” Armstrong’s wife is from Fresno and their oldest son was born here, so they never cut ties when they left.<\/p>\n In the end, “it all came down to family, friends and the quality of living that they could find in Fresno,” according to the 2000 story.<\/p>\n “It didn’t hurt,” The Bee wrote, “that his return was to the top-rated news station in town.”<\/p>\n It is a sentiment echoed by James, who calls ABC30 a “legacy station” with 70 years of history<\/a> and a massive amount of support from the community, and also its parent company: “You don’t find this sort of operation everywhere.”<\/p>\n Changes at ABC30<\/p>\n James is part of a switch-around at ABC30<\/a>. He took over the AM duties from Jason Oliveira, who moved to the evening newscasts to replace the retiring Armstrong. This comes following the loss of three on-air personalities in July and the addition of at least one new reporter, Grant Johnson.<\/a><\/p>\n Johnson joined the station this week. It’s his first full-time reporting gig, though he’s done live and long-form reporting work across the country and graduates this month with a master’s from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.<\/p>\n Other Fresno TV news change-ups<\/p>\n The entirety of Fresno’s TV news landscape is seeing big changes right now.<\/p>\n Last week, Kim Stephens announced<\/a> she would be leaving Great Day, the KMPH morning show she helped create back in 2003. She took a full-time tenure track position at Fresno State. The four-decade TV news veteran only recently returned to the morning shows after filling in on evening desk duties for Monte Torres, who announced his retirement in June.<\/p>\n Over at Nexstar’s CBS47 and KSEE24 duopoly<\/a> several on-air personalities left, including Ben Morris, Brian Dorman, Briana Byus and Jason Takhtadjian. “This happens in a lot of newsrooms where contracts come up at the exact same time,” Dorman said in a final segment earlier this month. “We all started around the same time, different year … and then contracts come up and this is what happens.”<\/p>\n CBS47 has been teasing Luis Cruz as its new evening anchor<\/a>, alongside Kathryn Herr and Lauren Wallace. For the past year, Cruz had anchored KSEE24’s Sunrise and Midday newscasts.<\/p>\n