By Emma Krupp

Earlier this month, I received an unexpected call from a number with a Washington, D.C. area code while wrapping up the final hour of a work shift. Bending beneath my desk surreptitiously, I listened to the voicemail: It was Maureen Orth, famed reporter and Vanity Fair correspondent, and she wanted to talk now.

“I’m going to be traveling tomorrow,” she said. “Sometimes in this industry you have to be ready for the thing when it happens.”

Orth, whose 50-year career has taken her from Newsweek to Vogue and more, knows a thing or two about working on the fly. Her career in journalism began in the late ‘60s after she grew bored in a master’s program for Latin American studies — following a stint in Colombia for the Peace Corps, school seemed dry and dull. Instead, she happened upon a program in documentary and journalism studies at the University of California – Los Angeles (“In the course catalog, right near ‘L’ for Latin America was ‘J’ for journalism,” she said) and enrolled on a whim. Soon after, she scored her first major article with the San Francisco Chronicle-Observer, a piece on the “dope lawyers of San Francisco.”

“I really was convinced that I didn’t know how to write,” Orth said. “I said, ‘You want a story about the dope lawyers of San Francisco?’ And they go, ‘Yeah, can you write?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, I can write,’ never knowing if I could or not. And so that’s how it started.”

Since then, Orth has amassed a jaw-dropping list of interview credits — Vladimir Putin, Madonna, Mohamad Al Fayed — and with that, endless anecdotal curios. There was the time, for instance, when she got her first editing lesson as a young reporter from “Roots” author Alex Haley. Or when Karl Lagerfeld, surrounded by the opulence of his large apartment, broke down about the death of his longtime partner. Or even when Margaret Thatcher, in her first interview after being voted out of office, told her that her life had been “shattered.”

“All I could think in my head was headline, headline, headline,” Orth said.

In her reporting process, Orth adheres to a formula she calls “Energy, Enthusiasm, Empathy, Polite, Prepared, Persistent” (EEEPPP, like a scared-sounding exclamation, for short). Being a reporter means doing your research, and listening, and being honest when you don’t understand and — especially now — engaging with sources on an interpersonal, nondigital level.

“You need to get on the telephone, you need to do the shoe leather work,” she said. “You need to get on the phone and go talk to them as human beings in person, or you have to develop a rapport over the telephone and hear their voices.”

Orth frequently writes about fraught subject matter and makes no obfuscations about where she stands, offering candid assessment about the sex abuse scandals of Michael Jackson (“I happen to think he’s a pedophile”) and Woody Allen (“I believed Dylan [Farrow] from the beginning”). But personal opinions, she added, shouldn’t affect a reporter’s empathy or the shrewdness with which they approach each source.

“Even if you’re dealing with people that you’re not on the same side that they’re on, you have an obligation to listen to what they have to say,” Orth said. “And then you can go back and forth with them, but you’re not being deceptive. If you think someone is not telling the truth, you can say, ‘Wait a second. Are you trying to tell me this and this and this? Come on.’”

In addition to writing for Vanity Fair, Orth runs a charity in Colombia — that’s where she was heading when we first exchanged emails a few weeks before our interview. Later, she offered a halfway apology for calling me out of the blue, then stopped herself. As an aspiring journalist, I should learn to expect the unexpected, she said. It’s a lesson that’s served her well throughout her career.

“It’s partially luck,” she said. “But when opportunity comes knocking, you [have to be] capable of responding.”

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By Darrah Perryman

It’s just past noon on an almost-summer afternoon and Sarah Kustok is racing through the corridors of New York City, nonchalantly competing with the clock to beat her daily deadline. Though the train’s whistle is dancing with the summer’s howl through the phone, Kustok’s voice is calm and focused, piercing through the never-ending chaos that comes with the job.

“I pour my heart and soul into this,” she said. “I never even visualized this job as an opportunity, as an option for me.”

