Lights, Camera, Action
Getting to know FOX2’s Ronia Shamona
By Sarah Kittle
Ronia Shamona, host, anchor, and producer on Detroit’s channel FOX2, tried to be a lawyer once but her mother reminded Ronia of when she would walk around the house as a child with a hairbrush “microphone,” reporting on the news. Yes, she was meant to be on TV.
Not as a reality show actor, either. She tried that too and found out that “reality” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Now, Shamona is living her dream, in her home community, in front of her own people. And she’s making an impact.
“I really want to make a change in the world,” Shamona says. “If someone might have negative thoughts, maybe I can change that. Maybe they can tune in and say, ‘You know what? This is just what I needed, and now I can accomplish my goals.’ I think that’s why I do what I do.”
Finding Her Voice
Shamona always had a love for TV news and investigative journalism. She went to college at Wayne State University (WSU) and studied criminal justice, planning to be a forensic unit investigator. An advisor in her third year saw that Shamona was extremely skilled at speaking and suggested she should go into broadcast television.
“You can still do the criminal justice and take it into the investigative world,” she was told.
Full circle to that kid with the round hairbrush.
Go West, Young Ronia
But WSU didn’t offer a degree in broadcast journalism; Shamona did some investigating and found the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) offered the degree she sought, so she hesitantly approached her parents with the idea of her picking up and going west all by herself.
She really thought there might be a great deal of resistance—after all, she was barely an adult in a Chaldean family that valued togetherness. Surprisingly, her parents were supportive and told her to go for it.
“I was in shock because I never thought they’d let me live on my own, let alone in ‘Sin City’,” she recalls. She is quick to point out that although the city has this bad reputation, “Vegas really transformed my life in a great way,” helping her find herself and be responsible and make major life decisions with confidence. “It actually made me who I am,” she says.
Shamona reveled in her independence, until she didn’t. “Something just hit me,” she recalls. “I just said, ‘I think I need to go back home.’ I missed my family; I was missing life events.”
When she called WSU and found out they still didn’t offer broadcast journalism, but they did have a journalism program, she decided to return to Metro Detroit. “Overall, I was happy to be home and finish at Wayne State,” Shamona shares, although it took her 7 years to get that degree, after switching schools and paying non-resident tuition fees.
Behind the Anchor Desk
Upon graduation, Shamona decided she was going to intern at FOX2. “I remember walking in that door and seeing Huel Perkins and my heart rate just went through the roof,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m here,’ and I’m standing next to these people that I was watching and looking at and thinking, ‘How do they that do it? How do they become this?’”
After her internship ended, Shamona ended up in Lansing at WILX as a producer. It was almost 20 years ago and much has changed since then with the introduction of digital recordings. “It’s all so different,” she remembers. “It was tape-to-tape production.”
When her contract was up in Lansing, Shamona looked at the employment opportunities and had two choices as she saw it: apply for a reporter position in Green Bay, Wisconsin, or go back to Las Vegas as a producer.
She went to Vegas and signed a contract for two years with Channel 13, the ABC affiliate in Nevada. The two years soon turned into six.
“It was a fantastic experience,” she recalls. “I was on the morning show, which means I was nocturnal for six years. But it taught me resilience. It taught me grit.”
Motherhood and a Six-Year Pause
Vegas had a different audience than any she had experienced before; she had also developed a relationship and was starting a family. She was going to work at 2am, sleeping three hours a day, producing a morning show and taping segments of a new reality show. It was time to reevaluate her life’s direction.
“I’m in my late 20s,” says Shamona, “I think it’s time I skip half of this and be a mom.”
She stayed with the morning show and gave birth to her son. When her daughter was born two years later, Shamona decided to take a more substantial break. “I thought that there’s no way any job, no matter how much I love it, would take precedence and have priority over family,” she recalls.
She took six years off to be the kind of mom that could make dinners and read bedtime stories, unsure of whether there would still be a place for her in television if and when she decided to return. “It’s a chance I’ll have to take,” she thought to herself.
The Pandemic Pivot
Fast forward to January 2020. Her son was now in kindergarten and her daughter enrolled in a pre-preschool program, so Shamona decided to ease her way back onto the small screen. She contacted FOX 5 in Las Vegas to see if they were hiring. They assigned her a laptop and told her to take it home and they would figure out together where she fit in.
“Then Monday, March 16, 2020, hits,” says Shamona. “The entire world shuts down, and I was worried I was going to lose my job.”
Instead, they told her she would be producing from home. “From home?” asked Shamona. “I’m not a technical person. How am I going to do this from home?”
