Walking on Air

True reality TV hit the airwaves recently, when a surprise on-air marriage proposal turned an ordinary day at work into one television news anchor Liz Foster (’08) will never forget. The Georgia Southern alumna is a member of the news team at WICS-TV in Springfield, Illinois. During a 5 p.m. newscast last fall, Foster, her co-anchor and the station’s chief meteorologist were introducing a segment featuring viewers describing their favorite rainy day activity when her boyfriend popped up in the monitor.

“I call this my ‘blonde moment,’” Foster said as she recalled the proposal. “It wasn’t until I started listening to what he was saying and saw the pictures of the two of us in the monitor that I realized what was going on.”

Moments later, Justin Cooper walked onto the set, dropped down on one knee and asked his girlfriend of nearly a year to marry him. “He had arranged it in advance with the assistant news director, but my co-anchor and the chief meteorologist didn’t know about it either,” Foster said. Afterward, she learned that her fiancé decided to propose on live television because he wanted to genuinely surprise her. “They (co-anchors) were just as shocked as I was. Everything was a blur. I was speechless, and I am rarely speechless,” she added.

Foster’s parents live in suburban Atlanta but relatives of the couple are scattered all around the country. Thanks to the station’s ability to stream newscasts live via the Internet, both families were able to watch the proposal as it happened. The video is also available on YouTube.

Foster, a former communication arts major, has been anchoring news broadcasts at the ABC affiliate in Central Illinois for three years now. She previously worked at the NBC affiliate in Macon, Georgia. The couple plans to tie the knot on August 30 in Springfield. – Sandra Bennett