CBC has announced that Colleen Jones will retire at the end of the month after nearly four decades with the public broadcaster.
Jones, 63, who is also known to Canadians as a six-time national curling champion and three-time world champion (including a senior’s title in 2017), began her broadcasting career in radio sports with CHUM Halifax in 1982. She transitioned into television with CTV in 1984, before signing on with CBC Nova Scotia in 1986 as a sportscaster on First Edition with Jim Nunn and Susan Ormiston, just 12 days after giving birth to her son.
Jones, who already had made history in 1982 as the youngest skip to ever win the Canadian Women’s Curling Championship, joined Don Wittman and Don Duguid on CBC Sports curling broadcasts a few years later.
She joined CBC Newsworld, starting in 1993, as the early morning weather presenter and sports reporter, in addition to covering 11 Olympic Games for the public broadcaster and serving as a curling commentator for NBC during the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Since 2012, she’s been a reporter with CBC Nova Scotia, carving out a niche as a local storyteller, including two stints biking around the province to tell stories about ordinary Nova Scotians from “the road less travelled.”
“Colleen impresses everyone she meets,” wrote Ian Brimacombe, Managing Editor, CBC News, Current Affairs and Local, CBC Nova Scotia, in an announcement Thursday. “The assignment producers, hosts and videographers who’ve worked with her know her to be a journalistic force of nature…Colleen’s storytelling is marked by deep, honest curiosity about so-called ‘everyday’ Canadians who do extraordinary things. She will bike, swim, paddle, run or walk with anyone, anywhere to bring out the best in their stories – often to the great challenge of the videographers trying to keep up with her. Through it all she says, she’s had one philosophy: ‘As one person in Tatamagouche told me…you bring back yard stories to the front yard for all of us to see.'”
Jones was named to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2016, and appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022. She penned autobiography “Throwing Rocks at Houses: My Life in and Out of Curling” after contracting bacterial meningitis in late 2010 and later undergoing brain surgery.
Her last day with the public broadcaster is April 30.
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