Television

Breaking the News: A Journalist's Perspective

Anna Tolette — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:50:53 +0000

Breaking the News: A Journalist's Perspective Anna Tolette Tue, 11/12/2024 - 13:50

Cynthia Barnes

In 2022, Allison Sandza (Jour’09) became the executive producer for the CBS News Streaming Network’s coverage for Washington, D.C. She has also served as a senior producer for Meet the Press, the longest-running show in television history, after stints at PBS and CNN. Born and raised in the capital city, Sandza is committed to reaching an audience that increasingly turns to digital devices for their news.

What led you to journalism?

I grew up in a news household: My parents met in a newsroom before my mom became a lawyer. I grew up with framed newspapers on the walls. So, to say politics and news is in my blood is probably an understatement. It is what I was meant to do.

How do you see streaming platforms evolving for political news coverage, especially in this election cycle?

We are the live and breaking news arm of CBS News. We rush toward the stories, and in this news cycle — especially this political news cycle — it’s just faster than ever.

How did your time at CU and in Boulder affect what you’re doing now and what’s happened in your career?

In my last semester at CU, I took what ended up being my all-time favorite class: a media ethics course. I still think about that class. Every day, every single day, I think, “Is this fair? Is this sourced enough?”

We try to make sure that we are explaining the context and analysis of the whole picture, all while it’s happening in real time. I learned those nuts and bolts in journalism school at CU.

How do you balance breaking timely political coverage with the desire for, as you said, more nuanced, in-depth reporting on complex issues?

Every day, it’s a conversation and an internal struggle. I do think CBS News is unique in that it’s a place that’s known for taking a beat, for taking context into account with every story. It’s the home of 60 Minutes. It’s the home of in-depth reporting and analysis. So I think we’re very careful — we admit in real time when we still don’t know something. That is really the only way to operate. And I think it’s authentic, which audiences now crave.

Any final thoughts?

It’s a privilege to be able to cover this election, to be able to really write this first draft of history. That’s such a journalism cliché, but I think it’s a cliché for a reason.

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to the November 5 election.

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Photo by Hugo Ross/ CBS

In 2022, Allison Sandza (Jour’09) became the executive producer for the CBS News Streaming Network's coverage for Washington, D.C. Here's why she's committed to reaching an audience that increasingly turns to digital devices for their news.

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LOOK: 100 Years of Journalism

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 07:00:00 +0000

LOOK: 100 Years of Journalism Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/07/2022 - 00:00

Malinda Miller

On April 21, 1922, the CU Board of Regents voted to form the Department of Journalism, and that fall, the university launched its flagship journalism degree program. As the journalism department marks its centennial anniversary, celebration goes to the thousands of alumni currently working in the media industry, many of whom are on the frontlines of news — reporting from the field for NPR, from the Celtics’ sidelines and from inside the White House for Fox News. Read more in the CMCI Now magazine.

Abby Chin (Jour’03), Celtics sideline reporter at NBC Sports Boston

Baker Machado (MJour’11), anchor at Cheddar News

Alanna Rizzo (MJour’03), sports TV host and reporter on MLB Network

John Branch (MJour’96), reporter for The New York Times

Kevin Corke (Jour’88; MA’02), White House correspondent

Kirk Siegler (Jour’00), NPR correspondent, National Desk

Michael Gelman (Jour’83), executive producer, Live with Kelly and Ryan

Linda Villarosa (Jour’81), contributor to The New York Times Magazine, journalist-in-residence at City University of New York

Savannah Sellers (Jour’13), anchor and correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC

Tom Costello (Jour’87), NBC News Washington correspondent

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Photos: Courtesy of CMCI (Kevin Corke and Michael Gelman); Jon SooHoo (Alanna Rizzo); Courtesy of Tom Costello; Allison Shelley/NPR (Kirk Siegler); Courtesy of Baker Machado; Courtesy Savannah Sellers; Courtesy of NBC Sports Group (Abby Chin); Courtesy of John Branch; Nic Villarosa (Linda Villarosa)

On April 21, 1922, the CU Board of Regents voted to form the Department of Journalism and that fall, the university launched its flagship journalism degree program.

