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The Et Cetera

    Communications Career Day

    Communications Career Day
    April 24, 2018
     
    Check out the bios of our participating media professionals below, listed in alphabetical order. Asterisks indicate current or former Eastfield students.
     
    *Jarrod Ausborne 
    Senior Product Designer and Startup Founder
    Jarrod is founder and CEO of Mintor App and was nominated to the Forbes Under 30 list last year. After studying Digital Media at Eastfield College, he went on to work for companies such as Nike (urban culture marketing), the NBA (freelance journalist and photographer), AT&T (senior product designer) and American Airlines (senior product designer). Complex magazine named him one of the top sneaker influencers to follow while he was working with Nike and the NBA.
     
    Marleine Calderon
    Media Services Coordinator, FC Dallas
    Marleine started as a media services intern in August 2016 and now works mostly with the Spanish-speaking players, handling Spanish interviews and appearances. She also keeps track of the players’ stats daily to update the FC Dallas game notes that are distributed on game days. On game days, she compiles statistics, assists with post-game interviews and occasionally helps with social media. Working with FC Dallas has opened up other opportunities for her. She has helped out at CONCACAF events, including the CONCACAF Champions League and the Gold Cup, and U.S. National Team games. She has served as the assistant venue press officer for both organizations, helping set up the stadiums for the media and teams. She supervises the press box at those events and helps with media questions and requests. Marleine graduated from the University of North Texas in December of 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism with an emphasis in sports journalism. Prior to that, she attended Brookhaven College for one year.
     
    *Kevin Cushingberry Jr.
    Manager of Public Relations, Kalogridis International
    Kevin first walked through the front doors of Eastfield College in 2011, still undecided on a college major or career path. An essay written for Professor Sabine Winters English 1301 course led him to the League for Innovation Student Literary Competition, where he met Lori Dann, the student publications manager at the time. Their conversation led to Kevin working for two years with The Et Cetera student newspaper as a sports reporter, sports editor and editor-in-chief before transferring to UT Arlington. He was an editorial intern at D Magazine this past fall and has worked as a high school sports freelancer for The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In January, he was hired as the manager of public relations at Kalogridis International, a luxury aircraft carpet company based in Dallas. 
     
     *Billy Dennis
    Associate Editor, 1105 Media
    Billy is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer and journalist from Dallas who has a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas at Dallas. His fiction has appeared in several magazines and literary journals, including Juked, Story and Grit, Breath, and the Alternative. His nonfiction has appeared in the Dallas Morning News, CNN.com, and The Et Cetera. He is an associate editor for 1105 Media, where he writes for the medical industry. His first novel is currently in the query process. You can see him preform his fiction live at the Moody Performance Hall in Dallas this June. Billy is a former editor and columnist for The Et Cetera student newspaper at Eastfield.
     
    Roger Emrich
    Voice of the Cowboys at AT&T Stadium and sports reporter/anchor, KRLD
    Roger is a longtime DFW radio legend who currently can be heard announcing for the Dallas Cowboys as the public address announcer at AT&T Stadium. He is also a sports reporter/anchor at KRLD and host of the Vokal Media podcast “One on One with Roger Emrich.” Previously, he served as the Texas State Network’s capitol bureau chief in Austin and wrote sports for the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans.
     
    Nicholas Friedman
    Social Producer, Dallas Morning News
    Nicholas is a social producer at The Dallas Morning News, where he spearheads and manages social media campaigns for written content, including accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram. He is a University of North Texas journalism alum originally from Philadelphia.
     
    Danny Fulgencio
    Senior photographer and photo editor, Advocate Magazine
    Danny is an editorial photographer based in Dallas. In 2010, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism, before taking a vow of poverty as a freelance photojournalist. He still freelances, but spends most of his time working for the Advocate Magazine in Dallas as senior photographer and photo editor. The propellant for his work is the same core of his trade: Share stories and show people themselves. Danny’s work has appeared in dozens of publications including D Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Observer, SF Weekly, the New York Times Lens blog, Texas Monthly, Texas Observer and Village Voice.
     
