Leadership, Media, and Why Engagement Matters More Than Ever

“Engagement is the metric of whether people actually care.”

Join me as I sit down with Simone Aponte, VP News Director at KTVU, who has spent her career inside newsrooms - from writing scripts at 3:00 AM to leading teams shaping how communities receive and understand information.

Simone has seen the media landscape shift in real time - not just in how news is produced, but in how trust is built, how teams are led, and how impact is measured.

In this conversation, we explore what it actually looks like to lead inside a newsroom - the shift from doing the work to building systems, developing people, and thinking long-term in an environment that runs on constant deadlines.

We talk about the tension between speed and thoughtfulness in news, why engagement matters more than reach, and how the way people consume information is fundamentally changing.

We also talk about AI in journalism, the realities of leading through constant change, and what it means to leave something better than you found it.

This is a thoughtful, grounded conversation about leadership, journalism, and the responsibility that comes with shaping how people understand the world around them.

You’ll Learn

⭐ Why engagement matters more than views or reach
⭐ What it actually looks like to lead inside a newsroom
⭐ The shift from doing the work to leading people and systems
⭐ Why local news still matters for strong, informed communities
⭐ How Simone’s definition of success has evolved over time
⭐ What it means to build trust with audiences today

Key Insights

Engagement Reflects Real Impact
It’s not about how many people see something - it’s about whether it resonates enough for people to respond, share, and care.

Leadership Requires Letting Go of the Work
Moving into leadership means stepping out of execution and focusing on people, systems, and long-term outcomes.

Speed and Thoughtfulness Are in Constant Tension
Newsrooms operate in real time, but meaningful storytelling requires context, nuance, and editorial judgment.

Trust Is Built Over Time
In a fragmented media landscape, trust isn’t assumed - it’s earned through consistency, clarity, and credibility.

AI Is Changing the Work — Not Replacing It
Technology can support efficiency, but human judgment and storytelling remain essential.

Timestamps

[00:00:00] – Introduction: Simone’s path into journalism
 [00:03:00] – Early career and first newsroom experiences
 [00:07:00] – The reality of working in broadcast news
 [00:12:00] – Transitioning from producer to leader
 [00:16:00] – Thinking long-term in a deadline-driven environment
 [00:20:00] – Building a live streaming model during COVID
 [00:24:00] – Engagement vs reach in modern media
 [00:28:00] – Rebuilding trust with audiences
 [00:33:00] – AI in journalism: tool vs risk
 [00:40:00] – Redefining success over time
 [00:45:00] – Early work experiences and leadership lessons
 [00:50:00] – Legacy and leaving things better than you found them

Resources and Links

Connect with Simone on LinkedIn

Find host Kristin Belden on LinkedIn or at BeldenStrategies.com

Sign up for Kristin’s newsletter for more stories, insights, and tools for women leaders: BeldenStrategies.com/newsletter

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hi friends, welcome back to Kind of a Big Deal. I'm your host, Kristen Beldon, and I'm so excited to be here with you. What does it mean to lead something that shapes how people understand the world? That's the question sitting underneath this conversation with Simone, VP News Director at KTVU in the Bay Area. She spent her entire career inside newsrooms, from writing scripts at 3 a.m. to now leading teams, shaping coverage, and thinking about the long-term future of journalism. We talk about the tension between speed and thoughtfulness, why local news still matters more than ever, and how she thinks about legacy. Not as something distant, but as something she's building in real time by leaving her newsroom better than she found it. If you care about leadership, storytelling, or the future of media, this one's worth your time. Hi Simone. Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited. I was doing a little reflecting before we jumped in and how I was going to introduce you. And I've been sharing a lot how some of my favorite new relationships or connections are because of other amazing women that I know. And the fact that a dear friend of ours thought to connect us just brings me so much joy. Simone was introduced to me through a wonderful human who will also be on the show at some point. But as soon as Simone and I started chatting, I decided I was gonna have to steal her, which I already told our friend.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Our awesome friend. She's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Oh, she's so great. So Simone has built her career in the media and journalism space. And she is now the VP news director for KTVU2 in the Bay Area. And having spent many years in the journalism space myself, it's always just a real treat for me to sit down with someone who is leading in these spaces, someone that is making a really large impact, who cares deeply about the future of the industry and the folks that are coming up into the industry. So I'm just really excited to hear kind of how you got to the place that you're at. Um, so I think let's start there. Like how early on in your life did you know that you wanted to be a journalist?

