Hello.

Thank you for joining us today.

Welcome to Knight Talks, the Uni of Florida College of Journalism and Communications talk show, produced by students for s My name is Ethan Goddard and I'll be the host today.

I'm a junior here at the univers studying media production.

And I'm very excited to introduc our guest, Ron Allen, a distinguished NBC News corresp for over 25 years based out of N Hi, Ron.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

I'd like to get right into the q because I'm very excited to inte What initially drew you towards the field of reporti Was it your dream job from young No, it's not anything I ever tho until after college, when I couldn't find a job with a political science degree.

And I always was interested in current and social science and politics and writing and current events.

And I happened to get a job, a part time job, at CBS News in their newsroom during an elec when they tend to hire part time temporary workers.

And I got a job in a newsroom as essentially a clerk around th doing pretty basic things, answering the phone, delivering And it introduced me to the worl And I thought, wow, this is really interesting.

And so and that's how I became i in journalism and being a report And as they say, the rest is his Okay.

So it was more just the chance of getting that It was frankly desperation to fi And yes, I thought that studying politics and political science, I have an undergrad and a gradua in political science.

I thought I would work on policy I thought Id work in Washington I thought I'd do that kind of go maybe civil service work, but looking for a job after coll didn't work out.

It really didn't.

It didn't work And I happened to find this oppo at a job fair that was hosted by the National Urban League, which it's a great organization, but a lot of people don't find j fairs.

It's usually a first step.

But I actually did.

I got an interview.

The job was part time, working midnight to e weekends only, and for me it was a humbling exp to accept a job like that just out of college and with high hopes and expectat And I remember my father told me take the job.

It's CBS.

It's a great opportuni you'll advance.

And I thought, oh, my God, this is embarrassing.

Midnight to eight part time.

My friends are doing so much better than I.

But he was right and it worked o I went from one thing to the next to the next.

Okay.

So you're a graduate of the Univ of Pennsylvania, right, with degrees in political scienc Now, what skills did you pick up while getting those degrees that you still use in your job t Writing, researching, analysis.

Information gathering.

Breaking down information to its essential components.

Basically, news gathering journalism is social science research on the fly.

There's an old saying about how news is the first draft of h In that regard, the skill sets are very similar to what you do in class studying social science You know you write long papers.

In journalism, you write news stories every day or every few days.

So it's very similar.

It's about looking at a situation, analyzin learning more about it, and communicating in the case of a class, your pro in the case of what I do now to an audience, what I've learned or what I think is important or what they need to know about a particular topic.

Right.

So it was less about the specifi you graduated with and more about the stuff that you were practicing while t Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think generally speaki it's true that, you know, once you get your first job out of college, what you studied, what your degr becomes somewhat irrelevant.

You know, employers, whether you're in business, medicine, law, journalism, they want to know what you can d and they want to know, can you do what we need you to d Not whether you got an A or a B or whatever the grade was in psy two or three years ago at the University of Florida.

I'm sure it was a challenging ti but it becomes irrelevant to som From 1988 through to 1992, you w News as a national correspondent How did you get your first break into the industry?

Good question.

Well, again, going back, I started at CBS as a desk assis and that was a long time before the first reporting job.

Back then, CBS News ran a traini for minorities, women who they w to identify as future reporters, of like NBCU Academy at NBC Univ where I work now, runs a fellows program.

There's also something called a News Associates program It's basically a training progra that tries to identify people who have ability and it's a tremendous opportunity.

I mean, this is an incredibly competitive business, but I got a job as a reporter tr I got a job at an affiliate stat in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Then I moved to Hartford, Connec and then to Boston and then back to the network.

And went from one market to the Bigger, bigger, bigger stories.

That's how I progressed through the bus I worked at CBS, the worked at A and for the last 20 some odd years, I worked for And was it people that you met t your first job that have ended u you further down the line?

I think, you know, you form a ne you form contacts, relationships and they serve you throughout yo Some of the people who I met many, many years ago have retired and moved on to oth But I think it's essential as you're building your career that you maintain good relations and that you not only look for h but you offer help.

Right.

It's a, you know, it's a give and take process.

You know, there's an old saying in the bus about how you should be nice to everyone because you never kn who's going to be successful.

You never know who's going to be your boss.

You may be my boss in ten years Who knows.

How different was it reporting a Were there any unique challenges that came with being international compared to back h Yeah, most foreign news coverage that America is about war and peace, and death.

It's very intense.

You know, the stories that we co were not local stories.

Well, I think there's a big diff between foreign and domestic new And again, a lot of the stories were about A lot of the stories were about natural disasters, you know, famine in Africa, terrorist attacks here o Covered the war in Bosnia.

And Europe and Kosovo.

The Middle East conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, that's still o But those are the kinds of stori and I was drawn to and I travel So I traveled a lot in Africa.

And that's a lot different than the kinds of stories you do dome You know, here you do stories ab that are happening in the States You know, the American media is very focused on America.