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Zombies: A Success Story

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 12:14:00 +0000

Zombies: A Success Story Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 05:14

Kurt Anthony Krug

Ross Marquand, far left, on the set of The Walking Dead.

Ross Marquand (Thtr’04) was about to give up on Hollywood.

“I was at the end of my rope,” said the 35-year-old actor (top left), reflecting on the summer of 2014. “After about 10 years of living in L.A. and trying to make it work, it just dawned on me that it might not happen.”

He’d appeared in independent and short films, had a role in Mad Men, playing Paul Newman in a 2013 episode, and done a lot of voice-over work. But a career-making role eluded him and he planned to try his luck in New York theater.

Then Marquand got a call about auditioning for a zombie apocalypse show, AMC’s The Walking Dead — the highest-rated TV series in cable history. About a week later, on his birthday, he was cast.

“It’s really changed my life,” said Marquand, an Eagle Scout who grew up in Littleton, Colo., and also counts mountain climbing and firearms among his skills, some of which come in handy on the set of The Walking Dead.

The blockbuster show, based on a comic book series of the same name, is about regular humans trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Marquand joined the cast in season five as Aaron, an openly gay former NGO worker in Africa who tries to recruit fellow survivors to a safe zone.

Now in its seventh season, with an eighth planned, the character-rich drama is conspicuously gory, a selling point for hordes of viewers: More than 21 million tuned in for the current season’s premiere.

So far, Marquand has appeared in more than 30 episodes. The resulting notoriety has expanded the audience for his spot on impressions of some of Hollywood’s most famous actors. After Vanity Fair magazine published a video called “Nanoimpressions with Ross Marquand,” in which Marquand impersonates Matthew McConaughey, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Michael Caine and others doing everyday things, he found himself performing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Kevin Spacey himself has singled out Marquand’s impression of him as top-notch.

The impressions are funny, but The Walking Dead is primarily a drama — the sort in which heads are bashed, throats ripped out and entrails on display.

In the controversial seventh season opener, two beloved characters meet their end in a graphic scene at the hands of another (baseball-bat-wielding) human survivor named Negan, underscoring one of the show’s themes — that in the post-apocalyptic zombie world, survivors can be bigger threats than zombies.

“I certainly understand people’s feelings, and I think it’s good that they have strong feelings,” said Marquand. “It means we’re doing our jobs — people are actually feeling connected to these characters, and when two of their favorites are killed off, it affects them. I think that’s wonderful.”

Of fans who found the scene too much to stomach, “we hope we can win them back as the season goes on,” Marquand said, “because I will say that this season is the strongest yet.”

Outside The Walking Dead, Marquand has been sampling what else showbiz now has to offer. A fellow Walking Dead actor, Danai Gurira, cast him in her play, Familiar, for its 2015 world premier at the Yale Repertory Theater. He’s provided the voice of Han Solo for the video game Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine. (He does a mean impersonation of Harrison Ford, who plays Han Solo in the movies.) Other projects are in the works.

Marquand is meanwhile settling into his new measure of fame, “a bit of a shock” at first, he said. “Now it’s a part of my life and you just have to roll with it.”

Overall, success has been a welcome door-opener.

“It’s great to have to go from almost being $40,000 in debt to being on this massive behemoth of a show and having opportunities sent to you,” he said.

Freelancer Kurt Anthony Krug is based in Michigan.

Photos courtesy Ross Marquand

For actor Ross Marquand, a certain zombie apocalypse has been a career-maker.

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Changing the Face of Television

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Changing the Face of Television Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/01/2011 - 00:00

Clay Latimer

One of Hollywood’s pioneers in reality TV, Howard Schultz (Comm’75) bares all about his hits like Extreme Makeover andMoment of Truth.