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Um, I think I always knew. And the story that always comes back when I talk about this is that I think I knew when I was 11. And the reason I know specifically 11 is because it was a presidential year and I grew up right outside Washington, DC. And for a school project, I was cutting clips out of the Washington Post, you know, about the campaign and developments and appearances by the candidates. And I was typing on my little typewriter uh my analysis and my summaries, basically a story summarizing what happened, what did the candidates say, why should people care? What was this newest development? And I cut out my little clips and typed on my little typewriter and put it all into a binder, and I had like my campaign binder that my dad held onto for 30 years. Oh he gave it to me a couple of years ago. He had come out to the Bay Area and I won an Emmy and he came to the awards ceremony and thought it was so cool, and he gave me my binder back.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

Uh oh my god, he's all this is yours.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Right to the parent. Like, I'm gonna hold on to your report card for from elementary school for a thousand years, and he still had it, and I was just like, oh my god, it was great. So I know it was when I was 11, and um I don't I think that's just kind of like where it all started.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

That's incredible. I feel like that's actually the kind of thing you want your parent to hold on to. Like I have shit that I'm like, what on earth? Like what it what an interesting thing. And I'm sure I'm doing the same thing for my kids. Like, I am not one to hold on to too many things, but guaranteed the things that I am holding on to, they're gonna be like, what would you like? What is this?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah. No, they can have plenty of other stuff that I don't care about, but that was actually really happy to see again.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

It was kind of that's incredible. Do you still have it?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Like, do you still Yeah, I have it at home somewhere. I have a set, I'm sure I have like my high school yearbook and a couple other things and that finds it. I still keep it.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

I also love that you just on the cash dropped when you won an Emmy. So we're gonna come back to that because we're wanna hear more about that. But so did you do the typical do yearbook in high school? Were you into that world all growing up, or was this like a flash dream? And then by the time you got to college, like what did that part of your journey look like?

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Um, I was a really unusual kid. I was lucky enough to grow up in a county that had magnet programs, and one in particular was focused on communication arts. It was called the communication arts program, and it was focused on shooting video. I was on the school newspaper, we had a high school television studio, you know, really basic things. We had to take video editing classes, and so as being part of this program, I didn't have to take, you know, like super advanced math senior year, but I did have to take photojournalism. There were some kids that went along more of like a newspaper track, and some kids that wanted to do photojournalism, and then another group that was really more into video editing, television, and so I really got to get my hands dirty into all these different things. And these programs, there's a feeder program in middle school, so I started in seventh grade, and then that middle school program fed into high school, and all through high school I went through these kind of classes. So we were I had a radio class in seventh grade where we got to watch how radio works, and we were editing eight millimeter film in eighth grade and taking journalism classes and photography classes and developing our own film, and so I think I was sort of always on this path because I started along this journey with a bunch of um, you know, journalism and media and production classes that I just really loved and I was really into, and I was around a bunch of other kids who were really into it, and so when I went to college, I knew I wanted to do broadcasting around.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

That's incredible. So when you went into school and you knew this was your path, when you first started dipping your toes like into the actual career waters and you knew you were gonna be in broadcast, what were those early years like for you? Were you surprised by anything? Was it exactly what you had kind of expected it to be? What was the energy like when you were first starting out?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Oh gosh. Um, it was nothing like I expected it to be. Didn't, you know, I had done internships and I had been in a variety of newsrooms. I had an internship at the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had kind of seen different variations on production, but TV news was a different beast. And my first, my first real full-time job was in San Diego at an independent TV station, not a network affiliate. And my first job was writing for the morning show and coming in at 3 a.m. and writing scripts for the morning show and you know, everything that goes along with copy editing and watching video and trying to parse information either at a wire copy or from notes from the assignment desk. And just it was intense and super fast-paced, and it was this hours-long morning show that was just jam-packed full of stories. And I remember that job. I did that job for quite a long time. There wasn't even time to breathe. I remember it was hard to get a bathroom break. And it was just the culture, and it was like normal, and you live this crazy life, and you have breakfast in the middle of the night, and you go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. And I I think like intellectually knew that that was happening. I'm like, someone has to get up and produce these things, but I'm living it. Really living it was really different. And I mean, for a long time I really loved it. It like the stress of that schedule was much easier to tolerate in my 20s.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

But yeah, I think just like the intensity, the hierarchy of the newsroom, of anchors who were more seasoned, who had been there for a long time. And I was a really young writer in an entry-level job, and sort of learning like what do each of these positions do? And who are the authorities in this newsroom and who is there to learn from? And what are these sort of like bad habits I need to avoid? And all of those sort of um those growing pains. It was all new, it was all really different.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah, I can imagine. I when I wound up, I did not study journalism. So when I entered that space, you know, I had really had no clue. And it wasn't broadcast, right? We were a nonprofit, but local newsroom, and I was like, oh, this is a whole other world, right? The pace and the needing to stay on top of everything was not something I was ever exposed to. So, but it's also really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Like I was right, like I mean, as an intern, you're usually working a pretty reasonable shift till you have schoolwork and things like that. But then I did get to experience in those internships the buzz of breaking news and all hands on deck and everybody running around and all of this exciting stuff happening, and being a part of that in the morning show and being able to produce those sort of things or see or pitching an idea and then having it come to fruition was really exciting and really helped confirm for me, like, oh, this is where I want to be.