Our politics, our economy, as it should be, our cultural issues.

So it's very different, you know, here in America, in the States, you're covering a that you're a part of.

And there you're covering countr that you are not a part of.

It's a different perspective, but you're trying to explain complicated things to people back in the States that they often don't understand or aren't paying a lot of attent that are happening in different and different cultures.

And I found all that fascinating and challenging and some of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

Can you talk a little bit about what you do for NBC News?

I do stories at NBC about everyt I'm based in New York, and I basically do stories that appear on the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, the Today Show.

NBC News is also MSNBC.

So stories appear on MSNBC.

Now, the company is very much into our new streaming platform: NBC News Now.

So we do stories for that and they are stories about every from the COVID epidemic, of course, was a whole couple of Everything is COVID, COVID, COVI And as it should, because it was tremendous experience, such a traumatic experience for Covered some political campaigns over th I covered the the Hillary Clinton versus Obama back in 2008, which was one of t fascinating campaigns that happe I spent some time covering the White House in Wash You know, for the last number of years, I' a lot of social justice stories.

A lot of that has to do with the and calls for reform, police reform and judicial reform in a lot of communities because of things that were happ It's a little bit of everything.

We go out and cover the weather, Ive covered hurric not here in Florida, but other parts of the country.

You know, you name it.

You know, consumer stories, busi stories, the economy.

Literally we could be doing a story about just about anything that's in th So it's really just the incredible diversity that is do you think, kept you there for It's certainly interesting intel the substance that you deal with The process of what you do is al extraordinarily exhilarating to travel all over the country and basically tell stories about what you see, what you fin I've seen some incredible things over the years and some good, some not so good.

And, you know, it's just been an incredible privileg and opportunity and blessing to be able to live that kind of and get paid for it.

Yes.

Can you just talk us through what a typical day would look like for you, from th until you clock out?

Short answers that there really aren't typical Some of the days are endless.

They go on and on and on.

It's a lot of work and a lot of commitment to doing this.

It's sort of like being a firema where you sit around the fire st and then a story breaks and you have to run out and put out the fire and cover t There's a lot of that that happe It's a lot of trying to sort through information and process things that are happening in the So, you know, it's every day is a little different.

You know, every day's a little b more or less challenging.

And again, it's just a fascinati to live your life and live your work doing this kind of work.

So do you think that any differe in news organizations such as FO has played a role in political p in this country?

I think one of the fundamental c in this country is that nowadays there are so many different sour of information.

You can go online and you can find news organizati or bloggers or individuals or other organizations that are providing information about stuff and issues.

And depending upon what your political views are, you can go and find entities that will tell you you're right and tell you, support your views and tell you that these are the facts about things There used to be a time when the country could agree on certain facts that this was t and that was that.

And that was pretty clear.

Now, there are lots of facts out that people believe, and there are places online and in the world of media where you can go and listen and have your beliefs about what these facts are or what these theories are reinforced.

And so I think I always urge viewers and I always urge practitioners, journalists to expose yourself to a wide range of points of vie to a wide range of sources of in so that you understand what's really going on in the wo And you can make up your own opi or make up your mind based on including a lot of different poi of view and perspectives.

Because I think it does create a lot of division, a lot of inte a lot of passion in our politics and in our daily when we're all sitting in our si and looking at and listening to certain sets of facts that we believe are true and not believing a set of facts over here that challenge that.

I think we need to challenge our like that.

And to answer, you know, your bottom line quest there are media organizations that are less traditional in terms of their journalistic a There are some that are more opi So you can consume the opinions but know that that's what that i And at the same time, scroll down, click on something somewhere else.

I was going to say Change the ch But that sounds so makes me soun I'll turn the page to see a wide range of, you know, something happens, but why it happened, how it happ who saw it happen?

You know, there's a whole lot of perspectives out there.

And to be really knowledgeable and informed, I think you need to avail yourse as wide range of perspectives as Have you ever felt endanger while covering a story, whether at home, abroad or after you've published it?

Yeah, there's a fair amount of danger out there, especially in foreign reporting, because a lot of the stories you do are about conflict.

You know, I've been in a lot of zones around the world and I've always been with people who are trained and willing and competent to manage these kinds of situati I used to tell my mother, you know, it always looks worse than it actually is in real life because the situations are manag But yes, journalists often put themselves in harm's w We're not as exposed as the ordinary people who live in the place where these things are happening But yes, I often found myself in those kinds of situations.

You know, I often tell people that wars don't really happen on battlefie They happen in neighborhoods, they happen in communities, they happen on city streets, they happen on farms.

They happen where people live.

It's not like armies go out and Let's go out to this battlefield and fight this out, you know, and journalists inject themselves in the heart o And it takes a lot of bravery.

It takes a lot of courage.

It takes a lot of caring about what's going on in to do that, to expose yourself in that way.

And colleagues of mine who are i for example, which is in front of the news these days, yo they take incredible chances.

They spend an incredible amount away from their families.

