Photo courtesy of Living Legends
NBC-4's Julie Carey
For more than three decades, the face Northern Virginia turned to when the news was biggest belonged to an Alexandria resident. This week, that long run came to a close.
Julie Carey, the Northern Virginia bureau chief for NBC4 (WRC), announced her retirement on Wednesday, June 24, capping a 34-year career at the Washington station and a body of work that helped define how the region understood itself.
Her colleagues, past and present, offered well wishes, advice, congratulations and thanks.
"Julie, you are truly phenomenal. You are respected and beloved across Alexandria, the Commonwealth, and the region," wrote former Alexandria Mayor Allison Silberberg, in a post on Facebook announcing the news where more than 300 commented, adding their well wishes.
"We can all be grateful to you for all your fairness and hard work," Silberberg said. "You will be so missed. Huge congratulations! A well-deserved retirement! I look forward to hearing more about what’s next. Wishing you and yours all good things."
Carey joined WRC in 1992, after she and her husband moved to the area on April 1 with their then-young son thinking of staying for about three years. "The April Fool's joke was on us," she said on-air after her retirement was announced. Since then, the couple had another child and made the area their home.
Her reporting carried her from neighborhood meetings, including many in Alexandria, to the halls of power in Richmond, where she covered every Virginia governor, General Assembly session and statewide election from 1993 onward — and where she was a familiar enough presence to be called on regularly to moderate and question candidates in televised debates. The Northern Virginia bureau was launched in 2012 and became an exclusive beat.
"It has been amazing to witness and cover all the changes" over the years in Northern Virginia, she noted. Her favorite stories, she said, were about "ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances."
She built a reputation for the kind of patient, fact-first journalism that wears well over decades. She reported in depth on child abuse, sex offenders and the integration of women into the Virginia Military Institute, and she was the lead reporter on some of the region's most closely watched trials, including those of sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo and University of Virginia lacrosse player George Huguely. In the late 1990s, she anchored NBC4's daily coverage of the Kenneth Starr grand jury investigation and the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.
Before Washington, Carey worked at KSDK in St. Louis, WTHR in Indianapolis, and KCRG in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — the small-market newsroom where, as she once put it, she was free to learn the craft and make her rookie mistakes. She and her husband, a fellow journalist who she met at Indiana University.
That choice was never incidental to who she was on the air. Carey has long been a fixture beyond the newscast — a volunteer in Alexandria's public schools and a member of her church choir, with two children who graduated from what is now Alexandria City High School. When Alexandria Living profiled her in 2022 on her 30th anniversary at the station, she described the city she covered and called home as "a very big small town," prizing its diversity and its sense of community.
At the time, retirement was nowhere on her mind. "What I do beats working for a living," she joked then. "It's not quite time to step away yet."
Some of her most enduring reporting was rooted close to that home. She covered the September 11 attacks from the start, driving down Mount Vernon Avenue when she saw smoke rising from the Pentagon and reporting from the scene for the two weeks that followed — then keeping in touch with the families she met for years afterward. The Charles Severance murder case, she has said, hit harder still, because she had known the victims and what they meant to the community before their deaths.
Asked in that same conversation what she would tell young people weighing a career in journalism, her answer was characteristically plain: it helps to have healthy doses of curiosity, creativity, and persistence — three qualities her own work supplied in abundance, week after week, for 34 years.