SPEAKER_02 10:04

Yeah, yeah. What of those years, when you think about your experience and now being a leader in the newsroom, um, like what of those lessons do you still kind of hold as you are now the one leading a team? What from that experience have you either um how is it just like informed, I guess, how you show up as a leader today?

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Um, in a lot of ways, honestly. That's a complex question. Um You can give me one one thing. That job was great in so many ways because it was under-resourced at a small independent station that it was production boot camp. Like you did everything. You learn how to run a prompter, you learn how to write, you learn how to stack a rundown, you learn how to deal with guests, you learn how to do Chiron, you're learning everything. And so I do think that that is sort of a superpower of mine now is having that experience of trying a lot of different roles. And um my philosophy throughout my career has been that you can never have too many skills, and it's important to learn the job of the people that I am in charge of because um I need to be able to understand what is reasonable and what a a good goal is or how something works, or be able to brainstorm a workaround. Um, and having the experience of doing a lot of different roles, and I know how to edit, and I know how to shoot, and I know how to run the teleprompter, and I know how to make a chiron, and I wanted to continue to educate myself throughout my career and keep learning. And I do keep trying to learn new skills as new technology comes out because I think it's so important to understand there is no easy job in the newsroom. There is zero easy jobs there, and really understanding what the challenges are day to day helps me remove the roadblocks from the people who are trying to do the work every single day in the trenches. And that is my job is to make it easier for them to do their jobs.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. With that transition, was there anything that you felt um it's always funny when I ask certain questions, it's because of my own experience. Like when I went from being the doer and the executor to being, you know, quote unquote leader. Every everyone is leading in their own way, but the way we think about the hierarchy of some spaces, right? You are now leading entire news operations and not, you know, focused specifically on writing a great piece of journalism, right? So to go from being a great journalist to leading these entire operational systems, was there anything that you had to unlearn from like your own practice of doing the work in order to be able to think more expansively? I mean, it sounds like you were already kind of thinking in those ways, even as a producer and a journalist, but anything stuck out for you?

SPEAKER_00 13:05

I still am, honestly, because it's hard to not be the one doing the work because I think the work is fun. Yes, exactly. Yes. Like, oh, learning this new skill and cutting this video or making this fun thing. I was like, this is fun, and it's hard. I have to constantly remind myself, like, I need to be the strategic person. I need to have hands off and be looking at, you know, from the 10,000-foot view and not have my hands in everything, and then also be thinking of who is training to be the next person in my position and their position and the position after that, and thinking of the newsroom as a whole organism and making sure that it's healthy in that way, that everyone has the skills and the tools that they need, and that I can't do everything, even if I want to, because it's fun, but also making sure you know that I'm passing on that information to the people around me. And it's hard because I like investigating and I like making graphics and cutting video and that kind of thing. It's fun. So it is hard to remind myself, like, okay, I need to step back. And I think it was hard to move into management in that way, and it is a muscle I'm constantly having to practice um exercising.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Yes, I mean, I think especially when you care about the craft, to your point, right? When you care so deeply about the work itself, it's not easy to not want to be the one doing the work. And I remember when I moved into a different position, I had a great manager at the time, and she's like, You have no idea how different your days and your weeks are gonna look. And she's like, I just want to prepare you for you love to like get shit done and you love to do the thing. And she's like, it is a different level of doing, where there's probably gonna be weeks where you look back and you're like, What the hell did I even do? But you worked your ass off because you were the one removing the barriers and making sure the team was fed and making sure that everybody felt good and safe, and all the things that are not always as easy to point to, and they never are things that are done. They are things that are constant. Like you can't, you're not like, Well, I did the project, like boop, there we go, ship it out. It's like there's it's never ending.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

There's always another goal, there's always another project, it's constantly evolving. Um, timelines, getting like, you know, being in TV news, everything is like there is a deadline constantly, and being able to look at a huge project or a big goal to shift an entire newsroom in a different direction. I'm just like, oh, we're thinking in like years now, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not well, I guess I guess oh, I have a couple hours to get this thing done. And now I'm like maybe in 18 months, and so shifting that thinking, I think, was also like jarring.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

That is so interesting. I did not think of it in that way, but of course, how much what an additional layer of having to shift your mindset from when you are constantly on and having to think about the next minute versus having to think over the course of two years. That had to have been a wild, a wild shift to make.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Um, I'm still making it like with my management team too. There'll be times where I'm like, okay, I wanted the managers to think about XYZ and we can come back together and have some ideas for whatever. And many of them are like, great, immediately. Go, go, go, go, go. They've made their list, they have it to me in 10 minutes. And I'm just like, no, this is supposed to be more of like a week-long exercise, but they are working on a deadline, and they're just like, I'm gonna get this thing done now. And so they're straddling both worlds, right? And that kind of thinking and that kind of juxtaposition comes up a lot where I'm like, no, no, no, no, we're gonna be now.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

You know, we're not used to being told take a beat or take a minute to actually give some thought in general, right? Let alone when you're in breaking news. I read something about um you leading a national streaming product during COVID. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about that, what it was like to be leading something. I I don't want to put I don't want to put any assumptions out there. I imagine though that that was an intense thing to have to navigate as you're also navigating the news itself. Like, can you talk a little bit about what that looked like?

