The National Press Club Journalism Institute is spotlighting the next generation of journalists, students graduating from college or Master’s programs this spring into a challenging job market, in hopes they’ll meet future bosses and colleagues here, who will reach out and support them in building journalism’s future together.
Name: Dan Toomey
School: The University of Southern California
Location: Boston, Mass.
Internships: HBO, CNN, NBC
Awards: Outstanding Journalism Scholar 2020; Murrow winner 2019 and 2018
What have you learned from your involvement with student media on your campus?
Toomey: I am the managing editor for our student newsroom, USC Annenberg Media. We have a team of over 100 graduate and undergraduate students who work endlessly to create a broadcast, radio program, and multiple online pieces for our website and social media each day.
We are a multimedia news environment. As someone who has worked as a student reporter and editor, I have seen that the best journalism today comes from taking risks and experimenting with your content.
An example: I executive produced a series of interviews with the presidential candidates from this year’s undergraduate student government elections at USC. This could have just been an article. But instead, we filmed the interviews, sourced questions from our audience on Instagram, uploaded each interview separately to our social media channels, and coded a webpage for each of their answers to live on, where users can navigate through each question and the candidates’ respective answers.
This was two months ago – when we still had a newsroom. But I see this digital adaptability now as we continue to launch broadcasts and report the news from home.
I’ve been lucky to study journalism at a time where we are encouraged to experiment more than ever. I see this bringing us into the future as the next leaders in news.
What have you learned from your internship experience(s)?
Toomey: I’ve worked at the Olympics in South Korea, NBC4 News in Los Angeles, CNN in New York, a data journalism startup on USC’s campus, the Mayor’s Office of International Affairs in Los Angeles, and the San Juan Record in Monticello, Utah.
Here are my main takeaways:
First, simply working hard isn’t everything, but it must be done. I am blessed to have amazing internship experiences that have brought me across the world, and all of them came from me giving everything I could to my application and, later, my work with the teams that invested in me. But I also had to think critically and be inventive while I was an intern. I would constantly speak with executives, asking them where they think their organizations can improve and what their plans are for the future. I took notes and applied this to my work as a student journalist, looking to be as inventive as I could to reflect industry trends.
Second, digital news can be invested in without sacrificing what makes traditional news great, and we should pay more attention to it. I’m a huge fan of The New York Times and what they’ve done to grow their brand during my time in college. Sometimes it seems like there’s an anxiety to do this, like we’ll lose the pathos in a story that makes a reader engage with the writer. But the old can be blended with the new. The trailers I helped make at the Olympics were just as impactful as some of the data stories I worked on about crime rates in Los Angeles. Fareed Zakaria’s always sobering and compelling takes can be just as insightful as an IG story that I saw some members of NBC4 working on. These platforms are promising, we just have to believe in them.
Lastly, we have to embrace change in news… I’m excited to see what the future holds. Whether it looks like the NYT now, or something closer to NBC on Quibi, we don’t know. But, as journalists, we have to develop the skills and mindset necessary for welcoming whatever our audience wants – even if they don’t know what that is yet.
What’s been your best moment in journalism?
Toomey: I won’t feign modesty and say that I’m not immensely proud of the stories I’ve worked on. I have written a 20-page piece about a murder I investigated my junior year, received awards for covering multiple shooting scares and was given a certificate of appreciation for writing a piece about marginalized gay Catholics.
But there’s one moment that stands out to me the most.
I was a junior, working as managing editor for our student newsroom, USC Annenberg Media. Each week, I had to lead a team of 50 graduate and undergraduate students in days of news coverage that went from 8 a.m. to whenever you wrapped things up. With a full broadcast, radio program and website to uphold, that usually meant 9 p.m.
I never had anxiety about what the news we would cover. I even led our team through a day of harrowing reporting when we reported on the 2018 Borderline Bar & Grill shooting. If we could do that, I believed, we could handle anything.
But the one worry I had was that our team wasn’t connecting. It was often hard to relate to the graduate students that were much older than me and in a vastly different program. So each day I would try and ask one to stay after their shift for a bit so we could talk. What issues did they have? What did they think was going right? How could I help?
Many of them were shy, and I couldn’t tell if I was making progress. But I kept going. I carried the tradition of these little talks throughout the semester until our last day of coverage. That evening – like most – I was staying after to make sure our final articles could be published. The sun was down, I was exhausted, and, frankly, a little sick of being in the newsroom.
Then one grad student came up to me – the quietest on our team.
“Hey,” she said. “I just wanted to say that – I know we don’t talk about it often – but you do a fantastic job.”
“You have been a really great leader for us,” she said.
With the stories I’ve covered, shows I have produced, and students I’ve spoken to across the world, that remains my best moment in journalism.
What’s the wackiest story you’ve worked on?
Toomey: “Meet Merlin the Rescue Duck, and Check Out His Custom Wheelchair.”
