Assistant news director
KCUR, Kansas City, Mo.
Age: 29
In three words: “Driven, thoughtful, perceptive”
What colleagues say: In January, Madeline took over as KCUR’s interim news director. Soon after, KCUR faced multiple breaking-news situations, including the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Parade shooting. Madeline made sure reporters who had been covering the parade celebration got home safely and sent others to report on the shooting from multiple different angles. She made sure our newscasts were up to date with constantly changing information and that every reported detail was relentlessly fact-checked. Through it all, she continued to check in on reporters’ mental health and helped them take breaks as needed.
Madeline made sure we covered the shooting in a balanced way from every corner of the newsroom — including investigative work, features, breaking news stories, radio spots and talk show segments. When news was coming faster than reporters could handle, Madeline distributed the load and ensured our coverage stayed thoughtful and caring.
What Madeline says
Decision to work in public media: I went to journalism school intending to work in newspapers. Then I interned at WLRN in Miami and fell in love with audio storytelling. I had excellent editors who taught me how to produce sound-rich spot and feature reports.
Key accomplishments: Most of the accomplishments I’m most proud of have come in the last two years, as an editor and newsroom leader at KCUR. I took over as interim news director in February and led coverage of the run-up to the Super Bowl, the big game and then, unfortunately, the mass shooting at the parade celebrating the Chiefs’ win. I helped set up a partnership with KFF Health News to continue covering people who were injured at the parade. It has been an honor to guide my education reporter through a seclusion and restraint story that won a regional Murrow Award for investigative reporting, and my city hall reporter through an impressive scoop about the forced departure of the head of civil rights compliance at City Hall.
Inspired by: My reporters! They’re curious, tenacious and empathetic. I’m constantly in awe of how they use those skills to do remarkable reporting. I love seeing them light up when they talk about a new idea, or come in bursting with excitement about the great tape they got or the juicy public records request they just got back.
Advice for young public media professionals: Find something you’re not good at outside work, where the stakes are low if you mess up. It’s nice to balance that against our work, where errors in judgment can have significant consequences. Have friends outside work. Have friends at work, too! Finally, when you’re looking for jobs, ask around, reach out to people who work at the station, prepare questions for your interview that will help you see how your potential bosses manage people. Even if the beat or the position sounds perfect, it’s hard to do good work when the workplace around you isn’t a welcoming, supportive place.
Advice for public media leaders: We all do our best work when we have time to rest, recharge and nourish our lives outside of work. Make sure your staff — and you — have time to do that.
Funniest thing that’s happened on the job: I was once covering a corpse flower bloom in Loxahatchee Groves, Fla., when a bird escapee from Lion Country Safari landed on my shoulder and chomped on my cheek mid-interview. Fortunately, the guy I was interviewing snapped a photo!
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