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Sure. Um, that was a crazy time. God, it was all a blur. Fox Television wanted to experiment during the early, early days of the pandemic with having a streaming channel where we would basically be taking any kind of news, press conferences, um, reporter live shots from all of the Fox ONOs from all 16 stations that had to do with COVID at the time. Because there was like, if you if we can remember back to those days, it was like there was a press conference in LA, and then the mayor in New York had something to say. A new case would pop up somewhere else, and there would be a health department talking, and there was just a flood of information constantly that everybody was interested in and wanted to get raw right now, just show me what's happening. And my news director at the time volunteered our station to leave this for Fox and said, like, okay, our control room will take the lead on coordinating all of these stations and getting a live shot from Detroit and then getting the signal of a press conference from New York and getting something else from LA. And so we start, I want to say we started out with two hours and it grew a little bit. And I was an EP at the time working with a producer, and we would get up early in the morning and call the East Coast stations and had, you know, emails and communications and phone calls with all of these affiliates trying to figure out like what's going on in your market today, what is happening, what should we take? Okay, what time is that press conference? And this producer was building a rough rundown, and we were just bouncing around from place to place streaming, and this was after our morning news ended on the West Coast. We called it coronavirus now. And we were streaming this, it was on YouTube, and we were just bringing people just like the raw information, and it was now in retrospect looking back, Fox Television's sort of dipping their toe into live streaming news. What that eventually ended up leading to is what Fox has as their 24-hour streaming channel right now, which is live now. Um a model of Live Now is if it's happening anywhere in the country, if it's news, if it's live, we're gonna bring it to you. So I know that live now is always on. And if something breaks, they will have it, they will have the full press conference, they're not talking over it. I can just see what is happening in the moment. And that was really kind of the beginning of that model was testing that with the coronavirus now channel. And it really was very forward-thinking at the time, just to be like, just bring people what is happening in this moment and stream it, and people can get it on their phone and they can watch it on YouTube, and folks will be able to get the information themselves, the most up-to-date data and the most up-to-date announcements as they were coming. And we started it while we were in the station, and then we went home. And so we were working from home. I remember I was working out of our second bedroom, just like up early in the morning, like on the phone with her, on Zoom, on Slack, trying to make it happen. And she was producing that's incredible these things, and it I remember it being like just a freight train every single morning.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Yes, I was just gonna, I can't imagine the pressure cooker of first of all doing something new during a time when we're all already off of our like foundational setting and trying to jump in. And sometimes that's when innovation happens, right? Is when we're pushed into these spaces where it's we have to move and can't overthink it, and you just go. Are you seeing I'm curious because I I wasn't aware of that at the time. Is there also commentary on top of the like live streaming of the thing, or is it just straight up this is raw footage of whatever is happening in that?

SPEAKER_00 21:32

This is raw footage of whatever is happening.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

So when we talk to the managers who are running live now, they say that like some of the feedback that they get from the audience the most is stop talking, like stop over the thing. Just let me hear what the person has to say. Just let me see the event, let me hear the press conference. I just want to filter it myself. I don't want all of the commentary and the curation.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

I'm so curious. About your own kind of perspective on the state of news in general. But I think, yeah, folks do, I think, at some point feel a little bit overspoken to or overtaught. It's like I can think for myself, I just need to have access to the information. I don't need the talking head constantly to tell me how to think about the thing. And it's really hard when you look at most mainstream media channels. There is some typical lens in which they're sharing the information. And so you have to know that as you're consuming whatever's being shared. So, I mean, what a really cool part of your legacy. I I'm I'm speaking into your legacy before you speak into it because I'm gonna be asking you about it later.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

But like the whole period was a blur, and that whole experiment with coronavirus now was is like sometimes I forget about it because I feel like I sent like a freight train. We were trying something, and we were really the center of all these folks that were contributing. And now looking back, I'm like, oh, that is the model. That is the model that leads to what a lot of these networks are doing now, which is just live streaming of whatever is happening in the moment. And that's the direction in which news is moving. Um, so now with the 2020 hindsight, I can see how transformational that was for um for a group of television stations to be able to pull their resources and do that. And I do think that it shapes a lot of what the future of news is gonna look like.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

