Graduation: Select the ‘noble side’

Cindy Velasquez

Cindy Velasquez, vice president and general manager of KMGH-Channel 7 in Denver, delivered the graduation speech at the School on Dec. 20.

I am honored to be a participant in your commencement exercises today. I am very excited for all of you and wish you good luck and congratulate you and your friends and family on this very important day. And Lee Hood, wow, what an accomplishment. I’m very proud of you. As I walked into this hall, I realized that I am here with two former co-workers: Lee Hood, who is receiving her doctorate today, and Ed Sardella (longtime news anchor at KUSA-Channel 9 in Denver). Ed Sardella is out in the audience; and that made me very nervous, when I realized I was going to be here talking to former co-workers.

I have to say that when I was putting my remarks together, Ed came to mind. When you try to balance the issues of running a business and understanding the impact that your company has in providing and news and information, that is a difficult balance to strike. And I thought of Ed last night as I was putting these words together because Mr. Sardella was just a challenge at all times. As a communicator, he was the kind of person you were very happy to always have in the newsroom. And when you walk into a newsroom that doesn’t have that kind of presence, it is sorely missed. So I’m honored you’re here, Ed, and you taught me a lot.

I’m not a journalist; I’m a businesswoman. I’ve never produced a news feature or fronted a live stand-up, or written a single newspaper article. I’ve shared an opinion or two. And by the way, I have to say I am somewhat relieved that although this is a gathering of 50 people or more, that the Boulder police is not here in riot gear.

Now, I am a broadcaster, and I am passionate about this business. It has given me an incredible career, and it has been an amazing ride. I have learned so many of life’s lessons in being part of the media. I am delighted to welcome you as you enter the world of the media. If you chose to make your careers in any segment of the media, whether it is as a journalist, a writer, a producer, even a disc jockey, from this day forward, you know that you have joined an industry that often has words like “circus,” “frenzy” or “hype” attached to it. You join an industry that the global audience has a love-hate relationship with. I believe it’s one of the most important industries in the world today in our global economy.

From this day forward, if you chose to make your career in any segment of the media, you will be grouped with the best and the worst the industry has to offer. Expect that. In the consumer’s mind, it can all be the same. I hope, and I’m certain that each of you, coming from this esteemed school, would choose to contribute to the more noble side of our industry because I strongly believe that you can make a difference as long as you hold true to some very basic values.

Some of the values that are most important to me took me years and years to appreciate and far too many tough lessons to learn. And I’d like to share them. Dean Brinkman talked today about the year 2001, Sept. 11, and how it has impacted us this year, how it will impact your lives forever. First and always, you must understand and appreciate and fight to protect the freedom of speech in the press that is guaranteed by our Constitution. That’s not something that I had much of an appreciation for when I joined the industry back in 1978. I was an account executive, and I didn’t understand that. I was out to make a buck, and there were a lot of dollars to be made. It was a lucrative industry, growing in double digits. As a matter of fact, Charlie Leasure and Al Flanagan and the likes of those pioneer broadcasters were making so much money that they didn’t even write budgets. How different the industry is today. But it took me a long time in those days to appreciate what freedom of speech and what freedom of press actually meant and how valuable it was not only to our business but to our lives.

It was 12 years into my career when I had the opportunity with my daughter to travel to Tbilisi, Georgia, which was a Soviet (state). And initially we thought, “What an adventure; we get to go spend nearly a month to understand what life is like in a Soviet country.” And I took my daughter, who was 9 years old, and off we went with this filmmaking crew to document life in this city. Tbilisi is the size of Denver, about the same size in terms of the number of inhabitants, but it was so negatively impacted by decades of Communist rule that there wasn’t a single hotel in the city.

We ended up staying with a an extended family of five that had a flat with two bedrooms, and my daughter and I were given one. And very quickly we realized that this adventure of experiencing Soviet life turned into counting not the days until we returned home but the hours. It became a struggle just to survive there, and amazingly enough, being American citizens, we had taken money with us to spend in this country, and we returned with all of it because there was nothing to spend it on. There were no stores, there were no shopping centers, there were no restaurants. We came back to Chicago with every cent that we went into Tbilisi with. So on to my big revelation while I was there. Not only was there little to buy, there were no diversions. No television, no movies, no radio.

After about three weeks there, the family we were staying with offered to take us to a resort city, and we were very relieved to get out of Tbilisi. We drove for hours on bad roads that were poorly lighted. There was a lot of vodka. I didn’t quite understand that there weren’t good transportation systems, but there was always a lot of vodka. And we drove over these mountainous roads at night, with no protection at all on the sides of these roads.

