 Hi everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the director of P20 initiatives at Northern Illinois University and we're very excited to bring you back another episode of Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads. Today we're going to be talking about a career that we're all pretty familiar with because we hear it on the radio or see it on TV but we're going to dig into the world of not just a journalist but a journalist who's involved in television or radio, specifically in this case. And what's really exciting is we're going to, this is another two for one episode. We're going to really hear about two careers because our journalist today has had a workplace journey that took her from studying journalism in college to pursuing another career, being very successful with it and now back into journalism. So let's start with introductions. Jumoke? Hello everyone. Happy New Year. My name is Adi Jumoke. I'm an international student here at Northern Illinois University. I'm originally from Nigeria and I'm working on my master's degree in public health and I'm really excited to have you born on this series today. Over to you, Yvonne. Hi. So hi everyone. My name is Yvonne Booth. I am a reporter at Northern Illinois University for NPR. I am excited to talk to you guys today because I've always wanted to be a journalist but I had a long career doing something else. So I hope that you guys can learn from this today. And the full disclosure part of this, not that any of our students who are going to watch this care, but given that we're talking to a journalist, we want to be very transparent about disclosures. WNIJ and our office and the Illinois P2I network are part of the same portion of Northern Illinois University. We're part of the outreach engagement and regional development division department at Northern Illinois University. So with that said, Jumoke, take it away. Awesome. So Yvonne, just walk us through how you started your career as a journalist. What high school did you go to? How did that transition happen? All right. So when I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. So I had my eyes set on Milwaukee School of Engineering and then I took pre-calculus and I was like, nope, this isn't for me. So I went back to my grandpa and I told him, I said, I don't know what to do. You know, I'm in my senior year and I don't know what I want to study now. So he said, you know, you're really good at telling stories. Why don't you do journalism? So I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. And we laugh because when we say telling stories, my family used to always say, oh, she's gonna tell, especially my brothers. Don't do anything in front of her. She's gonna tell. So I went away to school, but then I came back. I ended up going to Chicago State and I majored in speech communication. So there I learned about radio production, TV production. We did commercials, everything in regards to TV and radio broadcast. And after I graduated in 97, early 97, January of 97, I ended up working for what was called Ameritech back then. Now Ameritech, I don't know. A lot of people may not have heard of it, but we were around and I started in the paging department where I was customer service for people pagers where, you know, they would call and say, my page is not working and I would have to do technical things to make sure that they pagers started working. But as I was at Ameritech, I started getting promotions and doing very well. I went to the cellular department and then I went to a department called Resource Planning. And somebody hear the term workforce management, so those can be used interchangeably. So I went into that department, but I still wanted to do journalism. So I ended up doing an internship for AT&T Cable where I was like a journalist for this show called Hometown Edition. So I would go out and do local stories and I would have a cameraman with me. But at the same time, I felt like I needed to increase my skills in regards to more so of the print part. So I went back to school. I went to Roosevelt University around to 1999 and I studied journalism for my master. So I did that. Thankfully, my job paid for it because they had very good benefits. So that is one thing that I have to say. Don't discard doing something that you really don't think that that's what you want to do for the rest of your career, but there could be benefits in that. So they were able to pay for my master's degree. So I got my master's degree, but then I found myself stuck. So I worked for Returnees to Verizon and I worked for Verizon for 22 years. And in that position at workforce planning, I became a supervisor and I did that for almost 15 years. But I would always feel like I want to do journalism. I want to do journalism. I did another intern at the Beacon News in Aurora. And one of the things I used to tell myself when I was in my career is, you know, this is not what I want to do, but who knows? Maybe I'm picking up some skills that I can use when I transition into my career. So that kind of kept me going. I kept feeling like that I was doing something that was meaningful. I did a lot of customer service. I had a team. So, you know, I was the leader. I had to facilitate meetings, talk to people. I had to do interviews. I had to hire people. So there are a lot of things that I did in that position that I