That's so cool. It's really cool to think about when you because we can't know these things when they're happening in real time. We won't be able to understand it until we're able to look back at it. When you and I chatted before this recording, you said something that really stood out to me as you are thinking about um state of the media and then how that translates to the skills you would tell young journalists to focus on as they're building their careers, and it was engagement as currency. And I said, okay, we're making a t-shirt out of that because that is a brilliant statement. Because I think it, yes, it applies to media and journalism, but it applies to so many industries and so many aspects of our lives and our careers. So maybe say a little bit more about your own perspective on that.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

I think what I've really learned recently in thinking about engagement and viewership and in the state of our industry, you know, we've spent all of this time, especially in TV news, caring about ratings and how many people are watching and how many eyeballs can you get. And eyeballs are no longer currency. Attention is no longer currency. That's not what matters. What matters is no longer the volume of how many views you can get or how big your audience is. It's really about the quality. And the quality of who is in that audience and how they are engaging with you gives you the proof that what you are doing matters to them, that they care. The engagement is the metric of how much the audience actually cares about what they are consuming. Because you can have a million views on a video, on a social media video, but if nobody is sharing it or commenting on it or making it part of their conversation, you don't know if they saw that video for one second, if they actually absorbed any of it, if it's actually having any kind of impact. The engagement is what actually is a measure of impact. And I put much more weight and much more priority in um in the way that we report and the way that we present information on engagement and actually having a conversation with the viewer, um reader, rather than just here's a raw number of the number of eyeballs that we got. That doesn't matter if people only read a story, one sentence in a story, or scanned a headline, or watch two seconds of a video.

SPEAKER_02 26:05

Right, right. Well, and I think there's a constant conversation about how news organizations build trust and rebuild trust, honestly, right, with new audiences or with audiences that have become maybe disillusioned and are looking for something different from journalism right now and want to have that built-in layer of relationship, frankly, right, with the person that's giving them the information. So, where are you seeing that really shift in your own newsroom, or where are you seeing highlights of where that's working?

SPEAKER_00 26:42

I think a really good example we have recently is KTBU and Fox 11, our sister station in LA. We just hosted a California gubernatorial debate with the top seven candidates. And a big part of that campaign was soliciting viewers for their questions, having the audience participate, um, having an interactive sort of relationship because, you know, we can uh talk all day about what we think is important and what questions we ask and it should be asked and what we think people want to hear. And it's really important to open the door and actually listen meaningfully to the communities that we serve about what they care about and the topics that they want to ask their potential future political leaders and to make that an active part of how we report and the direction and the angle that we're taking with um stories or questions or interviews, you know, or a debate. And it's not every story that those opportunities come up, but we try to create those as much as possible to actually read comments on social media posts and respond to emails and participate in community town halls and be present and to actually listen to the people that we are trying to engage with who we're trying to provide information to about what they want and what they are interested in hearing and the questions they want to ask.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I hope it continues to be part of the way newsrooms are thinking about building that trust, because I think it really is, it can feel so abstract. Say you're a young person, right, growing up now, and media literacy or critical things, these things are not always taught in schools. And if you're not in a family where media consumption is even part of the daily life, it's to then expect, as we are young adults or adults, to give a shit about their local, you know, news organization, it's tricky, right? Because people don't have a relationship with it. And so to humanize it and to have somebody behind the writing and behind the story that can actually draw people into the conversation, I think is so important. I continue to be hell-bent on like get to the young people. How do we get to the young people? Because that's where it's gonna matter, right? We have to get to people before we all of a sudden say you have to care because this is the community that you're in, so you should care. Of course, that would be remiss if I didn't ask a bit about AI and kind of I think there's so many different philosophies of what AI can mean for journalism good, bad, indifferent, whatever. So maybe let's start with what excites you most first about how AI can be utilized in the industry. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Uh I get asked about AI all the time. So this is I know I have to. I have to. I can't not. You have to. Um, usually the question is really it's too broad, right? It's like, what do you think about AI in journalism? Like, well, there's so many different ways to answer that question. I think the first answer is always like AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for a critically thinking human person who um who can make decisions and execute judgment and have ethics and follow standards. To me, it's a tool. And um and I think it's very useful. There are a lot of ways, there are a lot of repetitive tasks and a lot of tedious tasks that we do in a newsroom that could be expedited with AI. We're already using AI in logging video for press conferences. We have a system that will transcribe as video is coming in, and it is just speeding up the work of you know, tediously typing out every word that someone says. And of course, you have to go back to the tape and verify. You have to have a critically thinking brain and go back, and you need the human element. Um, but it is a tool that speeds up how quickly we can get out quotes from a press conference, information from a leader. The governor's having a press conference and he's saying something urgent and important. We can get that out word for word faster by using the tool, but we still need the human judgment of what is important, what is impactful, what do people need to know first. So that's really how I approach it. I think I'm excited about certain AI tools that are going to remove more of those tedious tasks that we have humans doing right now, so that journalists can spend their time um on elements of their job that require critical thinking and judgment and analysis and the things that you can't replace with a person. AI is never gonna show up at a fire and be able to describe what they see and you know never never say never.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Maybe never say never.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Yeah, but be able to do the interview and approach something with compassion in that way. And there's always gonna be a need for news and information in our communities. So I know that there's a lot of fear in our industry around AI right now. Um, and I think rightfully so in a lot of ways, but the way that I approach it is I see it as a tool that we need to learn how to use properly and in what ways to make our jobs easier, more efficient, and actually allow us to do the work.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Yeah, I'm I'm with you a hundred percent on that. I think some of the smaller organizations or some of the nonprofits I've consulted with in the last handful of years, it's like if we can if we can shift our lens on the thing to being something that we can use as being in service of the work we care most about, then that shifts the way we engage with the technology itself. Because if we can consider it in that way and recognize that, oh, that might mean I get to do another piece because I have additional time to go and report on this thing that I cared about, or you know, whatever it is, I think I hope that that can be the way we utilize this technology that can it's it's for any industry, right? Not just for journalism. I think if we're intentional about it and we know what we're using it for, then that can kind of shift the story.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Um yeah, we're not using it to write, to do tasks, to verify, to fact-check, to research. I am highly skeptical of AI. I think a lot of those models have hallucinations, they bring back information, they make up information. I think anyone who's used one of those LLMs has seen it, but it is constantly evolving, and I think we need to learn as we go how to use it properly and what kind of applications are appropriate.