That’s the headline.
Merlin is a duck who was found by rescuers with a leg impairment that made it hard to waddle. But who was there to help him? That’s right, you guessed it: Goats of Anarchy, a sanctuary for special needs goats in New Jersey.
Soon after Merlin was brought into Goats of Anarchy, he got the wheelchair from an online retailer called “Walkin’ Pets,” which prompted a line of mine that I’m particularly proud of:
“Walking’ Pets may soon have to add ‘waddlin’” to their name.”
Merlin got the help he needed from the wheelchair, and was soon up-and-moving again with his best friend, a chicken named Opal. Rescuers believed Merlin would never have survived if not for the wheelchair.
Here’s another line for you. It’s my closer:
“The extra support from Walkin’ Pets will help Merlin get back to shakin’ his tail feathers like never before.”
What do you want to accomplish in your journalism career?
Toomey: I am a huge fan of comedy and news. So much so that I actually started my own news satire show, called Night Class USC. The show started after the USC admissions scandal, when a friend of mine and I were inspired to create a show similar to John Oliver’s, but about the crazy USC scandals that were coming out every day. Within a few weeks, we filmed our first full episode in our student newsroom. Just two guys, a camera and a green screen.
Now in Season Two, the show is a live-to-tape production with an entire writers staff and production crew, bringing in a crowd of 25 people each week. (This was, of course, pre-COVID). We’ve covered everything from mental health, to Target price inflation, pending lawsuits against our school and, of course, the novel coronavirus.
What I love about my show is that it’s a combination of my two passions: comedy and news. I was actually going to give a TEDX Talk on how I believe satire can be an impactful way to get audiences to care about important stories before it was cancelled due to the pandemic.
While I created this show, I was also working as a student reporter and editor for our newsroom. For so long, this felt like a separate environment from comedy until I realized it could be blended.
As a journalist, my goal is to report on the stories that matter. Yet, I never want to lose the voice and narrative that can humanize a reporter and connect with audiences, which I think I have done through comedy.
I don’t believe this comes at the expense of watering down stories, nor do I believe it makes the humor unfunny. If done right, I believe it can be an effective tool for informing others, which will always be my ultimate goal as a journalist.
If you could meet any journalist and ask for her/his advice, who would it be and why?
Toomey: I actually keep a notebook of people I want to interview – living and dead. Among the journalists are Claire Booth Luce, Anthony Bourdain, Art Buchwald, Jake Tapper, Ronan Farrow, Shane Smith and Isobel Yeung.
But, most of all, I want to talk to Frank Bruni. Because I squandered my chance before.
I was interning at CNN, and I sat in on Brian Stelter’s show because I knew Frank was a guest and I wanted to talk to him after. Once the show ended, I walked up to him and introduced myself.
Then I froze. I knew I wanted to ask him so much about his career and advice for me as a young writer, but I couldn’t find the words. Instead, a basic question about Pete Buttigeig’s candidacy as president floundered out of my mouth. As was to be expected, Frank answered politely, but I knew I was coming off as the nervous, unprepared intern.
His answer took up our short walk to the elevator before we said goodbye. And that was it.
So, if you’re out there, Frank, I want you to know that I love your writing and I promise to ask a better question next time.
What do you want potential employers to know about you?
Toomey: There are a lot of people in this business that work hard and love what they do. I consider myself among them. I also have a knack for facilitating growth in a newsroom and picking compelling stories as a reporter and an editor.
Professors have also asked me before if I worry that employers will think that, since I have done comedy, I won’t take the news seriously or report in a professional manner – although I believe my experience speaks to why this wouldn’t be the case.
But if I were to isolate one thing, I believe what separates me from many candidates right now is my passion for creativity and an eclectic background of experiences that makes me an even stronger candidate for your newsroom.
At Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office, I explored public policy, which informed my work as a criminal data journalist. I read scripts at HBO so I could understand how to better craft longform narratives. And I have spent my time in college working in news, comedy, radio, television, social media and digital journalism to give me the open-mindedness and curiosity that I believe is necessary for any journalist.
Outside of my internship and work experience, this isn’t something that I can show on my resume, but I believe it’s paramount to what makes me a valuable employee and reporter.
When you aren’t practicing journalism, how do you spend your time?
Toomey: I love music, TV, reading and exercising. I am a distance runner, so podcasts like “The Daily,” “The Knowledge Project,” and “The Daily Stoic,” are my favorites to listen to while on runs. I’m a giant fan of music, too. Everything from dubset to folk, classical and rap – I love it all. Years of listening gave me an encyclopedic knowledge of music that I still hope will be put to good use. I also read for a nightly release – right now I’m enjoying Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.”
And, yes, I watched Tiger King.
If you’re a senior studying journalism, or know one, we’re accepting information here for students to feature in the future. If you’re a supporter, you can contribute here to scholarships for journalism students.