The American Society of Newspaper Editors counts minorities each year with a goal of achieving some level of parity. In 1978, minorities are 3.8 percent of the newspaper workforce and 20 percent of the general population. In 2010, we are at 13.2 percent. That gain would be remarkable if it wasn’t that in those twenty-two years we have become 34 percent of the U.S. population. Broadcast journalism does a bit better, but the gains are smaller. The Radio-Television News Directors Association says minorities were 17.8 percent of their workforce in 1990. That number was 23.6 percent in 2008. Progress in this country can be wicked slow, as they say in Boston. As I start out my career in 1988, I know there is a world of opportunity available to me. I also know I need to be extraordinary to make it.
My young career rolls out in fits and starts. One moment I impress everyone. Then suddenly I feel very small and irrelevant. I am the so-called minority trainee and one day I confuse Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with the anniversary of his death. The news director finally calls me into his office and tells me not to be so hard on myself. A year flies by. I am promoted to “Writer/Associate Producer.” I am assigned to the morning show, the first of several opportunities in my career that require turning my sleeping clock upside down. I am foggy with exhaustion. The show airs from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. It is a warm-up to when NBC takes over our air with Today. I work from 2:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and I am chronically tired. I eat donuts and gulp coffee to stay awake. My eyes don’t as much open as they get unstuck each morning. I never feel completely bathed. I stare off into the distance at times, falling in and out of focus. If there is news, everyone snaps to attention.
But there rarely is news at that hour—there are single-alarm fires and car accidents. I’m so tired I rest my head on my keyboard to snatch a catnap. The only thing that rolls in is another torturously slow sunrise. I watch the anchors with their perpetual smiles pull questions from the air without scripting. The Soviet Union falls and there is a sudden burst of news. The anchor fills the time asking the most general questions. I watch and run copy and think to myself, “I could do that.” But for now, I rarely even have a social life, much less a shot at being a TV anchor. My life blurs by. Every now and then, Brad invites me to a party. I step into this other world through him. There are young people, mostly Harvard graduates, investment bankers and law school students. They are my age, but they feel like younger people. They have this glint in their eyes. They laugh and drink and date. I don’t do those things. My mind has a day job. I have a plan.
Jeanne tells me not to blow it. Journalism isn’t a job. It’s not fame. You work lousy hours, she tells me. It’s not always exciting. It’s often pretty awful, emotionally taxing, unfulfilling. Your life is constantly interrupted by the joys and tragedies of others. So much of what you do seems repetitive. The schools open so you do a story. The kids don’t learn so you do another kind of story. Then they do learn so you do that story. School ends and you are at it again. A guy kills his wife. A mom kills her kids. A house burns down. A plane crashes. Congress can’t agree on anything. You become a player in the political or criminal or social drama of the moment. You don’t want to be one, but you are.
I try to tell the story of the moment differently. That’s not hard. There is a template most people work from. You hear the tease and you know what the story is about already. “When we come back ... tragedy strikes in Anytown where a family loses everything to an early morning fire.” The piece will open with video of flames leaping from a window, followed by a sound bite from a firefighter, then a neighbor, then video of the house charred, the mystery of how the fire began, a sound bite from a family member about the loss and back to the anchor in the studio.
The more stories I do, the more I realize it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve grown so accustomed to hearing the same voices, the same stories. We forget that every story is different. Every tragedy and triumph is personal. Our country is full of people whose perspectives are never heard, people who have something to say. The trick lies in listening to them. I’m dying for a chance to do stories of my own.