did love. And I took a little bits and pieces out of that to say, okay, I'm not a journalist now, but I'm still talking to people. I'm still doing interviews. I'm still working with the team and making a difference. And then in 2018, we got this email, and it said that the company was letting people leave the company, but they were going to get a severance package that was much different from the normal severance package. And it's funny, I was on the phone with two of my direct reports when the email came out. And we were talking about it, and I said, what are you guys talking about? They were like, looking at your emails. I looked at my email, and I saw it in my voice. The pitch in my voice just went up, and they're like, you can't leave us. Because I looked at that and I was like, this is my perfect chance. Because, you know, working for Verizon and being a supervisor, I started making decent money. So it was hard to just stop working. You know, I had a family, I had bills, and I'm like, if I were to transition to journalism, I know I'm going to take a pay cut, especially starting now. So I was trying to figure out how can I do this? You know, I tried to do some things on the side, but you know, with the family, I could not really fulfill whatever itch I had for doing journalism. So once they offered that, I put my name in the pot, and I was picked. So that allowed me to leave Verizon and transition into being a journalist. Sounds like a very interesting story. Along the line, you mentioned that you did an internship. You actually did two internships, and then you said that the internships helped you understand what skills you need to develop further. And I think that's really important because a lot of students have opportunities to do internships, and for some students, they just think, oh, I really need to get a paid internship, you know, and just make some extra money over the summer. But students need to understand that the main purpose of doing an internship is to help you build skills and to understand what skills you need to develop for that. So thank you so much for mentioning that. So currently in your job title, your current job, could you tell us about the organization you work with currently and what you do with this organization? So I work for WNIJ radio, a part of Northern Illinois University, and I am an art, culture, and spiritual expression reporter. So my beat, I work with the community, a lot of artists in Aurora, Rockford, even the DeKalb area. I talk to faith leaders. I've done stories like over, like when it started getting cold, I did a story with a couple of churches. One was in Elgin, one was in Rockford in regards to how they're still being creative and bringing the gospel to their parishioners outside of Zoom. So they were doing parking lot service. A couple of them were doing it over the summer. So I wanted to know, okay, what are you guys going to do now that is getting cold? You know, some people just need to be around people even though they're in their cars. And so I learned that some of them were still going to do parking lot service during the winter. So I do those types of stories. I do a lot of stories about maybe murals that are going up. There was a mural and Aurora that was going to take place, and then there was some controversy around it. So I had to talk to both sides to tell that story. And I also did a follow-up story on that because the whole art community came together, whether they were against how the mural came about or who was picked, how they were picked for the mural, they still came together at the end and worked together. So more artsy type stories and things like that. And once in a while, I will delve into something different if needed. Wow, it sounds like your job also has you working as a mediator, which is interesting. So I mean, you've talked about how you work with community. And so I'm assuming that a typical day for you would be going out into the community and getting stories. So if you could just walk us through a typical day now that the whole world is in a pandemic and before the pandemic kicked in, what would your typical day or week look like? Okay, so before the pandemic, I was in a full-time reporter at WNIJ. When I started at WNIJ, I started as a volunteer. So I know you talked about internships, how important they are. But sometimes volunteering is just as important. So I started as a volunteer. When I left Verizon, it had been 20-something years since I've been in school. So I started applying for journalism jobs, but nothing. And I didn't want to get discouraged. I made a decision to invest in myself and take some of the funds that I guess got from my severance and I went back to school. So I went to Illinois Media School. There's a campus in Lombard, one in Chicago and across a few other states. So I went there. It was an eight-month program where I learned hands-on training again, but it was the updated technology. So video editing, audio editing, skills in regards to telling the story and putting it together. So I took classes for eight months there. And thankfully, it was before the pandemic, so I was able to do hands-on. So I think that's what helped me get into WNIJ, just having those skills and building those again. When I started WNIJ as a volunteer, I volunteer for something called NIRIS and that's where we have visually impaired people