However she pulled it off, she did this for 6 months, producing and creating from a laptop and multiple screens, balancing both career and family. After the initial rush of adrenaline, she started to think about what was really happening.
“COVID hit and I was in Las Vegas. My family was in Michigan,” she says, “I told FOX ‘I’ve got to go. It’s time to move back home. I don’t know what’s happening in this world, and I can’t take the chance. My parents need me. My family needs me.’”
They told her to go and take her laptop with her, so she could work in a Las Vegas newsroom from across the country in Michigan. “That’s when I knew something was different,” she says.
She tried for a couple months but felt too disconnected to continue so she put in her notice at FOX5 and applied for and landed a job at FOX2 in Detroit.
“I remember telling FOX2, ‘We’ve got to launch digital. Digital is very big. Streaming is the new era,’” says Shamona. “And FOX2 said, ‘Well, help us build it.’”
Shamona created segments, which turned into shows, and now she’s hosting, anchoring, producing, and online streaming. “I’m on Roku, Tubi, Apple TV, FOX local apps all over the country,” she says. “And it’s fun! God has given me a platform to change people’s lives or to be the help they might need.”
When asked what advice she would give to someone just starting out in television, she shares this story: “I made the decision to become a producer, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. My challenge was to prove to the bosses that there was more I could do than just producing.”
In an industry where good producers are hard to find, and where landing that role can make it hard to move into others, Shamona’s challenge was to show she could also anchor and host. “It’s a lot of work to do it all,” she says, “But it’s certainly rewarding when you can balance a whole show from creation all the way through closing.”
On the Job Today
Did motherhood change how Shamona looks at the news? “Any stories involving children hit different,” she says. She also gets deeply involved with the interviewees. “I’m one of those people who want to maintain a relationship with the families after the interview is over.”
Everyone is a journalist nowadays, she says. “It’s no longer a world of FOX vs. ABC or NBC,” she notes. “Now it’s us versus influencers.” While she loves social media and appreciates those influencers, not all display the journalistic integrity that has been instilled in her. “As a journalist, you just know when to cover the who, what, where, why, and when, making sure you have the facts,” she says, as opposed to someone just posting randomly on their smartphone.
Technology provides tools that are evolving at a rapid pace, making it a full-time job just to keep up with the advances. “AI is not always accurate,” Shamona states, “I want to connect with people on a human level.”
She had a strange experience once with AI involving a robot on the set. “I was being chased by a humanoid (robot) in the newsroom,” she recalls, “and it backhanded me in the face.” Although she wasn’t hurt and found the experience funny, she learned a lesson about controlling technology—it doesn’t always work. “It was unpredictable to see this robot just running around the newsroom. I thought, ‘Where’s life going?’”
Staying Real
Authenticity is a big thing for Shamona. “I’m not one to say, ‘This is me—take me or leave me,’” she says, “but there is a reason people connect with you and trust you with their stories and it comes down to integrity and authenticity.”
When she was advised to lose her accent or change her look, she considered the advice before disregarding it. “I think people relate to me because they know I’m real,” she says.
Although she is real, her first shot at reality TV was a non-starter. After taping several episodes in Vegas, she was asked to fabricate a situation to create some drama and declined. Even though she was threatened with a lawsuit, she decided her integrity meant more to her than the show.
Shamona may get another shot at a reality series, however. “This time, it’s food related,” she shared. “We all know the Chaldean community is big on food. So maybe I’ll do that, but first I have to see the contract.”
Home
For now, her most rewarding moments come from sitting on the couch with her kids, sharing a laugh. “These are the most incredible things in life,” she says. “A bike ride with your kids or watching your son play hockey. Every time he scores, he looks over at me to give me a thumbs-up. Yeah, I’m a hockey mom.”
Shamona has many friends in the television business who still believe they must do it all. She says, “No, you don’t. You appreciate a lot of other things when you’re not doing it all.”
Living in Las Vegas introduced Shamona to Hispanic Latino culture and music, but it also made her realize how much she loved her own community. “Our music, weddings, the food—everything that is here was missed when I lived out there,” she says. “Oh my gosh, I love going to Dream Market!”
Her kids prefer attending Mass in Michigan. “They want to sing Qadish,” she says, “and my son says the bread (host) tastes better in a Chaldean church. I’m like ‘really?’”
Recently, Shamona covered the unveiling of the Chaldean Town marker for FOX2. “It’s so incredible because so many people have memories here,” she stated. “My family had local ties to the Chaldean Church on 7 Mile,” she says. “My brother-in-law Yassir Yasso’s uncle, Fr. Jacob Yasso, is the one who started it, so when I was called to do that story, it was a full-circle moment.”