Jeanne hooks me up with Bob Bazell, the NBC network’s science correspondent. Occasionally I shoot video for him for NBC Nightly News, scramble around gathering material. Jeanne helps me rent an apartment for 600 bucks. It’s a basement studio on Marlboro Street, the leafiest, prettiest street in Boston. I feel like I am on the cusp of success even though I can barely pay my rent. Like Jeanne, Bob is also covering the AIDS epidemic, but he is much more fascinated with the science of this fast-evolving virus. There is an international dispute over who discovered HIV that prompts high drama. The debate over how this killer disease can be transmitted is in full tilt. There is a period when it feels as if mutating viruses are spreading through the population like a common cold. It’s a terrifying and challenging time to be covering medicine. Jeanne keeps pushing me to focus on the people. This is not just about a fast-changing illness eating away at human strength; this is a story of lives destroyed, of public services failing the vulnerable. This is about people like Jim, whom she and I met together. Jeanne becomes one of my best friends even as she is my mentor.
My work is energizing and convincing enough for Bob to hire me as a researcher and field producer. I move to New York, the epicenter of media. Brad is living in New York, so I get to see him occasionally, and slowly, in spite of my crazy travel schedule and Brad’s hundred-hour workweeks, we become close friends. He’s like my guidepost. I bounce my frustration off of him. I try out my strategies. But dating is barely on my radar. I live alone in a crappy one-bedroom in SoHo on Thompson between Prince and Spring Streets. I paint it yellow. My rent is $1,050 a month. There are cockroaches everywhere that scramble when the lights turn on. I pour Borax everywhere. My room is shaped so weirdly that my bed is in the middle of everything. But I feel like I belong in the city.
People are from everywhere. Everyone acts like they have someplace to go. I seem very serious in the midst of the artists and hipsters around me. I wear smart suits and low heels into the office, often passing nobody on the street during my morning commute. Eight thirty in the morning is much too early for the people in the community I am living with. I work at Rockefeller Center, which towers above the plaza like a national monument. Flags from many nations flutter beside the ice rink and the golden statue of Prometheus. The whole place feels like an enormous finish line, like the big tent at the circus. So many people originally from Long Island are scrambling to get out here. For me, Manhattan is the city on the hill. The place where dreams are made.
My first day at NBC I ride up in the elevators with Jane Pauley, and I am so excited I can’t breathe. I race around the hallways of NBC working on stories that air on a network everyone is watching. I get to see important anchors with big jobs. I know I want to be on TV reporting the news. I know I can do it. I want to be Jeanne. I’m meeting the people that can get me there. Bob sends me all over the country as his field producer. I keep coming back with the same thing, a story with a person as its center.
I fly to Phoenix to do a story about a man with strep B. His family talks about watching him dying because bacteria are eating him alive. He has two small kids. He survives and now he takes walks on his prosthetic legs because his legs have been eaten away. He also has a prosthetic hand. He can’t toss a ball with his kid, but he is alive. Bob is very focused on the science, the “why” of medicine. I am consumed by the humanity. I learn a lot from Bob—it’s like going to college, but sometimes I wish I can do it differently.
TV is a team sport. You get a piece on air with no less than a half dozen people working together—cameraman, audio technicians, editors, producers. But the TV reporter is at the top of that team. If I can get that job, I can frame the story the way I want to. I bump into Elena Nachmanoff one day on the elevator. She is in charge of what they call “Talent Development,” which means she is the gatekeeper for anyone who wants to be on TV. She has a serious look and she dresses in that stylish New York
corporate way that portrays how powerful she is. In our two-minute ride she asks what I want to do next. I don’t hesitate: I tell her I want to be an on-air reporter, a concept I find exhilarating but that also makes me feel a bit ill. She says she thinks that can happen and walks off the elevator with the polish of the high-ranking executive she is. That’s all we say. I’m stunned.
Brad moves to California in 1992. The moment he’s gone, I start to miss him. He has been in and out of my life forever. We have gone out a few times but really we are just friends. I suddenly feel his absence, which is weird because we’re just friends. I can call him and he encourages me to do things. I am lonely even though my family lives all of an hour away. I have five siblings, loads of coworkers. But I feel disconnected. I fly out to San Francisco to do a piece for Bob. Brad picks me up afterward. We go to the Tiki Lounge at the Fairmont Hotel. There is a pool in the middle of the bar and the band floats on top of it. It’s really tacky. I suddenly feel that this is a date. We’re not just catching up from some other time. I’m so comfortable it’s like I’m visiting my family. I have so much to tell him. He is so eager to listen.