And we get to this resort city, and somehow we naively thought it was going to be like a resort city in the United States, but it wasn’t. There were three towers, multilevel buildings, and we were very excited, thinking, “Oh, yes, some comforts of home!” But there were no elevators, and when we got into our room, there was no running water. There were two cots, a modest desk in between them and a radio. We hadn’t heard a radio for the three weeks we’d been there, and we were so excited by the sight of that radio that we really dropped everything else, went to the radio and turned it on. But we plugged it in and found that the electricity was off. Later, when it came back on, and we had some light, we turned the radio on and we realized that it had no tuner. We thought, “This is odd; how do you have a radio with no tuner?” Well you have a radio with no tuner because you have only one frequency, and you have one frequency because there is only one signal, and that signal was controlled by the Soviet government.

So here I was, this hotshot account executive thinking that my goal was to make a lot of money selling advertising in Denver media. And I came back in 1989 with a renewed understanding of the constitutional freedom of the press that allowed my industry to thrive. It had a great impact on me, and it does still today.

It changed me: I was a person who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. We had a black and white television. We watched the first color telecast with the entire neighborhood, when Batman was on in color. And TV was something that I had taken for granted; I don’t take it for granted any longer. You never, ever should forget the value of that freedom. And you should never forget that it is useless unless you put it to work for someone.

Which brings me to my second point, and I don’t mean to lecture, but it is not about you. Never forget that. It’s about your reader, your listener, your viewer. It’s important that you understand their lives, their need for information and how you can serve them. Understand that your written word, your spoken word must have value to their lives. If it has no value to their lives, that remote, that car button, that turn of the page will quickly turn a deaf ear to your message.

On this point, I also have to mention the Poynter Institute, an institute for professional journalism studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was about six years ago that I was invited to go to the Poynter Institute with our news director and stay for a weeklong seminar. I went as the station manager, figuring that what they intended to do was get all of us on the business side down there and convince us that our job in life was to find enough money to say “yes” to whatever the news directors wanted, but that wasn’t the case. It was quite an interesting seminar, and I was very excited because I saw that Dan Rather was on the agenda for lunch the next day. And I called my husband and said, “I get to have lunch tomorrow with Dan Rather!” I had been in the business for probably 15 years at the time, but I was still very excited about meeting Mr. Rather.

He was an honorable man, and we were able to ask lots of questions about his profession and the network and how they approached serving their communities. He was there with his producers and a couple of his writers, and I asked them how they could possibly understand the audience when it was nationwide, when we in Denver struggled to know what the audience was in just one community. And I was astonished to find out that they didn’t have an answer, that they didn’t know anything about any of the audience. This is not an affront to Mr. Rather, but it was really more about the network, and about them, and about what they wanted to say, about what they chose to be conveyed in their message. And I came back from that experience with more resolve than ever and more determination to understand that it really is about the audience, and we’re not relevant at all; we don’t understand the lives of the people that we serve.

Finally, I have a third point; it’s very simple. It is amazing the kinds of power that you have when you work for a newspaper or when you work at a broadcast property or when you produce and write for the Internet, and I don’t mean personal power. Don’t let that go to your head. What I mean is that you can turn up the volume tremendously to the message that you choose to write or speak about. You have an amazing megaphone, if you will, at your mouth and at your pen, and if you don’t chose to use that to improve the communities that you serve, you will miss a great deal of satisfaction from working in this industry.

When we survey the Denver market, we are told by families in Colorado that they feel like they are up against the impossible a large bureaucracy, a large government, and that the common people have no one to speak for them, that nobody listens to them, that they can’t get through the red tape. And doing something as simple as having a call center in a TV station that manages 300 and 400 calls a week can use the power of that broadcast signal to answer the problems in people’s lives.

A couple of stories: We had a gentleman call our Call 7 for Help line two weeks ago. A cable company had installed his cable service. The installer had left cables exposed in his yard for three years. He kept a log of repeated calls to the company. Then he called us in frustration and said, “They won’t come out here. There are kids in the neighborhood and there is exposed cable, and I’m very concerned about it.” With one phone call, from a volunteer who didn’t even work at the station but was able to say “I represent CALL 7 FOR HELP,” within two hours the cable was removed from that man’s yard. Unfortunately, his voice alone didn’t speak loudly enough to his provider, but the voice of the media did.

And again, I recognize that not all is great in this industry because we are grouped with the likes of those that I described earlier. But you should remember that you have the opportunity and the ability to impact lives, that it is not about you, it’s about the people you serve. And to use that megaphone and that volume control to do something good, it will be the most amazing career that you could have ever chosen.

Relish the freedom of the press; protect it always. Make your work be about the people you serve. Understand that you speak with a very strong voice and that you can impact communities and change lives.

Always control your careers; never compromise your values. And may you have the good fortune to work with professionals like I have, some of whom are sitting here.

Good luck to all of you.