And they do it, I think, because they believe that this is something that's really important, that they literally risk their lives to tell the world ab And again, it's these situations, though, are manageable.

We take calculated risks.

You know, there are ways to cove a war and ways not to cover a wa There are precautions to take.

You know, one of the best things that you don't get in between tw You know, the other thing is you the army that you think is going when possible.

You know, we do a lot of reporti in war zones embedded or working with the American military because the military wants to show the country what's happening.

You know, there's all kinds of political issues around war and And sometimes and it's often saf safe to be embedded with the mil That also limits what you can se they only take you to certain pl I, generally speaking, and when possible, prefer not to be embedded with the mili because we try to go where we want to go to see what we wan And because we dont always beli what the military is telling us, they have their own agenda.

I've often been at the scene of earthquakes, the aftermath, where there's still aftershocks.

I am deathly afraid of earthquak There is training, there are cou There's work to prepare people t I mean, the people you see out t covering conflicts and coverage, they're not just thrown out ther You know, and I personally will not go out there with somebody who's just thrown And, you know, I believe most of my colleagues feel the same way.

You know, it's risk.

Yes.

But it's it's managed and measur And again, you do all this becau what's happening in that particu is extraordinary.

And you want the world to know and see what's happened.

And the most dangerous assignments are not when I, as an American, go to the Middle Ea to cover a conflict.

The most dangerous assignment is that journalists who live in East, who's covering something happening down the street from t where they live, where their family lives, and when they go home, it's still happening.

When I go home, I'm perfectly sa And away from it all.

So there's that, too.

So in countries without a free p they're obviously taking a far heavier risk.

Exactly.

Yes, we have in this country, we have a free press.

We have our First Amendment.

We have protections.

We have civility for the most pa But there are a lot of places where people don't have those pr where people dont have those gu You know, some of the most incre brave people you ever meet are journalists who take on the leaders of their own countri And they write their names and they publish their names.

An then sadly, in many cases, some the consequences.

During the time you've worked in media, what's the biggest change you've take place within the industry?

The biggest change I've seen in the world of media, I guess, is the rise of social m the rise of the ability of everybody to have a camera, ever to post their video or their stories online.

Everybody to, you know, just say what they wan The world used to be smaller.

I mean, the media landscape used to be smaller.

You know, there used to be three Now there's like 100 channels, y And I think that's the biggest change.

Nowadays, a person with a phone what it used to take teams of pe to accomplish over long periods You know, think there was a time when the medium was film and a team would go out with a film camera, take pictures of something, come back, process the film, let the film develop, let it dry put it in the mail, send it to s they developed.

You know, all that can happen in the blink of an eye.

So the things happened really, really fast.

You know, deadlines come really, really fast.

There's a real demand for more and more content, more and more And so the technology continues to revolutionize the business.

And I often tell young journalis or aspiring journalists that I think in that regard you have something of an advanta you're used to dealing with and used to working with te in a way that older folks like myself are not.

And that's going to continue to how we tell stories, how we gath how we produce programs for the foreseeable future.

So are you seeing any new trends in reporting, such as TikTok, virtual reality, podcasts or substack?

Yes, and yes.

There's constantly new things.

And again, this falls into the category of social medi There's a whole new world of inf out there.

There's a whole new way of telling stories.

The God's honest truth is that this is not something that my is my strong suit.

I mean, social media is somethin I'm very, very concerned about because it creat a proliferation of information.

But it also a lot of that inform isn't true.

Correct.

It creates the need for more fact checking, a lot of more verification.

But it also creates more opportu to reach people.

This is where people are.

People are on their phones all d They're not sitting at home at 6:30 in the evening waiting for the news to come on their television.

You know, so many people these d no longer have cable television.

Remember when cable television used to be the big thing.

So the world is constantly chang And I think as journalists, we have to constantly take advantage of these ways to not only gather news, but to distribute news and infor And so, yes, things are constantly chang and I think will continue to cha going into the future.

So lastly, do you have any advic for aspiring journalists?

I think the best advice I would someone is to be as knowledgeable about as many things as you poss To know as much as you can about everything, to be always curious, to always have questions, to be open minded, to travel, see the world, read as much as you can.

You know, it's at another level if you want to be a journalist and you want to get the best of it takes dedication.

It's a very competitive business You have to you have a strong sense of yourself and trust your own instincts.

And because people are going to you're wrong.

People are going to tell you you don't know what you're talki I think you have to at some level, learn to trust an not just trust yourself, but trust your teammates that you're out there working wi And, you know, it's a wonderful and I think imp profession, craft, business to b I highly recommend it.

Its all I could say.

Well, I think that's great advic And your story was amazing.

I think that we can all look at how big the world really is and with the vast amounts of inf out there nowadays, we'd be doing ourselves a disser to not open our minds a little b Well, it was a pleasure having you on the show, Ron.

Thank you.

And I would like to thank you, our viewers, for joining us at h It was great having you here.

Until next time, goodnight.