We go to dinner in the North End. We stay out as late as possible. We both have so much to say to each other. I realize I have a crazy crush on him and I always have. I just haven’t let it go anyplace. There were too many things in the way. I was too confused over what to do with my life. Then I was focused about making it in TV He works all the time. He is calculating his next big move in his career in finance. I am dating other people and so is he. While the guys I date are sweet and generous, they bore me. Brad is focused and self-sufficient. He believes in strategy; he has a plan. He is philosophical. He thinks about what I’m saying and gives me a thoughtful answer. He is the living definition of what character means. It matters to him to get it right and be honest and compassionate and to work hard. His eyes are mischievous and make him look like he’s smiling even when he’s not. He’s handsome and fair, with all-American looks. He carries not an ounce of arrogance. He is unimpressed by wealth or good looks. He could care less how I look or what I do. I am considered pretty but not like the girls I run into at parties. He is happy to have me and create our own category. Brad is a minimalist, no frills. Nothing is a big deal to him. He is happy to live in a place that makes him comfortable, no matter the address. He likes an edgier neighborhood. He drives an old Honda. He doesn’t brag he went to Harvard or that he was a star athlete. Years later I will show up to black-tie dinners underdressed because it will skip his mind to tell me I need to wear a gown!
There are many reasons people fall in love. I was born to a family made of concrete. We were a team—solid. I learned from my parents to look for that in people. If you’re going to make a lifetime commitment to someone, base it on something that’s real. Often people seem to look for someone who looks like them—same race, same class, same school, and same ambitions. None of that mattered to my parents. My dad was a good man. He was present, loving, no drama, a good friend, and a good father. That he is white and Australian are just facts about him. My mother is driven, purposeful, devoted, detailed. My dad fell in love with that. He loves that she loves family, that she loves God, that she has that immigrant spirit. The fact that she is black and Cuban and from a poor background are just details. That is one of the wonderful challenges of living in a country of immigrants. You have to look past people’s facade. Every face you meet tells the story of far-off places and snap decisions. The ruddiness and freckles and red hair of the Irish in a man can tell the story of a grandfather’s sudden quest to the Americas for another life. You can jump to a million assumptions about a guy. But looks cannot tell you what’s inside the grandson who grew up surrounded by other histories, other dreams. You have to look at the person within.
It was easy to figure out why I want Brad to be my husband. He lives in forward motion just like me. He makes up his mind to do something and just does it. At the end of our date, he suggests I move to California. I have no job, no car, and no money, but somehow it totally makes sense. Life in the United States affords you unending opportunities to do one better. There is always something flashier than the flashy thing you’ve got. So sometimes it pays to just choose the thing you want. I want Brad, the man that urges me on like a fan at the racetrack, who talks about me like I have limitless ability and potential. I am in New York building a job as a network producer. But I want to be with this guy.
At NBC, I treat every day as if it’s my first day on the job. I make sure everyone knows what I want to do next. I want to be a reporter. I practice. And I make sure everyone sees me practice. Other people begin to root for me. I call Jeanne constantly. I send Jeanne tapes of my efforts. She tells me to lower my voice and not punch the words so hard. I ask Bob for advice. He doesn’t say much, though he blurts out at one point that I need to focus on marrying Brad because he’s too good a guy to lose. I begin to figure Brad into my plans. There is someone out there—a destination to go with my strategy. If you tell people what you’re after, they help you get there. I check in with Elena Nachmanoff all the time, a serious customer. She looks my resume up and down. I work at my writing. I look at myself in the mirror, work on my voice, and watch the anchors.