SPEAKER_02 33:45

For sure, for sure. Before we get too much further, um, Emmy keeps coming back in my head and like, okay, we gotta come back to it. And I think part of this is too recognizing that there's so many amazing things that women are doing in the world that we don't get to see every day. And so maybe folks in your industry got to see this win, but can you share a little bit about what that was for and what that experience was like?

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Sure. Um, humble brag. I have 12 MEs. They're back.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

Okay, listen, you could have just stopped me. You could have just stopped me.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Um they are, I have them in my office, and you know, I think humble brag. I no, not a humble brag. This is legit.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

Like, this is the thing. Yes, just say it, name it and claim it.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

So they are in our industry. We have regions where you can submit stories for a variety of categories, and the first Emmy I ever won was for a breaking news story. It was in the breaking news category when I was a producer in San Diego, and I was producing a new newscast in the middle of the day, and there was um in San Diego a military, an FA 18, a military fighter jet, went down in a neighborhood and crashed into a house. And there were multiple people who died, and it happened right at the top of the show, and we could see the fire on one of our traffic cameras, and we got a crew out there, and I had a photographer um who I was friends with at the time who was really like a bold guy, and he got there before first responders did, and he went running into the house to see if anyone needed help or just to see what was going on and to scan to see if he could help anyone. And he had the camera with him and it was rolling as he was running through the house. And we were, you know, flooding the scene. We had neighbors who had helped the fighter pilot who had ejected and then parachuted into a nearby canyon and was climbing up out of the canyon. We were getting live information on the air, you know, phone calls from the police and the fire department, and are there evacuations and what are we learning from the military and what went wrong? And what kind of accountability can we, you know, and explanation can we bring to people in the community? And what kind of safety alerts do people need to know in real time? And I think getting back to what we were talking about about live news information, not curating it, we weren't curating that as we went. Yeah. Naturally, because we were in breaking news. We were just giving people what we knew when we knew it, and we just let them see it. And as we got the information, we were just putting it out in its purest form. And I do think that looking back, that's probably part of why that show that we submitted was deemed Emmy-worthy, not just because it had dramatic flames and video and you know, a lot of drama to the story, but I think also because it was a really well-rounded story in the sense that we weren't just like, look, something's on fire, look, there's been a crash, but also to serve the public and get the information and have some accountability in there of asking tough questions, you know, of military officials when we could get them on the phone and getting the latest information to the viewers and putting it out in a really raw form in that way. And I think we really covered all of our bases in terms of asking a lot of questions that the viewer would need answered. And it was, you know, at breakneck speed during breaking news, and it was live on the air. But I think I think back to that show and that afternoon and that experience, and I do think that it was really formative in terms of how I approach information and news and what's important, and who are we serving, and what are the questions that they would want answers to right now if they lived in that neighborhood. Um and so that is an instance that is really memorable to me, and then it was really exciting, of course, to submit it for an Emmy and to win, you know, um, as a young producer.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