The idea came to Howard Schultz (Comm’75) at the end of a long weekend as he crawled into bed in his Los Angeles home and glanced at his TV.

Flickering on the screen was a promotion for an upcoming segment of the daytime tabloid talk show Jenny Jones Show about ugly ducks-turned-swans. Schultz, a TV producer, froze for a moment.

“I grabbed a receipt because it was the only piece of paper I could find on my night stand,’’ he said. “On the back, I wrote down two words: Ultimate Makeover.’’

With a sense of urgency, Schultz immersed himself in what became Extreme Makeover, the groundbreaking show that gave ordinary people new lives — and new faces — after winning an opportunity to undergo plastic surgery. Debuting in 2002, the ABC series altered the course of reality TV, helped trigger a boom in cosmetic surgeries and blew the roof off the ratings to boot.

It was vintage Schultz — original, risky, highly controversial — a formula that made MTV’s Next! and Fox’s The Moment of Truth comparable hits for Lighthearted Entertainment, the company he started in 1992 following the success of Studs, his breakthrough reality show. In its sixth season, Next!is a speed dating show that has become MTV’s highest-rated show in the late afternoon time period. Launched on Jan. 23, 2008, The Moment of Truth was a game show hosted by Mark Walberg in which contestants answered a series of 21 increasingly personal questions to receive cash prizes. It ended in August 2009.

Schultz sits in his Burbank office down the street from NBC Studios where staff members are busy cranking out The Tonight Show. It’s a gloomy rainy day, but the 57-year-old is his usual irrepressible self, chatting about his current project, a reality show with another intriguing premise: in a world dominated by Facebook, do your friends have your back?

“This is a brutal business,” he says. “It will tear your heart apart if you don’t absolutely adore it. You’re living on the edge, trying to achieve the impossible nearly all the time in this very risky endeavor. But it’s been an incredible profession for me.’’

Although critics usually rip his shows, The Hollywood Reporter picked Schultz as one of the top 50 forces in reality TV in 2008, and Los Angeles Magazine named him one of the city’s most influential people in 2003. Not bad for a Chicago boy who arrived at CU in 1974 with little interest in TV beyond watching Star Trekreruns.

“I had this plan of taking all my prerequisites in my freshman year — biology, anthropology, psychology,’’ he says. “Needless to say, I got in too deep. I needed a class that was an easy A.’’

So Schultz took “Introduction to Communications,” followed by “Introduction to Broadcasting,” which ended his plans of running the family printing business.

“It was almost like I was made for television,’’ he says. “It was like a hand fitting into a glove. That’s the only way I can describe it.’’

It seemed Schultz was everywhere in those days — producing shows for the campus TV station, working as a disc jockey for Boulder station KADE, contending for Trivia Bowl titles and returning day after day to a studio/classroom at Folsom Field.

“Nobody walked in and knew what they were doing in those days,’’ says Bud Leonard (ConservEdu’72), one of Schultz’s CU instructors. “Howard was very sharp, especially on the producing side. He had the passion and the talent.

For example, he got [legendary Hollywood director] Frank Capra into the studio to do an interview. I always wondered how he did it. In this business, courage and belief in yourself are huge factors.’’

Schultz’s obsession became his profession when he returned to Chicago for his first TV job. A year later he picked up his first Emmy for a show called Friday Night.

Before long, Schultz packed his car and headed to Hollywood, a move that temporarily soured him on the business.

But he began working on a series of game shows, news documentaries, dating shows and as a segment producer of the John Davidson Show.

“Howard is a thinker,” says Ron de Moraes, former director of the Davidson show, who works for Schultz. “He’s always thinking about what he’s pulling the trigger on. But there was no way of recognizing that he’d be running his own production company 20 years later.”

In 1992 the Real World introduced MTV viewers to living in public, the beginning of the modern reality TV era. When the new genre began mutating into an array of concepts, Schultz was ready for his big, strategic move.

Asked by Fox to come up with a new show, Schultz came back with Studs, a raunchier version of Love Connection. It quickly became must-see TV on college campuses.