Jeanne had a model of the reporter she wanted to be, a tenacious, unyielding woman who won’t accept a “no,” a woman who sees someone that needs help and sends out a cry. Jeanne tells me that she once had dreams of going to work for a network, but made a decision to not pursue them. “I’d end up sleeping in hotel rooms using those little bars of soap,” she says. She wanted to stay in Boston and get married. She believed I could make it to the top. Back in the late 1970s, lots of women wanted to be Jessica Savitch. Jessica had practically created the role for women by sitting on the NBC desk with her reporter’s intensity, messy personal life, and anchor hair. Going network meant you had made it. Jeanne had given up her anchor chair to be a medical reporter. No one ever does that, but Jeanne was a pure reporter. That’s how much she lived and breathed her job. Jeanne looked at me and saw herself. She gives me advice every day. Sometimes it’s warming, sometime it’s harsh: “Try it this way,” she says. “Do it again and again until you get it right.” That is her way of putting me, and by extension her, one step closer to becoming the next network anchor.
Years later, I’m giving my daughter Cecilia a bath. Jeanne is there. Cecilia, who is four, asks Jeanne why she didn’t have kids. I jump in: “She does. She’s my TV mom!” I see Jeanne’s eyes get teary. It stuns me.
Increasingly, women were being hired by networks. I knew it hadn’t always been so. I thought that was really awful, stinging. Not fair. Not right. Intolerable. It’s all those things. Now I also know it’s typical. There’s an asterisk in the promise of America—a clause in the social contract that so many of us forgot to read. Women brought a special sensibility into the workplace. Journalism was no different. We gave life to what were thought of as women’s stories: education, the elderly, welfare, and children all became areas of serious news coverage. A certain sense of humanity entered reporting. The distance between the subject and the viewer became smaller. What women got in return was a place at the table—just one place.
This pattern repeats itself in every profession I’ve encountered. The United States has always been a land of opportunities. A place that advertises itself as somewhere anything is possible for anybody. It is in one sense, but it’s not in many others. There is always one breakthrough person. The first this. The first that. The person who leaps over their stereotype and creates a new reality. But most folks spend their whole lives trying to come in behind them and they only get part of the way there. They get the opportunity to try. They get a shot. They get further than the last person. Then they end up making way for the next person to get a shot. That can make you bitter. That can make you angry. Or it can make you Jeanne, giving a hard push to make way for the next woman in line.
One day, I break through glass. I am offered a job at KR
ON, an NBC station in San Francisco. I pack six giant duffel bags and move across the country. I move into a studio with an alcove that faces Bush Street. I can hear the traffic heading for the bridge that unites San Francisco and Oakland and it wakes me up early. I pay $600 a month for this tiny apartment, but I am making less money and working four days a week. But back in New York I was a field producer who wanted to be a reporter. Now I live three thousand miles away with less space and I have less money, and early-morning traffic noise. But I am going to be on air!
In the newsroom, I see some familiar and friendly faces. Stan Hopkins, who had been the news director at WBZ, is there. The meteorologist is Janice Huff, who is black, and she is nice to me. I feel comfortable asking her where to get my hair done. There are several reporters who are members of racial or ethnic minorities—Belva Davis, Ysabel Duron, and Vic Lee. They go out of their way to support me. They are also very talented, so their warmth gives me some comfort.
But often it feels like people don’t much like me. Nobody would quite say it but they don’t see me as qualified. Their eyes seem to challenge why I’m here. They act as if I am stealing something. I am definitely in over my head as an on-air reporter. But I have come from producing at an NBC network. I know I can write a great story. I just don’t know how to tell that story talking into the camera.
Pam Moore, who had been a reporter when I was back at WBZ, is KRON’s evening anchor. Pam makes it clear that she thinks I am in way over my head on camera so early. She’s right. There has just been a layoff of some staff after a strike by the writers and I am the first new hire, making a third of what the other reporters make. I am young and an ethnic and racial minority. People read something into that. I try to focus on working hard. I volunteer to cover fires in the middle of the night. I might not be good, but I’m willing. I have a lot to learn about being on air.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 5