Yeah, I mean, there's there's one reflection that's interesting for me, and what I hear from you is just this like pureness of storytelling and your approach, and it it feels like this kind of through line through a lot of what you've shared and this desire to be of service. I think we can miss that sometimes in journalism, right? It can't be that the angle is more about the the reporter than it is about the person receiving the story, and so I think the fact that you're having that level of impact across the span of your career is really amazing. Um, so that's one reflection to, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how there's only one time for like the first time something happens. The first time you win an Emmy, it's gotta be like, whoa, like by the 12th time, or you're kind of like, okay, like I got another Emmy.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

And then I'm still like I don't enter them anymore.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

That's hilarious. I don't even enter them anymore. I've got plenty. I don't have any more shelf space.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Um, I don't have any more shelf space. Well, I just like I don't have my hands in it, right? And I think sure it's really easy to be like, oh, awards are leaning on us like we're just congratulating ourselves. But I do think there's a lot of pride in the work that the people who work here have and what they do. And there's so much creativity and there's so many good ideas and just like great execution of storytelling and beautiful writing and and things that um should be recognized. And so I'm always glad to see when someone from our station um, you know, wins an award. And I think it's I think it's really cool, and I'm still immensely proud of the ones that I have, even though I'm not getting my hands dirty and doing a lot of the actual reporting and work anymore.

SPEAKER_02 39:50

Yeah, yes, that's amazing. It's good to have something that commemorates the amount of hard work that goes into something, right? It's cool to have something that that will be a marker of that because sometimes we have these big things happen or these big projects and we don't have that memory. And it's like this thing that unless you unearth it really intentionally, it just kind of lives somewhere in the back of your mind forever. When you're thinking back to those early days of your career and knowing that you wanted to be in this space, has your um I used to ask this as how has your definition of success changed over the years? But I've started asking it instead as has your idea of success changed over the years? Because I don't want to assume anything, but has it for you? Like when you think back to when you were young Simone, getting your feet dirty, getting your hands in the muck and excited about going off on this journey that you always knew you wanted to embark upon to Simone of today, who has building a family, building a career, building a life, like has that idea of success changed for you or evolved?

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think when I first started, I think the idea of being like, oh, I could be an executive producer and I could be the one who helps pick what stories we're covering for the day, that was such a lofty goal. And then when I became an EP, I was sort of like, oh, what do I do next? And I wanted to get into investigative journalism. And then for a long time I thought, oh, maybe I want to work for a network, or I want to work for frontline, or I want to do something national or overseas, or do I want to make a documentary? And I think there's value in all of those things, but I do think that something that I learned along the way is one, um, ambition is great, but it is no substitute for just peace and satisfaction. And I also think that the more I watched local journalism dwindle in the communities that I was living in, and small newspapers close, and TV stations get absorbed into other companies, and beat reporters disappear from courts and city council meetings. Um the more I really saw like the value of being where I am and the importance of being where I am and serving the community that I live in. I live in Oakland, my kids go to public school in Oakland. Um, you know, I care about what happens here, and I have the perspective of someone who is also my neighbor who is watching or reading our website and wanting answers to things that are going on in the community and letting go of those ideas that I need to be on some sort of national stage or I need to be a leader in some sort of big production. It was actually pretty easy because when I look around the community and I look around uh the resources and the journalism that's happening in in smaller towns and all over the country, honestly, I really do value local news and news that is produced by the people who live in the communities that they're serving.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Mm-hmm. Yes, I love that. I feel like I'm we could go off on a whole other part two around the absolute gutting of local news and how deeply sad it is. I I'm in Sacramento, and actually a friend of mine I used to consult with the McClatches of the World, so I was working with like Sackby and some others. And a friend of mine from that time, he just launched a nonprofit called Abridged, which is with KVIE, and so they're doing a whole thing around what does it mean to be thinking about community journalism and to get to reimagine what that might look like and to get to be, you know, he's just one. Those humans, too, that's just very deeply ensconced in the community and cares. It's like you have to really care about the community that you're serving. I think people can feel it. They know when it's just journalism for journalism's sake, but when it's coming from an authentic space of no, I want you, neighbor, to know what's happening and here's how it affects you. And hey, here, by the way, here's what happens when you don't have a local journalism outfit in your backyard, the amount of corruption and the amount of blah blah blah, like all the data on what happens to a community when they don't have a local newsroom. I think we can get into all of the philosophy around the importance of journalism for a strong democracy, but we'll do that on another time, because this is more about you. Um I have two more questions for you. One, and go with me here a little bit on this one. This was a um icebreaker question that was asked to me a little while ago, and I thought it was so brilliant because it actually got folks to think a little deeper than your typical kind of um, you know, do you like blue or green? And it was what's something from your past that has shaped who you are as a leader today that wouldn't wind up in your resume or bio?

