MEDIA
MAKING IT WORK
Angie Fenton: Entertainment correspondent on WHAS-11 Great Day Live and editor-in-chief of Extol Magazine HOME LIFE Angie was born and raised in Michigan and came to Louisville in 2002 for a relationship. Although the relationship didn’t work out, the city became her home. “I moved here for love, then I fell in love with Louisville,” she says. She now lives in Southern Indiana with her husband of nearly two years, Jason Applegate, their 5-month-old daughter, Olive; their dogs, and a cat. THE WRITE STUFF Growing up, Angie wanted to be a veterinarian, the first woman president, and a writer. “I’ve always loved animals, but I soon figured out that I had no interest in seeing the insides of them,” she says. “Politics was not going to be something that I wanted any part of either, but I stuck with the writing.” Angie earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and taught as a fulltime adjunct professor at Central Michigan University before joining the Courier-Journal in 2003 as a writer, reporter, and eventually the entertainment columnist. From 2009 to 2013, she was the managing editor of The Voice-Tribune. “I love telling people’s stories,” she says. “It’s so rewarding.” In early 2015, Angie and her husband published the first issue of Extol, a magazine they launched together to showcase the lifestyle and culture of Southern Indiana.
BIRTHDAY SURPRISE Angie and her husband didn’t plan on having biological children. “I’m adopted, and I’ve never had any interest in being pregnant,” she says. The newlyweds were stunned when they found out they were going to be parents just months after launching their magazine and filming an episode of Oxygen TV’s Finding My Father to learn about Angie’s biological father. “If you had said to me this time last year that I was going to be a mom, I would have said, ‘No way, you’re talking to the wrong person,’” Angie says. “But the minute we found out, it was life-changing and amazing.” Olive was born in January 2016 on Angie’s 41st birthday, fittingly marking a new chapter in her mother’s life. “Now it’s all about her. My daughter is my utmost priority.”
I love telling “people’s stories. It’s so rewarding.
CAMERA-READY Angie remembers working at her desk at the Courier-Journal when she got a call from a Fox News producer. “(Louisville native and former partner of Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith) Larry Birkhead had just won custody of his daughter Dannielynn, and all of a sudden they were asking me to go on national television to talk about it. This was ludicrous to me because I’d never been on television before in my life. But looking back at it objectively, I think I did a decent job.” In fact, Angie did so well that she started to freelance as a part-time entertainment reporter for WAVE 3 News while working at the paper. In 2011, she joined the Great Day Live team on WHAS-11 as a full-time entertainment correspondent. “I thank Larry Birkhead,” Angie says of her transition into television. “He’s actually a friend, and he’s a great dad.”
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ANGIE TIME There’s not a lot of quiet time with an infant in the house, but Angie makes sure to grab those moments whenever she can. “It might be only 20 minutes in a day, and sometimes I don’t get them at all, but I have to take care of me in order to be good for anyone else,” she says. Angie is getting back into an exercise routine — “Being an older mom, I owe it to my daughter to keep myself healthy” — and recharges by spending time with her dogs, listening to music, and taking a day off work when she feels like she’s reaching her limit. She also likes to cultivate her green thumb. “I take orchids that are on their way downhill, that are dying, and revive them. I have about 17 of them right now. There’s just something very Zen about being able to do that.” SPILT MILK One thing Angie has learned about herself since becoming a mother is that she’s far more resilient and flexible than she ever imagined. “And I really try not to sweat the small stuff. I was pumping for Olive one morning and literally spilled the milk. I wanted to cry — I’m producing enough to feed her but not an overabundance — but I told myself, ‘You cannot cry over this.’ At the end of the day, what really matters are my daughter and my husband, that my family and friends are safe, and that we’ve done something other than just taking up space in the world.”
Like most new mothers, Angie is doing her best to juggle work and family. “I get up in the morning, spend time with my daughter, drop her off either at her godfathers’ house or at her grammy’s to go do TV, then pick her up on the way home,” she says. “Then there’s the magazine, but I can work on it from anywhere — ‘have iPad, will travel’ — so I can be flexible to fit Olive’s schedule. That will change the more awake and interactive she becomes, but we’ll figure it out.”