‘And the Emmy goes to...’

TAMPA, Fla. — And the Emmy goes to Greenfield native Wendi Lane.

Lane, a multimedia journalist at ABC Action News in Tampa Bay, has won a regional Emmy Award for her work on a story that profiled a military sexual trauma survivor’s story of heartbreak and hope in the category of military news.

“It’s hard for me to really understand that this is still real, because to me, I still feel like this small town Iowa girl who just got really blessed,” Lane told the Free Press in a phone interview Monday. “It feels really good. I feel so grateful and blessed.”

Lane was named a nominee for the Emmy back in October.

In her nine year career spanning from KCCI in Des Moines to KCWY in Casper, Wyoming and FOX26 in Fresno, California to ABC Action News in Tampa Bay, she has reported on mudslides, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, environmental issues. She loves covering stories of hope, animal stories and veteran issues.

She has submitted works for Emmy Awards before but has never been nominated.

Lane loves covering veteran issues because her father, Clair Lane Sr., who passed away in June, was Vietnam veteran. Lane’s mother is Valerie Warrior of Fontanelle.

“That’s given me passion to want to help vets and tell their stories, regardless of what their story is,” Lane said.

Lane met Jacob Manning, a survivor of military sexual trauma. She interviewed him and realized his story was much bigger than most stories.

“For months I worked on this story. It was a six-minute long piece. It’s the type of piece that would normally take two, three or four people to put together, and over that time, I just did it by myself because I gained that trust with Jacob and it was a really sensitive topic,” Lane said. “I didn’t want to introduce anybody else into it. I just wanted to take my time on it, which my station gave me.”

Lane says the moral of Manning’s story is that he found peace in forgiveness and surrendering his life to God, and God then changing his life in the end.

In Manning’s story, Lane covered in-depth the problem of sexual trauma in the military. For one aspect of her report, Lane made an image of 20,000 toy soldiers to be aired on screen for 15 seconds that helped tell the story. That image took 11 hours to finish.

“It took blood, sweat and tears to make that graphic, but I wanted our viewers to see what 20,000 soldiers looks like,” Lane said.

Lane first decided that she wanted to pursue some sort of writing when her third grade teacher at Greenfield Elementary School, Mrs. Angie Shindelar, told her that she was a good writer.

Lane graduated from Nodaway Valley in 2000 and went to the University of Iowa to study journalism. She worked several different miscellaneous writing jobs before beginning her television career at age 30 in 2012.

“I had one of those ‘coming to God’ moments where I knew what I wanted to do but I didn’t know how to get there,” Lane said. “I asked God to show me what He wanted me to do with my life, and I am not kidding, I started to see doors open after that — doors into this career as a TV news reporter that I never believed I was capable of or I never believed was possible for me to do.”

Lane has been at ABC Action News for four and a half years and is thankful for all the opportunities she’s had there.

“Every day is new, every day is an adventure. You never know what you’re going to do one day to the next. I feel so blessed to give voices to people in our communities so they can share their stories and hopefully make some sort of a difference by sharing their stories,” Lane said. “With God all things are possible. I never imagined any of this would be something that I could do or be capable of. I’m so grateful and it brings me such joy. Growing up in Greenfield, I’m so proud of being from Greenfield. The virtues of growing up in Greenfield and genuinely caring about other people, that’s something that was instilled in me from growing up in Greenfield, Iowa.”