This is a speech Jill presented to the Northwest Broadcast News Association on March 29, 2003. She is this year's recipient of the NBNA's Charnley Award.

When I started reporting in 1971, I was still in college. I did a "hard-hitting" report for WISC-TV in Madison called "What’s New at the U." My stories were filmed features. I often shot them myself with a trusty Bell and Howell 16-millimeter camera. One of my professors joked that my future children would be born with one arm longer than the other, courtesy of the boulder with a lens that I lugged around the University of Wisconsin campus.

In 1972, I wrote a senior thesis on attitudes toward women in broadcasting. My research found that viewers of that time would rather see a woman reporting from Vietnam than from a football game, and that 25 percent of the students and 14 percent of the adults I surveyed had never seen women reporting news on TV.

Not a single one was femaleMy thesis also cited a 1968 broadcast journalism textbook written by past recipient of the Charnley award, Minnesota professor Irving Fang. The book was illustrated with 39 pictures of broadcast journalists on the job. Not a single one was female.

It took an FCC mandate (back when the FCC made such mandates) to help change the picture. In 1970, the National Organization of Women petitioned the FCC to include women among those covered under equal employment hiring practices by licensees.

The National Association of Broadcasters fought the proposal, claiming "no pattern of discrimination against women in the broadcasting industry has been established" and "that specific programs cannot be drawn up for every religious racial, or national origin subgroup, that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that it should be drawn to exclude women from the filing requirement."

The NAB lost. Women—and journalism—won.

Clearly, my career began in interesting times. From WISC, I joined the WITI-TV newsroom in Milwaukee in 1973. We shot stories on film and edited them with glue. We pounded out scripts on typewriters. We ripped the wires from a row of fat noisy machines that disgorged copy all day, ringing an occasional bell to alert us to an "urgent" that would send us flying from our desks to gather around the breaking news machine.

News releases arrived by snail mail. News cars had two-way radios. Stories that happened after 8:30pm were rarely told visually on the late news, considering the driving, film processing and editing time involved. That’s why the late news looked a lot like the early news on most stations—until those three little words of the 70’s—Electronic News Gathering—changed our lives.

I burst out of the truck in my spiffy bell-bottoms My station was the first in town to acquire a live truck. Station management gave it a name: Live Camera Six. And a face: mine. And a promo, in which I burst out of the truck in my spiffy bell-bottoms to cover the raging flames escaping from the windows of a home... that the fire department was using for a practice burn. (Please don’t tell anyone.)

Every night, I was to go live from some location with a story in the 6pm news. I firmly believe that in that year the productivity of public officials in Milwaukee went up dramatically. They were used to leaving City Hall or the County Courthouse at 4:30pm. Now they had to stick around for those darn live interviews during the Six.

I grew from live reporter to anchor in 1976. Anchoring was different then. No IFBs. No prompters. Imagine. No prompters.

From that experience, I developed a special skill that would prove mostly useless for the rest of my life. I can take a piece of copy, any copy, and even if I’ve never seen it before—I can deliver it by simultaneously reading aloud, reading ahead, processing the story’s context—and looking you straight in the eye to deliver all the key points.

Even when Teleprompters rolled into my field of vision, I’d never allow myself to be fully dependent on them. I always wanted to know I could look you in the eye and deliver. Nearly thirty years would pass before this talent would pay off for me again—and I’ll tell you about that in just a few bit…

Did that sound like a tease? Yes, they’ve been around for ages, too.

It’s a big leap, from 1973 to 2003—so let me fill in a few news developments that emerged in the interim: fax machines, cell phones, digital pagers, helicopter wars, satellite trucks, desktop computers, the internet, 1,850 watt blow-dryers (photographers need them to dry their wet gear, right?), non-linear editing, expanded morning newscasts, expanded afternoon newscasts, expanded weekend newscasts, laptops, mega-super-honest-to-god-this-will-save-your-cowering-family-Doppler-radar, cable news, cable sports, deregulation, ownership changes, network switches, HDTV, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, satellite phones, global positioning systems, and… oh yes… women in newsroom management.