SPEAKER_00 45:21

Um that one I think is pretty easy, actually. Oh my god, I love you. This is amazing. Um I think uh this speaks to like the values that I grew up with a lot. Something that would not be on my resume, I think, is working in the food industry, waiting tables, washing dishes. My first job in high school, I worked at a bagel bakery in my small town where I had to get up at 3:30 in the morning and open the store at four in the morning, and then would mop floors and wipe down counters and serve customers until seven something when my dad would come pick me up and take me to school, and I snake like an everything bagel.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

Like not super popular. And I really have this philosophy that you can tell when someone has not worked in a service industry.

SPEAKER_02 46:17

100.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

I think that um I was really raised with this idea of you treat the person at the lowest, most entry-level job the same as you would treat the CEO. And um, you know, you never know who is gonna be sitting at the table that you're waiting on. It could be anybody, and you treat everyone with the same amount of respect and dignity and value. And I think, especially in journalism, it is so true, like everybody has a story, and it doesn't matter if you are a CEO or the president, it doesn't matter if you have a minimum wage job or no job or no home, you have a story, and I think and there's value to it, right? There's value in sharing it. Um, so I really think that that experience of working hard and being nice. Like hell yes.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Yes, I'm with you a thousand percent. I both my husband and I spent many years in the food industry, and is some of my best education came from being, you know, going from host at a restaurant to food runner to server, and like what happens when you learn all of the inner workings of the restaurant before you're serving, you know, a table. It's also like very um, that has taught me what it means to exactly what you were saying about what it means to know what the folks that you lead in your newsroom are doing on the day. What do they need to be great at their job because you know what their job entails. It's kind of the same with food service. Like if you know what's going on in the back of the house and you know that the kitchen staff is slammed, the way you show up is just like a totally different experience than if you just show up and think that you're there to just serve the dish of food to somebody, right? It's a whole holistic experience that happens. And we say this to our kids constantly. You will be in some kind of service in your job at some point. I don't care if you want to or not. It is such an important piece, I think, of people's career journeys. I too in high school was working at a cafe where there was the um famous, they had this like dill dip that you got with a baguette, and it was just always that smell. When you said you smelled like an everything bagel, I'm like, I can remember the mopping of the floor, that smell. I can remember the big ass um, you know, like the crazy industrial when you're washing the dishes and the heat and the steam and the I had a dishwashing job and like all of it.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Also taught me that the best bosses in those kind of jobs were not the owner who just came in and saw everyone when they were like super slammed during the rush or whatever, but the people who picked up a mop, right? And I'm gonna pick up a mop and I'm gonna help, or I'm gonna help with dishes, or I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and do whatever it takes, whatever job is needed to help the team achieve what it's gonna achieve. And I think that that is an important lesson as well for positions to be like pick up a mop.

SPEAKER_02 49:28

Yeah, pick up a mop. Okay, yes, I love that. Pick up a mop is gonna be one of your t-shirts, and then engagement is currency is gonna be the other one. Um, okay, last question that I ask every woman that I have the honor of chatting with. And it is around legacy because I think sometimes we think of the term legacy and we think of this big heavy thing that we're leaving behind when we die. And I like to reframe it as this is this light, beautiful thing that we're building in real time as we're alive today. And so, you know, how better than to be intentional about what that legacy is? So, Simone, what does building a legacy mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 50:14

I think um, you know, in terms of my career, I see, you know, I'm the news director, I'm in charge of all these people, but I really see myself as a steward of this office. And whether I am here for two years or 20 years or whatever it is, I see it as my job to help create a culture and systems and infrastructure and relationships in this newsroom to leave it in a better place than when I came in. And I don't think I'm right about everything. I think I need the team, but my job is to steward this newsroom for as long as you know I am of service. And um I don't really have any ego about it. I've I could be working at In N Out tomorrow, and I would also be fine with that. But I think building a legacy to me is leaving something here in this job, a legacy for this position and for this station would be leaving something here that has helped shape it in a better way, right? Whether that is a culture shift or that is some new technology or it's just a different way of doing things, whatever it is that I can help shape to improve this newsroom and improve the way we relate to the community, or the type of stories that we cover, or even just how we engage with the community and how we answer questions and how available we are. I think that that is plenty of legacy, and that's really my goal with this position. It's just like leave it in a better place than when I came in.

SPEAKER_02 52:00

Yeah, that's amazing. And it sounds like that's already happening so uh well on the way. Um, well, I just really appreciate you taking some time. I know the what it takes to take an hour out of a day, especially in the industry that you're in. So I just really appreciate it. And I'm sure so many women are gonna get so many great nuggets from what you've shared. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 52:23

Of course. Happy to. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 52:26

For sure. See you soon. Bye. Thank you so much for listening and spending some of your time with me here. I hope our conversation sparked some new ideas for you. If you enjoyed the episode, please make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if you're ready for even more tools and stories, head on over to beldenstrategies.com slash newsletter. I share fresh insights, stories, and tools for women leaders every week. Until next time, keep building, keep evolving, and remember that you are kind of a big deal.