who are not hearing a peer, who I'm saying it right the first time, visually impaired people who aren't able to read actually able to read the newspaper or anything. What I did, I read the Chicago Tribune and not the whole newspaper, but certain stories for about an hour so that those people can listen to those stories. So I did that and around November, I was brought on as a part-time producer and I attended what's called Radio 101 because my whole goal for WNIJ at first was just to get an internship to fulfill the hours for Illinois Media School. There were things that we can do to fulfill our hours, but I was looking for internship. And I think I wasn't even an intern for a week before I came on part-time. And during my part-time stint, I worked as a producer. So on Mondays and Fridays, I would go to the radio station and I would help with the show called All Things Considered. I would help the anchor with that in regards to stories, pulling like bylines and things that we might want to read over the air, getting the stories together. And I was able to do some reporting. So if there was an event that was happening that I wanted to cover, and I didn't have a beat at this time, that I would go out if I had the chance to do that and then I would come home, come back to the station and I would produce it and do the story. So I was doing double work and then the pandemic hit. And so my producing duties ended. And I went more so just doing reporting from March to June. But before that, I was going out, when you say a typical day, I was going out doing stories. One of the stories I remember doing early on was a story in Rockford for there was a homeless shelter that hosts what's called, they were remembering our friends, where they honor homeless people who passed away that year. So I was able to go do that, get audio for that and put that together. So I did this all in my part time producing role. Now when the pandemic hit in March, we were stuck at home. So we had to kind of play it by ear. And I ended up doing more reporting stories. So that's when I felt like the pressure was on because I use the internet, I use Facebook. I use the people that I've talked to in the past to come up with story ideas. So I spent a lot of time searching for story ideas just using the internet and making that phone call. And one thing I want to say about transitioning from customer service, it was so easy for me to pick up the phone and say, Hey, my name is Yvonne Booze. I work for WNIJ and make those connections with those with some of my sources because I was used to customer service. I was used to talking to different people. So I want to jump in and just mention one thing because it's so interesting to hear you say that just last night. I saw on Twitter just a random tweet from someone. I don't even remember who it was, but saying no one should run for office without having worked in either the hospitality sector or in retail or in customer service because that's so much of the job of being an effective. I'm not going to even say politician. I'm going to say office holder. That ran true to me as a school administrator. That's a huge part of that job. And then it's really interesting hearing you say this because there's been two other things. A meeting I was in for a job search for someone today where we talked about those same set of skills. And then early this morning walking the dog, I heard a photographer on a podcast talk about what an important set of skills that is for him as a photographer to be able to approach people. And so I just want to highlight that because obviously for our students watching, you know, we've moved away from using the phone in the way we've traditionally used the phone, not just because of the pandemic. I mean, we had moved away from that because of text messaging, for example, and other text-based forms of communication. And so I'm wanting to call out that skill because in the workplace that remains an incredibly important skill across multiple careers. And so something certainly for our adolescents, young people, to all be thinking about honing as they move through school and work experience and so forth. Yeah. So, you know, from that, I was able to build my source list. So also during a typical day, I'll go on Facebook and I'll look at some of their Facebook pages and see what they have gone on. Also, we get press releases about things that are going on. But a lot of times I'll just send an email to say, hey, especially if I talked to them last year, I'll just refresh their memory and say, hey, I worked on you with this story. I see this is going on. What do you have? Do you have time to talk to me or chat with me? Or, you know, at the beginning of the year, I reached out to a couple of people. I didn't have a story idea. I just wanted to follow up and say, hey, it's the new year. I'm still an art and culture and spiritual expression reporter. I just wanted to say hello. And a lot of times they'll come back and say hello. But you know what, Yvonne, we have XYZ going on. So that has really helped me excel in being a reporter, being a reporter, just being able to communicate with my sources and just feel natural about that. And knowing when do I pick up the phone and call them? Or when do I send an email? Because there are some times where I don't think an email will do. I may have to call them and give them