There was a time when Aimee Cobabe thought she’d be telling radio listeners about the weather, not the news. She loved watching Mark Eubank, and then his son Kevin Eubank, do the weather on KSL-TV, so she thought meteorology and storm chasing were on her horizon.

But after graduating from Viewmont High in 2011, she headed to Utah State for two years before serving an LDS mission in Rancho Cucamonga, California. When she returned to finish getting her degree at USU, her direction with news began to shift.

“I always loved journalism. I wrote for my newspaper in high school and knew I liked news and wanted to get involved in it, but I always thought I wanted to write,” she recalled. “My brother-in-law asked me what I’d regret the most with my education and I told him that even though I loved it, I was terrified of broadcasting. The equipment, the cameras, and the editing all intimidated me, but I told him I’d regret it if I didn’t at least try. He said if that was the thing that scared me the most, I should go in that direction.”

So she did. She applied and worked at the Utah Public Radio station while in Logan. She then left to become news director at Mid-Utah Radio in Richfield, where she worked for two years. In October 2019, she started as a talk show producer at KSLNewsradio for veteran broadcaster Doug Wright. 

“That was incredible,” Cobabe said. “Doug has done it for so long and knows Utah in a way that no one else does. It was great to learn under him.” When he stepped away from his daily show, she produced with Lee Longsberry before he also left to work in Washington, D.C. That’s when she left the talk show side of things and applied to be the morning associate producer at KSL Newsradio.

“I missed working in news a lot and wanted to get back into the reporting side of the business,” she said. “Lee was leaving and the news director asked me to come over for a position they had opened. It’s been more than two years that I’ve been reporting in the field.” She is now the Senior News Reporter at KSL Newsradio.

Her daily routine is anything but – news reporters see their assignments and beats constantly changing with breaking stories or latest developments. One of her focuses is working with her KSL counterparts on “improving and creating a new way to report on crime – to be a model for other stations.” She said that involves the voices of those in the community who are impacted. 

“They used to say that if it bleeds, it leads when reporting on crime,” she said, “but not so much anymore. We need to look at the bigger picture – the effects of a news event more than just the causes.” 

She’s been affected by many stories she’s covered, citing the Lori Vallow Daybell case where she sat in a Boise courtroom listening to testimony about a mother who was found guilty of killing her two children. “I didn’t realize how sad that was going to make me feel,” but adding it was one she needed to cover.

“I’m grateful that I still get to report those stories, but I wouldn’t want to get to the point where I’m so callous that those stories don’t impact me. Once that happens, it’s time to move on to something else. In order to honestly report to a community, who have to have some kind of stake in it. You have to be able to feel that compassion.”

Cobabe thinks that journalism has changed a lot, or at least how it’s perceived.

“There are so many different forms of it. You have those who think that everything they see or hear on CNN and Fox is news, but now you share the media feed with someone on X or TikTok. In the middle is us – local reporters trying our best to tell stories in an impactful way and hoping to reduce harm. I do think people should pay more attention to their local news, and to decisions made closer to home that will affect their communities the most. If they do that, I believe they’ll find a little more comfort.”

She loves Utah, and has no great desire to leave for a larger market.

“I have a stake here, I grew up here,” she said. “I have family here, and I know the issues that matter to my neighbors. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be open to other opportunities, but I’m very happy here working for KSL and I wouldn’t want to lose that joy I’m feeling by trying to get to the next step.”