by Emmanuel Camarillo

Alex Perez is a native Chicagoan who visits his childhood barrio of Pilsen whenever he has the chance. “That’s the neighborhood that raised me,” he says, “I still have friends I grew up with there.” Journalism and the stories he loves to tell have taken him far from his colorful corner of the city. Perez reported at KVIA-TV in El Paso Texas and later at NBC Chicago. His stories range from presidential elections to hurricanes in the Caribbean. He traveled across Europe as part of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship to bolster his knowledge of the regions political backdrop.

But The Second City beckons and even after all the travel Perez still remembers that McDonalds in Pilsen that’s on Cermak and Western. “That was like the first McDonalds I’d ever seen in my entire life. When I was a kid we’d go there all the time.” As if it were some Mecca for the kids who grew up in Pilsen It turns out we frequented the same McDonalds as children. It’s also not the only thing I found we had in common when I had the chance to speak to the now ABC News national correspondent.

EC: I want to start off by asking what made you want to become a reporter?

Alex Perez: There’s no one short easy answer to that but I can tell you that I was one of those people who kind of fell in love with the idea of journalism early on. In fifth grade we had to write a paper. We were given a picture and you had to write what you thought would be the associated story to that picture. My picture in Mr. Burns classroom was of a soldier’s coffin covered in an American flag. I got an A+ on that assignment and I had to read it in front of the entire classroom.

There was something about the idea of relaying a story and sort of being that messenger that I kind of fell in love with at that point. And the idea that someone was relying on you to be the messenger, that what you were gonna say was gonna help them decide what they were gonna do that day or how they felt about something. They trusted you with this belief that you would be honest in relaying that information to them. I just felt that responsibility was something that I really wanted to be a part of.

EC: Since you pretty much knew what you wanted to do at a young age, what did you expect getting into the business? Were you surprised by what you found?

 Alex Perez: I didn’t know what to expect, I knew that it was gonna be different than some of my colleagues and fellow students. I went to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and I had friends who were in business and finance so before graduating a lot of them already had jobs in their fields. That was not the case for me or really any of the journalism students. I was worried about it and I didn’t know what to expect.

I decided in the middle of college that I wanted to do broadcast as opposed to print. I did well and I excelled when I was in school. I had internships in small markets and big markets but I graduated and could not find a job. I was searching for a job for about a year. I sent out 86 resume tapes.

My first job, a year after I graduated, 86 tapes later, was in market 208 which is one of the smallest television news markets in the country. I made $13,000 a year and lived in a part of the country that wasn’t exactly welcoming to minorities or people who didn’t look like them. You could make that amount without going to college, so I felt in many ways, am I making the right decision?

I was the first one in my family to go to college so I felt like there was a lot of pressure on me to be the successful one. Telling your family, I got a job and I’m making $13,000 a year but I’m getting to live my dream isn’t exactly what they wanted to hear. But I kept at it and I was able to get a job in a different market over there.

EC: Given how hard it was for you to kind of break into the industry, what advice would you give to those from a similar background that want to pursue journalism but realize that the road is long and might not be that fruitful in the beginning?

 Alex Perez: When I got those 85 rejections I remember I would put those letters on my wall and it would be the first thing I would see every morning. A lot of people thought that’s depressing why would you do that but for me it was more motivation.

Right below those on the wall I would put down sayings, quotes, verses, things that would make me feel like I’m not alone and this is eventually going to work out. One of my favorites was one from Maya Angelou that said, “don’t make money your goal instead pursue the things you love doing and do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.”

Other people will give up and you’ll lose them along the way because journalism is the kind of business that, if you’re in it for the glamour or the glitz and the big paychecks, you’re gonna have a hard time early on. You’re gonna quickly realize that’s not a part of it

If you enjoy what it is to tell a story, to investigate, to relay information, those things are fruitful in a form of payment in their own way. They don’t pay the bills, but they do pay that sort of emotion and that part of your brain that you need to pay as well.

EC: Along those lines is there a story that you keep going back to or that you still carry with you?

 Alex Perez: The first story that I remember feeling like our work as journalists has a purpose was when I was working in New Mexico. There was a woman who needed a medical procedure she was initially told was not covered by her insurance. She could not afford her procedure and was becoming really ill. We profiled her story and it turned out she was in the right and it was something the insurance company was doing incorrectly.

As a result of our story she was able to get the medical attention and the help that she needed. It made me realize that any story can be life or death for someone. While stories come and go and we interview people all the time, that moment when they talk to you, when they pour their heart out to you, means the world to them and it can always be a matter of life or death to someone.

You have to respect it and treat it that way no matter what. I think when you have that perspective, when you bring that to the table, when you’re working on something it really makes every story memorable because every story has an element of that somewhere.

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