a little more background about myself or a little more background about my idea or the story that I'm working on. And a lot of times my sources will give me other sources. They'll say, you know what, did you try talking to this person? How about talking to this person? And it just helps my story become whole. Well, I think that this is just amazing. Because currently I'm working on my internship with Prevent Blindness. And a big part of my internship involves talking to groups about their high health. And I have to approach this group. So as you were speaking about, you know, picking up the phone and sending emails, I was just there thinking, oh, these ideas that I could use to get participants or groups for my internship. So thank you so much for talking about this. While we're talking about skills, I was just thinking, I know you mentioned communication skills, which is really essential. I was just thinking, what other kind of skills would you need to be successful as a reporter? Listening skills. You really have to pay attention. And I learned that early on during my first internship, I remember there was a time where I was so focused on my questions. Like, you know, I need to make sure I asked this question. And I would miss out some important things they were saying to me. Or I would miss out on asking that follow up question because I wasn't listening. I was like, I just, okay, I ask a question and then they're saying something and I'm like, okay, what's my next question? Let me make sure I get it. So that is very important to slow down and listen. A lot of times they'll answer your question, your next question, before you even ask it. So it is redundant if they tell you something and then you ask the question again. That's kind of embarrassing. So listening is something that you need, I think also organization. Because at Verizon, I use a lot of spreadsheets. I did scheduling for the customer service reps and training and scheduling them for training and making sure that I kept track of certain things. So I've taken that and I use that as a reporter. I have a spreadsheet with all my contacts. I have a tap for my pitches that I'm working on. I have a tap for like personal information. It just keeps me organized to make sure that I'm staying on track of things. And also another thing, I don't know if I can call it a skill, but being in the corporate role, I gave a lot of feedback and I got a lot of feedback. But that's very important as a journalist to be able to receive that feedback, whether it's your writing, whether it's how you are telling your stories, whether it's feedback from your sources. You have to be open to that so that you can become a better journalist. So those are things that I took or brought with me from the corporate role and to this position that I didn't even think I needed. Sounds really good and I completely agree with you that for most people and even this includes myself, you know, I'm still pretty much new to doing this and I've learned that I have to listen because like you said, a lot of the questions you have written down like I do, people tend to answer them in the middle of other conversations. So yes, thank you so much for mentioning that. It sounds like you've really come a long way in getting your job as a reporter, because you've known from very beginning, this is what you want to do and you've put in a lot of work, you've put in a lot of internship and all. So my next question is, what's the thing you enjoy the most about being a reporter? What do you enjoy most about being a reporter? I love just talking to people and meeting new people. That's number one, but also the writing. I am a poet, I write poetry. So to be able to listen to someone and listen to their story and sit there and figure out, okay, how do, what am I going to say to get our audience to say, why am I reading the story? Why am I listening to the story? To be able to play around with some elements that I use in poetry, whether it's a metaphor, like for example, I did a story about a chef early on in the pandemic who used to go to people's houses and prepare meals for them. But then the pandemic hit, he couldn't do that. So he came up with, he rented out like a kitchen where he was still able to meal prep for people and just drop it off. So my headline read something like chef still has a full plate during the pandemic. So it brings me joy to be able to play around with words and things like that when I'm telling my stories, especially for the fun stories and in the headlines for those stories. So the writing, I also enjoy that. And also this is something that I didn't know was going to take place. But I also get to curate a segment called poetically yours. So that's near and dear to my heart where I have worked with poets across Northern Illinois and even a poet from California reached out and we aired one of her poems where they'll send me poetry and I'll take it and I will produce it, put a little music behind it and we air that every Friday. So that's one thing that I never thought I would be able to do as a journalist. Well, so this one is big. What's that one thing you don't like about your job? Bad audio. You know, there's software that allows you to work your magic editing software and things like that. But there are some things you just can't fix. So it's very important, like if I go out and cover a