Because before Kustok, this wasn’t a reality for women.

Today she reigns as the first solo female sports analyst for the NBA, a feat that she earned with talent and resilience in the industry.

“For a long time it was a ton of grinding and trying to figure out how to make ends meet,” she recollected on her first few years. “It’s such a competitive field … often times your starting point may not be worth the time and effort and education you put into it.”

And for most recent college graduates, that’s typical. Kustok started at ESPN driving players around, getting coffee for staff and doing other atypical tasks. She recalls sometimes working several jobs at a time and constantly putting her work outto gain opportunities.      Even though she relished every minute, it came with doubts.“It tests you. There were plenty of moments throughout my career that I had to sit and think, ‘Is this definitely my path?’”

Her concerns were valid, and journalism was not Kustok’s first love. It was basketball, right here at DePaul University. In fact, she almost took a position overseas to play professionally for two years.

Sometimes, she plays the “what if” game with herself, and momentarily peers down the path not taken. But in this life, there’s no going back.

“I don’t believe in regrets. All things happen for a reason. You learn from different experiences, and I believe this is what I should be doing right now.”

The experiences Kustok had as an athlete and her love for reading and writing have melded, helping her to forge a dream job. After ESPN, Kustok continued working in Chicago before moving to YES network in New York, where she worked as a sideline reporter for five years before getting the historic promotion last year.

Still, the added pressure of being the first woman in her role is not something Kustok obsesses over.“I often try not to think about being the only female when looking at this job or how I approach the work I’m doing,” she said.

And for Kustok, being the best she can be is the most important thing. She takes pride in showing up and being as prepared as possible, which is a piece of advice she stresses on to young aspiring journalists.

“What’s next?” I ask, half expecting her to reveal another dream or soon-to-be accomplishment on the verge of reality. Instead, she pauses, letting the silence on the other end of the line settle and thicken, and says humbly, “I don’t know. But I’m okay with that.”

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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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By Jonathan Ballew

Rob Rainey is worried about the future of journalism.

And Rainey is certainly a subject matter expert. Over the last five decades Rainey has worked with just about every legacy media organization — it would be easier to list the places he hasn’t worked because there would be so few.

Rainey might even be the most senior working photojournalist in the country. Starting while still in high school, Rainey has been behind a camera to help report the news for 52 years.

“I feel like a dinosaur,” he said.

When Rainey started, he had a black and white three-lens camera that he jokes “weighed as much as a Volkswagen.” Back then editing was done with “a razor blade, microscope, and scotch tape.”

Rainey used to hop on his bike after school and pedal to the local news station, where he operated a camera for the evening newscast. Since then, his interest in camera work has never wavered. But Rainey doesn’t consider himself a cameraman as much as he considers himself a journalist.

“I’m a journalist first, without a doubt,” he said.

In those early days there was still money in journalism. Jobs were available to anyone with the desire to tell stories to the public. Foreign bureaus were commonplace and getting hired by a news station out of high school was not unheard of.

Today, the landscape is vastly different, and as bad as reporters have it, it’s even worse for cameramen, according to Rainey. There is a trend in the market to either automate or hire freelance camerawork.

The problem with that, said Rainey, is that cameramen should be journalists in the truest fashion.

“Our role is not all that different from reporters,” he said. “The role of a cameraman is to find information, and to capture it.”

If a cameraman has a background in journalism, then they can offer a unique role to both the reporter and producer.

“The (reporter and producer) usually know the story backwards and forwards,” he said. “But the camera crew comes into the story cold without any background usually.”

This allows them to operate as the eyes and ears of the audience. In other words, they are seeing the story for the first time, just as the viewer will be. If the cameraman has a journalistic background they are able to ask questions that the reporter may have overlooked.

“If you are so familiar with the story, you never think to ask the obvious,” he said.

Rainey said that often he would ask a simple and innocuous question, only to have it end up as the cornerstone of the story. He credits his journalistic training in college with helping him to think inquisitively.