Related Resource

Mixed Results RTNDA/F's research on women and minority representation in newsrooms.

Back in 1978, when my general manager Henry Davis took a chance and named me news director, he was not only making a little history, but starting a trend. RTNDA research says that Mr. Davis’ risk-taking made me the first female news director of a major market network affiliate in the US.

Mr. Davis confided in me that our corporate brass had greeted his decision with 3 words: Are you crazy? Maybe he was.

He asked me: Do you think people will have a problem with the fact that you’re a woman? Yes, I answered, but as long as we agree that it is their problem, not mine, we’ll be okay.

We shared that vision. Not everyone else did.

People would call the station and think I was my secretary. I’d get lots of letters addressed to Mr. Joe Geisler. And at my first RTNDA convention in Las Vegas I know they assumed I was just somebody’s date.

Today, I can look you in the eye and say things are truly different. Next week I’ll be at the RTNDA convention teaching leadership workshops for the men and women who lead our nation’s newsrooms. The last RTNDA research reports that now 26 percent of NDs are women.

We’ve gone from a time when one in four young people hadn’t even seen a woman delivering news to an era when one in four news teams has a lady boss.

But as an industry, we’re still not where we need to be. Certainly journalists of color will confirm that the face of TV news and the people in the chairs at its management desks aren’t as diverse as any of us would want them to be. Minorities and women remain underrepresented in management, and some become discouraged and leave our business as a result. That is a loss to us all.

As managers, as leaders, we have the power to grow great journalists and journalism, to reach, teach and touch citizens. We can come to a newsroom every day, as I did, in love with the idea that through our enterprise and ethical decision-making, we provide a vital service to society.

Our obligation is to serve the public with integrityMake no mistake; no matter what you may hear to the contrary in this shareholder driven world, the primary mission of broadcast journalism is not to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. Our obligation is to serve the public with integrity. Our role is to tell stories that matter and make a difference in a democracy, whether or not they appeal to a key demo. Whether or not they spike a number. We can be successful in the business of news and honorable in the vocation of journalism. Certainly the war we are covering today reminds us of that.

They called Vietnam a living room war because we saw films of it on the early evening news. Iraq is our living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, live 24-hour-a-day war, a time journalists must be at their best.

Tonight, let me put my otherwise useless talent to work one more time to look you straight in the eyes, and ask you to rededicate yourselves to building and maintaining your very useful journalistic talents. Permit me to identify them:

Enterprise: Find the untold stories in your community. The weakness of TV news is that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re good at covering only events, not issues.

Terrorism and anti-Americanism were issues before 9/11.

Iraq was an issue before it became a war. Become a better storyteller about issues; use every brain cell and technological tool to make the complex understandable.

Viewers are hungry for more than we’re giving them.

Too many find local news irrelevant to their daily lives. Enterprise reporting can bring them back to their sets.

Critical thinking: Always ask why, what if, who else, when before, what are we missing, what’s beneath the surface of this story? Broadcast news can be shallow or deep; our commitment to critical thinking makes the difference.

Collaboration: Don’t just work with people; help each other grow. Coach, care, combine your talents. Your managers have asked you to do more with less; so you need each other more than ever. We’ve chosen a vocation that keeps us in the newsroom nearly as much as we are in our homes. Considering that, remember my simple mantra:

Life’s too short to work with jerks.

Leadership: Remember, you can tell the managers by their titles… but you can identify leaders at every level by their influence. Influence is the wonderful byproduct of your expertise, your integrity, and your empathy. Those are talents that will serve you both professionally and personally all your life.

Ethical decision-making: Know why you are making the editorial choices you do, be comfortable explaining them, and hold yourself to the highest standards of professionalism. There’s a vast difference between a TV or radio "personality" and a broadcast journalist. The former needs a look, a sound, and usually a script. The latter—the journalist needs and has—commitment, principles, a process for ethical decision-making and the continuous learning that enables him or her to relate a story admirably—even when there’s no script in sight.

Now it is time to look you in the eye one last time with one simple message. This wonderful Charnley award makes me so very happy. As you go back to your newsrooms with a commitment to enriching and expanding your talents... you will make me so very proud.