story that's outside, it's very important that I remember to put on my windshield because especially when the weather is windy, I'm asking people questions and they have a good bite or, you know, they say something that I think the listeners need to hear, but there's in the background that is very hard to clean out. So it's very important even during Zoom interviews that I do, I have to listen to the background to see what's going on because there are some times where even in a Zoom video, there's some type of noise that every time they talk you hear that noise and you can't edit around that. So I've been able to say, hey, wait a minute, I'm hearing something weird. It actually happened last week. I said, something's wrong. I'm hearing some type of background noise or something. So the person I was interviewing said, you know what, let me try my other computer. And he did that and it went away. So learning just to listen to that, just to make sure that you get quality found and even with the poetically yours, they record their poems for me and a lot of times they're using their cell phone. And so I try to give them tips and I say, you know, going your closet with the clothes, close the door, because it's very hard to air something that has background noise in it. So that's what I hate the most, background noise that I cannot fix. So a pro tip for our students watching because we know that video is king today, right? Whether it's TikTok or YouTube and that is the case. But one of the things that if you listen to people who produce any kind of video, audio is the most important part of video. You can only do so much with audio in post production. And so making sure you capture good audio from the beginning, I mean, video production literally revolves around audio full disclosure. The most recent episode, I shouldn't be admitting to this, but of the office ladies podcast that I listened to over the weekend. And remember that was being filmed with cameras and boom mics floating around. But they went off on a whole tangent about all of the audio setup to capture that because they weren't producing it like a traditional TV show. And so that is a great tip for our students who even want to produce videos for fun. If we can't understand or hear what you're saying, you can't go viral guys. So there it is. So talking about students, if you were to hire an intern, what particular things would you be looking at? And I'm sure to the skills and technical know how what other things would you be looking at before you hire this person? I would want to make first, first and foremost make sure that that person is a person of integrity because I believe as a journalist, you have to have a high level of integrity. Your sources, sometimes they get comfortable with you and sometimes they tell you things that they didn't even think about because they're comfortable with you and they're talking to you and being able to make a sound judgment of is that something that I need to share? Is that going to help my story? Or is this just information that they're telling me because hey, they're talking to me? The other thing is a person that's hungry for knowledge because I think that's one of the things that I always want to learn something. I love YouTube and sometimes I'll go look at different videos and I'll be looking at one and I'll say to myself, I'm not learning anything and I'll click off. So someone who yearns for knowledge, someone who is able to take feedback, someone who isn't going to get discouraged when they're being told, hey, I think you need to work on your intro a little better. Or I think that you might want to come up with a different angle for that story. Someone who's able to listen to that and let that motivate them to do better. Thank you for sharing. My final question for you today is how's your job as a reporter? How do you think it contributes to making the world a better place? I think my job as a reporter makes the world a better place because there are people that are going through things and sometimes they think they're along. But when you tell those stories and they hear things like, for example, I did a story about a videographer who of course was impacted by the pandemic and some of the things that he did to pivot. You may have someone out there that's like, well, now I might have to change careers, but when they hear those stories and inspires them and say, hey, I can do this, it helps people know that they're not along. Even with the poetically yours, one of the ports came and they said many of them because I did poetically yours, a couple of people heard that and I was able to get some pay gigs just because I aired my poem on poetically yours. So I think being a journalist enriches lives because you're telling stories that people don't always hear. And that's one of my goals is to make sure I'm finding those stories and sharing those stories with our listener audience. I cannot agree more because talk about developing countries and all the stories that you see. Journalism and reporting and media, social media in general has just gone a long way in telling stories that people cannot go to. I'm here in America. I don't necessarily know what's going on in Nigeria, but a reporter can get on TV or get on the radio and tell me a detail. That's what you said. Integrity is really important. Tell me a detailed summary of what's