“It became a cultural phenomenon,” Schultz says. “Johnny Carson and David Letterman were doing jokes about it. Studs changed my life because it allowed me to start my own production company.’’

Sensing a shift in the cultural landscape, Schultz began to look at plastic surgery as a reality premise in the early 2000s. The thought of surgically altering bodies on prime time freaked out one of his assistants. “You could kill someone,’’ she told him. But Schultz took care to minimize his risk.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” he says. “I did realize people could die. That’s why I spent hours and hours in surgery and handpicked every surgeon. We took out a lot of insurance.’’

An immediate ratings success, Extreme Makeover eventually aired in 100 countries — in different variations — as the reality genre went global. It stopped airing in 2005.

“The show was a game-changer for me,’’ he says. “I think it established me for the long haul. Once you’ve had hits, you’re forever associated with those hits.’’

Schultz went farther out on the limb in 2008 with The Moment of Truth, a controversial, scathingly reviewed Fox hit. During the show contestants were hooked up to a lie detector during which they faced personal questions backstage. Then they answered the questions again in front of cameras. The Moment of Truth ended up being seen in more than 100 countries.

“The show really established our presence globally,’’ he says. “I’ve been blessed not only with the ability to create ideas out of thin air but also to observe things going on in the world. I saw globalization coming long before other producers, and I said, ‘I’ve got to get into this game.’ ’’

Even at age 57 — old by Hollywood standards — Schultz is looking around the cultural bend, searching for another big idea.

“Reality shows will be part of TV forever,’’ he says. “Nothing’s more entertaining than reality.”

One of Hollywood’s pioneers in reality TV, Howard Schultz bares all about his hits like Extreme Makeover and Moment of Truth.

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Here's Something to Squawk About

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Here's Something to Squawk About Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2009 - 00:00

Robert Strauss

Carl Quintanilla (PolSci’93), Becky Quick and Joe Kernen (MCDBio’78)

It is a crucial part of their day, as Carl Quintanilla (PolSci’93), pictured left, and Joe Kernen (MCDBio’78), right, clamber back to their cubicles from the set of Squawk Box, the CNBC morning show they co-anchor with Becky Quick. Kernen and Quintanilla thrive on competition at the pinnacle of financial journalism they inhabit and here they wind down after the show by solving “The Jumble,” a New York Daily News word game they play religiously.

“It’s a triumph when I beat Joe since he is old and thus the master at obscure words,” says Quintanilla, who enrolled at CU in the late 1980s, about 10 years after Kernen graduated.

Kernen grunts and points to a scorecard that reveals his lead.

“Yeah, Carl is too young to know a lot of these words, but let me tell you, he’s a journalist’s journalist, and a fun guy to boot,” he says. “Still, I am, indeed, the Jumble king.”

The good-natured camaraderie between Kernen and Quintanilla is, in part, what the hundreds of thousands of viewers who watch Squawk Box each weekday morning (6-9 a.m. Eastern time) tune in to watch. Three hours of live TV, turning on the proverbial dime to a CEO here, a government official there and sometimes even a celebrity investor, can be both exhausting and exhilarating, and a brotherly sense of humor can be the WD-40 that makes it all work.

Air time is oxygen

“Anyone who does TV knows the saying, ‘Air time is oxygen,’ ” Quintanilla says. “For the past 18 months or more, besides the presidential election, financial news has been the story. We are there three hours every morning, so who can complain about that? And sometimes, we get to kid each other on the air. It’s a dream, just a dream.”

Carl Quintanilla (PolSci’93)

It’s not surprising CNBC’s ratings boom in times of financial bust. On really volatile days, Squawk Box gets as many as a million viewers, a record total for a financial news network. It is the show CEOs watch as they ponder the market-opening news, and the one analysts pine to be on to impress the high-prestige viewership.

Both agree this is an exciting, if harrowing, time to be covering the economy. Quintanilla covered all sorts of big stories as an NBC national correspondent but, he says, “Nothing compares with the import of the economy right now. There seems to be a new permutation every day, and I am happy to be in a position at a place where we get to analyze all of that.”