Additionally, Rainey says that camera work as it relates to news coverage can be even more difficult than the act of reporting.

“Reporters and producers have the luxury of rewrites and time,” he said. “Cameramen don’t. The decisions we make in real time are the only ones that matter for us.”

When cameramen with significant journalistic backgrounds are terminated, everyone in the newsroom suffers, said Rainey.

Rainey said that he believes the golden age of journalism ended right around the time Laurence Tisch bought CBS in the 1980s. Tisch starting selling off parts and closed down many CBS bureaus. Rainey said Tisch closed the Atlanta bureau because many, including himself, were close to earning retirement benefits. Since then, it has been downhill for journalists — especially cameramen.

“The volume of work is not nearly as great as it once was, and the compensation isn’t as great either,” he said.

Rainey laments the fact that his daughter pursued a career in magazine journalism, only to make the transition to communications and public relations after nearly a decade in the industry. She had dealt with staff cuts and layoffs before, but this time she was asked to be the one making the cuts. Fed up, she moved to a safer and better paying industry. Rainey said it’s the first time in her life that she has had a retirement plan.

“I don’t think journalists have the respect that they once did,” he said. “There is so much anger and animosity, and it’s easy to dump it all on people who are telling you stuff that you don’t want to hear.”

Rainey said that today journalists are expected to act as a one-man band due largely due to budget cuts in newsrooms.

“The bad thing about one-man bands is that you don’t buy albums from a one-man band because they sound awful,” he said.

If there is any hope for journalism, Rainey said to look no further than the White House.

“I think, maybe Donald Trump has been the best gift to journalism in a long time,” he said. “So much of what he has done has been so abnormal and crazy that it has inspired people to look more at newspapers and televisions to find the truth.”

Although Rainey has a bleak outlook when it comes to the future of journalism, his love and passion for the pursuit is a beacon of light that shines through without him realizing it. He said that those who “have to” pursue journalism, should.

“It’s almost like a calling,” he said. “I had to do it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

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By Lia Davis

Kevin Tibbles believes that to tell a good story, besides reporting on the facts, you have to tell it in a language that people understand and need to make it interesting. For him, he believes that even “one little extra thing” could take a story from good to great.

NBC News’ Kevin Tibbles is a correspondent currently based in Chicago. He contributes regularly to “NBC News with Lester Holt,” “Today,” “MSNBC,” and “Meet the Press.”

Tibbles is from Canada and attended Ryerson University where he received his degree in Journalism. He knew he wanted to become a journalist after meeting a family friend  was who a newspaperman.

“Whenever we visited his house he had a bunch of newspaper front pages hanging on the wall in his den,” said Tibbles. “I was so fascinated that I used to study these things and think about how far away these places were.”

Besides thinking about all of the places he could travel to, he knew he wanted to meet different people.

“I wanted to see everything and meet people. I thought it was important to find out if people were like me, different than me. I thought it was important to find out whether people in different parts of the world had different aspirations.”

Before coming to Chicago, he was a foreign correspondent for NBC based in London. His work has provided him the opportunity to travel to Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iceland, Thailand, and Dubai among other places. It was in Afghanistan that he covered a young boy’s story that he said still affects him to this day. The boy was employed by a candy maker and had to walk five to six miles to work every day.  He lived in a mud hut with his family and was regularly abused because he was a member of a minority group. No one else in his family was able to work, so the responsibility of providing was on him.

“He was so determined to look after the people he cared about. He endured a tremendous amount of hardship just to help them out,” said Tibbles.

He believes that since he is not from America, he can see what other people do not see when it comes to his reporting. His background allows him to pick up on stories that other journalists may not.

Tibbles considers the best part of being a journalist is being able to meet people.

“I’ve been so fortunate in 40 years of doing this that I’ve never lost faith in other people despite of what they do to other people or what I’m told about them.”

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