going on. And I feel like, yes, I am pretty informed. And so I do agree with you. Thank you so much, Yvonne. And then I was going to add the sound of the stories. I just wanted to share. I originally always wanted to do television. I thought I was going to be an anchor woman. And when I left Illinois Media School and I started doing the work at the radio, I started thinking, oh my god, I love radio because of the sound. Just the excitement of having someone say something. And as they're talking, you're thinking to your mind, oh my god, that's a good bite. I can't wait to use that. Or if there's music involved, or if I go to an event and there's different background sound, getting excited about being able to incorporate that into my story. So like you said, you want to be able to take that person to the actual location based on the story that you're doing. Yeah, two quick final thoughts for me. One is, as we record this, I mean, the importance of journalists, of all kinds of journalists, is, hopefully has never been more obvious to everybody. I know I'm listening to you talk and thinking about my years as an eighth grade teacher many years ago and how we approached the requirement to teach the Constitution as a really hands-on engaging study of American government. And as part of that, we had a multi-week simulation of the entire government. Every student got a role. You never knew what was going to happen. We had all three branches represented. And as that evolved year after year, one of the things we added in was they also had to, at different points, while they still maintain their daytime role as a representative or a Supreme Court justice or in the executive branch, they also had to become members of that fourth branch of government and write media stories about what was happening in the simulation, write newspaper stories at that time. I mean, this was in the 1990s. And so that really, I think, speaks to the power of your work and the importance maybe instead of the power, but is we cannot have the kind of government that we aspire to have. And as we hear about different politicians and leaders talk about what we aspire to be as a country, I'll leave that as an open-ended question for people watching this. I know what I want for our students who are watching this and for all of our students. And having reporters with integrity out there is, and then all of these other skills to actually get the work done and done well, really, really critical. So having you with us today is a real pleasure. And one of the things I think we're going to do for our students who are watching this, if you're not familiar with public radio and what it has to offer, we have a number of public radio stations throughout Illinois. To varying degrees, they also will buy programs nationally from national public radio and other organizations like PRI International. And I think what we'll do is both in the YouTube description and maybe at the end of the blog post, we will put links to our public radio stations, many of which maybe all of which I will find that I don't even know that. But as we write this up, Jo Moche and I will figure that out are associated with educational institutions in Illinois. I mean, certainly I know that's the case at Northern Illinois University and Illinois State University and WBEZ originally in Chicago is originally connected to the Chicago Public Schools. And so we will link to those and then you can learn more about what public radio is about even though that wasn't really the point of today. It's a neat little thing because as Yvonne talks about the sounds, that's really unique to public radio. And now today, there are lots of podcasts that are kind of emulating that type of production, audio production. Yeah. And when you talk about education, I just wanted to say that we do have our Teacher's Lounge podcast that my peer does. So they could check that out if they go to our website as well. Yep, particularly important for our teachers who are watching this either with or in advance of showing their students. So, well, this was awesome. Thank you so much, Yvonne. Really, really appreciate having you today. And congratulations on all of your success both in the telecommunications industry previously and today in your career as a journalist. Yeah. And I want to add one more thing. One more thing I want to tell the students, don't give up on your dreams. Even if it means that you're out there volunteering, make time for your passion. I see a lot of people who aren't able to get a job in journalism. I was blessed to get a job in journalism and not have to move to a different state. But I know people who regardless if they have a job or not, they're using technology. They're doing like a weekly show where they're bringing guests on and doing interviews or they're going out there. And I did this a couple of times just doing stories. Even though it wasn't something that was going to air, I was able to write the story and put a Facebook post up about it. So continue to work on your craft. Don't give up. I understand that we all have to eat. We all have to make a living. But you can still find a way to carve time out of your day to work on your passion. Great advice. Well, thank you again so much. It's been a real pleasure today. Thank you for having me today. Thank you. I really do enjoy speaking with you. You guys as well.