Her Story
About Paige
I work at ABC News on the show 2020, where I've been since May 2022. My main area of expertise is documentary production - I've learned how to plan film shoots, interview people for documentaries, work with editors, and put stories together from start to finish. I recently started booking people for the show, reaching out to them to see if they'd be a good fit to interview and share their story. I also find stories that work for a two-hour show format. One of my most notable achievements was working on a story where I pitched it, booked several characters we interviewed, did the graphics, helped with production, and even wrote an act for the episode. Writing for television was a great experience and a challenge that makes me feel like I'm on the road to being a producer one day. The show covers true crime, which is very heavy subject matter, but I love talking to people, really learning their story and who they are, what they've gone through, and putting it together in a documentary format. I cold call people all the time to see if they'll do the show, and my education at NYU really gave me the confidence to do that.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Paige
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever received came from a higher-up during my first internship in college. He told me that the first thing he has people do is ask them to print something for him, and if they act like they're too good to print, he knows immediately that this person isn't going to work out. I still think about this frequently because it's so true. Sometimes you want to do the glamorous things or the high-profile work, but if you consistently do the small work really well, especially at the beginning, you make a great name for yourself. People really start to rely on you for the bigger things when they know that you can handle the small things. So my advice is that no task is too small - any menial task, even if it feels super menial, is valuable and an important investment in your career.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think a big challenge is that the media industry has been very volatile, especially recently. There are a lot of layoffs and organizations that struggle. In television, the streaming model is something that hasn't quite been worked out yet. For example, 2020 is on cable television every Friday night but it's also on Hulu. As of right now, we don't get a lot of revenue from Hulu that's shared directly with our show, so we rely on ratings from cable television. The audience on cable television is dwindling by the day, so our budgets and what we use to create the show is getting smaller and smaller. It makes it hard in terms of everything - making a two-hour show on a very small budget, and also career-wise. There's not a ton of job openings, it's hard to move up, it's hard to break in. It's just a weird time, and I think until we figure out how to monetize more, especially the advertising models on streaming, which is way above me and above my pay grade, it's going to be hard to reconcile all those things. It's very different from the cable television of 30 years ago or whatever.
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