Kernen says he doesn’t revel in bad news, but reporting the economic news today doesn’t allow for many smiles.
“We are not the Red Cross,” he admits. “This is not something to make people feel good. It may not be the Great Depression, but there are a lot of negative things to report and we have to do that when it is necessary. It is our responsibility to explain it all to what may be a disbelieving or frustrated audience.”

Changing channels from CU to CNBC

Quintanilla took a more direct route to the show while Kernen’s path was less conventional. Quintanilla grew up primarily in New Mexico and Colorado and soon after enrolling at CU decided journalism was going to be his future. Since he was a political science major, he says it shut him out of working for the campus paper, so he took part-time gigs at the Boulder Camera and Denver alternative weeklies. He got an internship at the Wall Street Journal in Chicago after his junior year, which turned into a full-time job after graduation. In the 1990s, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC shared reporters for a time, and when he got used to being on air, Quintanilla saw it as the 21st century way to communicate.

Joe Kernen (MCDBio’78)

“I can’t imagine going back to print now,” Quintanilla says. “Daily deadlines seemed quick, but on TV, it’s every second. I’ve fallen in love with the immediacy and the buzz that is live TV.”

Kernen came to Colorado from Cincinnati, mostly, he says, because he heard there were 300 days of sunshine in Boulder. He got a degree in biology and pursued a graduate program at MIT.

“I was good enough to get my master’s thesis done, but MIT was so high-powered, I wasn’t like those Nobel Prize winners they had there,” Kernen says. While he was in Boston, his father gave him $5,000 to invest and he became fascinated with the stock market. He was a broker for 10 years. “But you do something for 10 years and maybe you start looking,” he notes. He got a job for $125 per day writing at The Financial News Network, a nascent cable channel out of Los Angeles. CNBC bought it a few months later and before long Kernen was on the air.

“When I was a broker at Merrill Lynch, we didn’t have much time to just talk since it was all about cold calling and wooing customers,” he says. “Our biggest wish, we would say, would be just to talk about companies and strategies as if we were at a bar or something. So now that’s the job I have. I’m not leaving it any time soon if I can help it,” Kernen says.

Discovering the news

In their former jobs, Kernen and Quintanilla were relatively anonymous. Although not quite Matt Lauer or Diane Sawyer, who are on the air opposite them weekday mornings, they are celebrities of a sort, certainly to the likes of Warren Buffett, who is on CNBC often enough, and financial news junkies.

Kernen, 53, stays out of the limelight living in Short Hills, N.J., a bedroom community 45 minutes from CNBC’s studios in suburban New Jersey, a few miles northwest of Wall Street. There he golfs when he can and dotes on his 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. Quintanilla, married three years and as yet without children, but with a long-haired Chihuahua named Lucky, lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Quintanilla travelled extensively for a couple of years, when he worked as a correspondent for CNBC’s parent, NBC News, but he’s happy to be fairly stationary these days.

“The story is the economy and we have people on the air daily who are the most important people to talk with,” Quintanilla says. Kernen adds, “And this is where the big news is, so we don’t have to go anywhere. Hopefully, we are the ones discovering the news.

“And hopefully we will be here long enough for Carl to learn enough words to beat me in the Jumble,” he jokes.

Alumni Carl Quintanilla and Joe Kernen co-anchor CNBC morning show Squawk Box.

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Television

Breaking the News: A Journalist's Perspective

What led you to journalism?

How do you see streaming platforms evolving for political news coverage, especially in this election cycle?

How did your time at CU and in Boulder affect what you’re doing now and what’s happened in your career?

How do you balance breaking timely political coverage with the desire for, as you said, more nuanced, in-depth reporting on complex issues?

Any final thoughts?

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LOOK: 100 Years of Journalism

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Here's Something to Squawk About

Air time is oxygen

Changing channels from CU to CNBC

Discovering the news

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