More than two decades, nine newsrooms.

A top-15 market, a 100+ employee operation, and one of the busiest hurricane and breaking-news markets in the country. I was assistant news director.

As assistant news director in a top-15 market, I helped lead a 100+ employee newsroom through hurricanes, breaking news and a shift toward impact-first reporting. I recruited and onboarded more than 30 employees, oversaw the weather department and helped launch its hyper-local brand, and directed the staffing, workflows and daily execution behind CBS News Miami’s 24-hour stream, launched January 24, 2022. I also created Headliners, a streaming-native weekly review launched in two weeks.

For the Surfside anniversary we built a full week of coverage plus 24 hours of stories from across the year, and gave an entire weekend of the stream over to it.

Executive producer of Today in the Bay, the flagship weekday newscast in one of NBC’s most competitive local newsrooms. Nearly six years on the West Coast: California culture and politics, the dynamics from the interior to the coasts, the immigration story, the quakes, and the microclimates where a forecast changes over a single ridgeline.

As executive producer of Today in the Bay, I led NBC Bay Area’s flagship weekday newscast and its team through nearly six years of California politics, wildfires, floods, quakes and microclimates. I set the editorial plan, coordinated field and studio coverage and made complex emergency information usable—from destructive fire seasons to the morning the Bay Area sky turned orange.

I covered it, and I lived it

I treat weather as service journalism, not filler. I have directed coverage of Florida hurricanes and tropical storms, California atmospheric rivers and floods, Northern California firestorms and Bay Area microclimates. In Miami I oversaw the weather department and helped launch a hyper-local South Florida weather brand built around disruptive, high-impact conditions.

I love weather coverage, and I think most newsrooms undersell it. It is the one story that reaches every single person in a market on the same day. The commute, the power bill, the roof, the kid’s game, the evacuation order.

I have run coverage of hurricanes and tropical storms in Florida, California’s atmospheric rivers and flood events, devastating firestorms across Northern California, and Bay Area microclimates where the forecast changes over a single ridgeline. In Miami I oversaw the weather department and helped launch a new hyper-local weather brand for South Florida.

Done right it is not a segment. It is service journalism with the largest possible audience.

I went from WOOD TV8 intern to producer, executive producer and assistant news director, learning every newsroom job before running one. I directed the multi-day coverage of President Gerald R. Ford’s death, funeral and homecoming, then was loaned to programming to conceive and launch eightWest—the format, segments, commercial structure, marketing and early social presence.

Intern, producer, executive producer, assistant news director. I learned every job in the newsroom before I ever ran one. West Michigan is home, and Grand Rapids is where my career began. A WOOD internship became a full-time job before graduation. I worked overnights, drove eighty miles back to school, and eventually moved from producer to assistant news director before joining WISH-TV in Indianapolis.

These were the people I grew up watching on West Michigan television. Not long after, in my twenties, I was their boss. Leading anchors and reporters with decades of experience on me was the hardest thing I had done to that point, and it taught me how I still lead: lean on the people who know more than you do, and listen. Be humble, stay willing to learn, and let the experience in the room make the work better.

The marquee assignment · a president comes home

Gerald R. Ford was Grand Rapids’ own. I directed coverage of his death, his funeral and his homecoming. Days of continuous, nationally-attended coverage in the city that raised him, with the whole newsroom deployed across the state and Washington.

It taught me what sustained coverage really costs: not one big day, but a plan that survives the fifth day, the crew rotation, the live window nobody scheduled, and the moment the story stops being national and becomes local grief.

The eightWest case study →

Decide what matters, get the right people to it, make sure the audience can find it.