Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | fall 2005

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START SPREADING THE NEWS:
ISU JOURNALISM ALUMNI ARE MAKING IT BIG IN THE BIG APPLE

Christine Romans: No Business Like Business
The College of Business and Christine (Tobin) Romans didn’t get along too well while she was a student at Iowa State.

“I crashed and burned twice in economics. I think I dropped every business class I took,” said the 1993 journalism graduate and former editor of the Iowa State Daily. “My father told me to stay with it, but I kept thinking, ‘I don’t have to know this.’”

Sometimes fathers know best.

Shortly after graduating from Iowa State, Romans may have wished she would have stuck with macro and microeconomics.

Romans was quickly forced to learn about the stock market, gross domestic products, and the prime rate as a reporter with Knight-Ridder Financial News in
Chicago.

Now a correspondent for CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Romans is frequently called upon to report a variety of financial news – everything from the trend of U.S. jobs moving overseas to CEO compensation and conflicts of interest in company boards to the growth of electronic trading.

Romans joined CNN Business News in 1999 after stints with the Des Moines Register, Reuters, and Knight-Ridder. During her tenure with CNN, she has served as an anchor for CNNfn’s “Street Sweep,” reporting daily from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

There she tracked the market’s boom through the late ’90s and the downfall after Sept. 11. Along the way, she interviewed hundreds of guests on-air, from
the mundane to the famous – like rock star Jon Bon Jovi and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“I like telling a story,” Romans said. “I’ve learned so much [about the business world] that I can tell a good business story.

“Some people want to be a television reporter,” she said. “I want to not only tell the story, but also find the story. That’s what a good reporter does.”

Still based in New York City, Romans frequently commutes to CNN headquarters in Atlanta where she anchors the weekend news and gives 3 1/2-minute
news updates every half hour.

“Getting a package together to go on the air is much harder than writing,” she says. “You can film several hours for a piece and than have to narrow it down
to just 90 seconds.”

Ann Cooper: Protecting Journalists
As a journalist, Ann Cooper has few peers.

The walls of the veteran newspaper reporter’s New York City office are covered with memorabilia from her journalistic career, including the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism and the Schwartz Award from the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication.

Millions of Americans became familiar with her voice when she was a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). As NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief, she covered the 1991 failed coup attempt in Moscow.

She was also on the front lines of some of the late 20th century’s most important events for NPR: the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, refugee issues in Bosnia, and the 1994 elections in South Africa that ended the Apartheid Era. For three years in the ’90s, Cooper criss-crossed Africa, writing features and analysis on the famine in Somalia, the
Rwandan refugee crisis, and the cholera epidemic in Zaire.

Now Cooper (’71 home economics journalism) has traded in her reporter’s notebook and microphone. The executive director of the Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) since 1998, Cooper heads the independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide by “defending the right of
journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.”

“This is a great job for a journalist,” Cooper said. “As a non-partisan organization, we are defending the rights of journalists everywhere. We’re defending a basic principle; not the ideas the journalists are expressing, but the ideal that they have to report the news and do so without fear of repression.”

Cooper coordinates a full-time staff of 22 at CPJ’s New York headquarters. A 35-member board of prominent U.S. journalists including Walter Cronkite,
Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and former Iowa State student Terry Anderson directs the group.

Cooper and her staff publicly reveal abuses that include murder, death threats, imprisonment, and harassment against the media by governments
throughout the world. As many as 600 reports of attacks on the press are reported each year. In 2004 alone, 56 journalists were killed.

“We effectively warn journalists and news organizations where attacks on press freedom are occurring,” she said. “Journalists throughout the world tell us that it is important that someone is
paying attention to the abuses and that we are reinforcing the message that what they are doing is not wrong.”

Sean McLaughlin: The weather 'Today'
Life in Phoenix was good for Sean McLaughlin, a 1988 graduate of the Greenlee School of Journalism and
Communication.

He was the long-time chief meteorologist and Emmy Award-winning journalist at KPNX-TV, Phoenix’s NBC affiliate. His charming and genuine on-air personality
made him a celebrity and a ratings hit in the Arizona capital.

That personality and his professionalism also caught the eye of the NBC brass. He filled in on the “Weekend Today Show” once and did several on-site reports for network affiliates including a Christmas
Eve forecast from North Pole, Alaska.

“They keep pretty good track of the talent around the affiliates,” McLaughlin said.

Over the years, McLaughlin was courted by the NBC-owned affiliate in Chicago to become that station’s morning meteorologist. The station wanted him so much they sweetened the deal with an offer to do the weather on the Sunday “Today Show” in New York. ABC talked to him about working on the weekend edition of “Good Morning America,” and McLaughlin also had offers from all three major network affiliates to stay in Phoenix.

“When the network (NBC) guaranteed me the ‘Weekend Today Show’ slot with MSNBC during the week, I took a leap of faith. I probably would never
have left Phoenix, but I thought I should do it now before I lose all my hair,” McLaughlin joked.

For the past year, McLaughlin has been seen nationwide by millions of viewers as the weather anchor at MSNBC, reporting on everything from the latest hurricane to hit the East Coast to major snowstorms in the West.

“Sean is multi-talented, and that’s what we look for at MSNBC,” said Mark Effron, vice president for News Daytime Programming. “He can communicate important and potentially life-impacting weather news and will report from the scene of major weather stories. He has a way about him that connects with all kinds of viewers.”

And every Sunday McLaughlin is an anchor for NBC News’ “Weekend Today Show.” He also serves as a permanent fill-in for weekday meteorologist Al Roker
on “The Today Show.”

“The job has been fantastic,” he said. “There have been plenty of opportunities to cover all sorts of national weather news.”

McLaughlin has recently been featured on MSNBC’s segment “Sean Across America,” reporting from the Super Bowl, baseball spring training, the Kentucky Derby, and a “Star Wars” convention.

About the Writer | Dave Gieseke is the public relations manager for the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.