Ruby Arora interviews Susan Lisovicz on how journalists can prepare to be on camera and why business journalism is such an important field for all journalists to understand.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Ruby Arora: Welcome to “We Mean Business.” I’m your host, Ruby Arora. This podcast is about something that affects all of us: business. Our culture and society are molded around business and what business leaders want. It impacts our daily lives more than we know. Here at the Reynolds Center we focus on business journalism, and we’re here acting as the liaison connecting business with journalism, allowing journalists to cover business better.
Today, we have Susan Lisovicz with 16 years of on air experience with CNN and CNBC, and will explain how you don’t need a business background to go into business journalism. And then give us some tips for our on-air presence.
Susan Lisovicz: Thanks for having me.
Arora: We’re in a time in a world where we’re getting so digital, you might be on camera and you don’t even know it. And as a journalist, I feel like at some point, if you’re good at what you do, you’re going to be interviewed yourself. So I feel that we need to learn to navigate. And myself as a first-year graduate student, I’m still curious and still navigating, so I kind of need help with that myself. What do you wish you had known about on camera media presence? Please enlighten me.
Lisovicz: So the simplest thing to do is to just simply watch and listen to yourself. Who is your worst critic? It’s you.
Arora: Oh, definitely.
Lisovicz: It’s definitely you. And if you’re true to yourself, you’ll know who you are, so we know what the best me or you is. So look at yourself. So when I would watch myself when I first anchored, and I had never been on TV before. I went into a cold right, because of an opportunity at CNN, I noticed that I had a nervous habit of moving when I was talking, when I was anchoring, to the side of my mouth. That is not normally how I speak, but because there was that whole artificial environment of lights, cameras, sweating, coffee, not screwing up, I was doing this weird idiosyncrasy. So recognize that, then also on less less important, but things that do make a difference are things like colors for yourself, finding a look that is true to you, that’s consistent, easy to maintain, something that can travel from the anchor set into the field so people recognize who you are. Being authentic, I guess, if that’s boil it down to two words: being authentic.
Arora: We I feel like society as a whole has become a cancel culture, a call out culture, a really digital world where if you say one thing, it can be taken out of context, or it’s playing out wrong, and that can derail your entire career path. I guess, how do you navigate that? And if you do make those mistakes, how do you come back from that?
Lisovicz: Well, it’s inevitable you’re going to make a mistake, and we’re only human. I suppose it’s the magnitude of the mistake. I’ve had the opportunity to interview a lot of crisis managers, and one of the things they typically say is: own it right away. Own it, apologize, explain what you should have said, what you may have meant to say, and then try to move on and remember that. Remember that episode, because we typically learn from our mistakes, our setbacks, and not from our victories. So don’t ever get too comfortable wherever you are. If you’re going to drop off your dry cleaning or pick up some yogurt, you’re at a fast food, you’re at a drive through, you’re potentially always on camera and possibly always being recorded. So just remember that, and try to be your best self.
Arora: Having an on camera presence, it’s important to also be personable to the public. But how do you keep a professional demeanor and without diluting your personality?
Lisovicz: That’s tricky. That is really tricky, Ruby. I would just say that you should know your audience, right? So for instance, if you’re on camera for a you’re doing the news, you have a very, very, very wide audience, and so the copy, what you’re saying, will typically reflect that you’re not just speaking to one group, but I would also say you’re on stage. For instance, if you’re speaking to a community group, know that group. Is it a nonprofit? Is it a food bank, or is it to help at risk teens? Know the audience. Know the audience. When I came to teach at Cronkite, I learned about the Cronkite mission, which is posted on a big sign right out of the Cronkite School, the ASU. Which is, we gather our strength from our in, from our inclusivity. We’re not being exclusive. We want to be inclusive. We want everyone to be here and to have a chance at life. So I learned a lot about that and teaching. Yes, of course, I have to remember things like you’re a different demographic than I am. Things like that. Know your audience.
Arora: What do you wish you had known when you first started out reporting in business journalism?
Lisovicz: Where do we start Ruby? Well, first of all, I had only taken one business course while I was…
Arora: Explain that. How do you end up in business journalism and you have one business class?
Lisovicz: Well, that’s how it happens. You know when I got this job at CNBC. If I had fallen flat on my face, it would have been exactly six weeks. But as it turns out, I did alright. I kept my head above water. Yes, I regret it all the time that I that I don’t have a deeper knowledge of economics, that I hadn’t mastered an Excel spreadsheet, that I didn’t know all these esoteric aspects that make the stock market fluctuate as they do. Yes, I have deep regrets about that, but at the time, there were a of my colleagues also kind of fell into it, and there were still people who, not necessarily brought a business journalism track, who, because of an opportunity, took it and succeeded.
Arora: Why is Business Journalism important? Why should people go into it?
Lisovicz: It’s vital. It matters to all of us. Money is a factor in our lives. It’s a factor is whether you’re going to go to college because you’re paying for it, or whether you’re going to have student debt that’s going to be a monkey on your back for a couple of decades. It matters because of health care prices. Do you have health care? Can you afford the prescriptions that really have gone up astronomically? It matters because how do you get to work? Do you ride a bike? Do you walk? Do you take mass transit? Do you have a car that is paying a lot for a gallon of gas? It matters because of how we’re paying for our roads. Are we paying for roads? Are we paying for mass transit? It matters in our lives. In every story that we do, money is a factor.
Arora: Thank you, Susan for being our first guest and sharing some tips with us. Thanks to everyone for listening. Make sure you subscribe and join us next time, as we talk about more business topics and what journalists need to know.
[Outro music]