    *Maria Yolisma Garcia
    Social Media, Dieste Inc.
    A native of Durango, Mexico who now lives in Dallas, Maria is a first-generation college student and Mexican-American immigrant who has used her personal experiences to fight for those in her community. A former Eastfield College Student Leader of the Year, she went on to study public relations and emerging media at the University of Texas at Arlington. She currently works for Dieste, a multicultural agency based out of downtown Dallas as an assistant accountant executive and community manager. During her high school years she wanted to advocate for her undocumented and migrant peers to ensure they had college access. This led her to join the North Texas Dream Team, an organization that fights for the rights of immigrants in the community. She was recently named president of the NTDT.
     
    Maria Guerrero
    Reporter, NBC 5/Telemundo 39
    Maria is a bilingual journalist and reporter for NBC 5 and also contributes reports to Telemundo 39. She began her on-camera reporting career at WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while still attending LSU, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with a concentration in broadcast journalism. She went on to report and anchor for WISC-TV in Madison, Wisconsin, KOB-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and KIRO-TV in Seattle, Washington. 
     
    *Juanita Hernandez
    Copywriter, Liberman Broadcasting
    Juanita is a copywriter at Liberman Broadcasting, the largest privately held, minority-owned Spanish-language broadcaster in the United States with 10 television stations and 17 radio stations operating in top U.S. Hispanic markets. Juanita writes copy and translates for national and local accounts and has written more than 500 commercials in the past 10 months. She has also done voice work for many of those same accounts. Juanita has also worked as a promotions tech and personal assistant at the company. She graduated from Eastfield in 2017 and will begin work on her bachelors at UT-Arlington this summer.
     
    *Keturah Hill
    Host of The Cussing Christian, UTA Radio
    An award-winning student journalist, Keturah graduated from Eastfield College in 2016 after completing an internship with Reach Media and the Tom Joyner Morning Show. She will receive her bachelor’s degree in broadcasting from the University of Texas at Arlington in May. Keturah has her own radio show with UTA Radio called “The Cussing Christian,” which she recently trademarked and hopes to continue after graduation.
     
    Blake Holland
    Anchor/Reporter, KRLD and Texas State Network; News Director, North Texas Television
    Blake is a 20-year-old multimedia journalist from Carthage, Texas. He is currently news director at North Texas Television and an anchor/reporter at NewsRadio 1080 KRLD and the Texas State Network. At North Texas Television, he oversees the production of 10 live newscasts each week and more than 100 student volunteers. He currently anchors the KRLD Sunday Morning News and does fill-in work on both KRLD and TSN.  Blake’s passion for news goes back to when he would make his own newscasts out of his bedroom radio/TV studio. While still in high school, he went to work part-time for a local radio station in his hometown. He had already been doing on-air work at the station since he was in elementary school.  During his sophomore year of high school, Blake was named afternoon news anchor at the station. Along with serving as the station’s news director, Blake also did field reporting and helped run the digital news division. His reporting was not only heard throughout East Texas but also across the state on the Texas State Network.  He is the recipient of several Lone Star Emmy Student Production Awards for his work at North Texas Television along with other honors and awards for his work in radio news. Blake is currently a senior at UNT majoring in Converged Broadcast Media. 
     
    Brad Kaplan
    Photojournalist, Fox 4 News
    Brad is a photojournalist at KDFW-TV (Fox 4), where he has worked for 16 years.  Prior to that he was a jack of all trades at the CNN Dallas bureau, which was his second stint with the broadcast cable network. He also worked for 12 years as a managing video editor at WFAA-TV (Channel 8), where he was the “go to” travel editor for stories ranging from Somaila to the LA riots. He covered the death of Princess Di, the Gulf War, Haiti unrest, the El Salvador revolution, and the Bosnian war.  His work won many awards during this time, including two Columbia Duponts. He also worked in CBS News’ Miami bureau covering the crazy 1980s Central American conflicts – Contras, death squads, and revolutions. He got that gig after freelancing for two years as a photojournalist in the Middle East.  He worked for every American and European network as a photographer or editor during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon from 1982 to 1984, moving to the Middle East after working at the ABC Radio Networks in New York.  He left his true love of radio to develop his other passion of photojournalism. Prior to ABC, he worked at Las Vegas’ all news radio station KNUU as a reporter. Brad is a graduate of California State University Fullerton.

    Alex Macon
    Online Managing Editor, D Magazine
    Alex is the online managing editor at D Magazine. He was previously employed at the magazine’s online arts and entertainment editor. Before that, he worked as a reporter for the Galveston County Dailey News, where he covered murder, mayhem, and high school sports. He went to college at the University of North Texas and lives in Dallas. 
     
    Matt Martinez
    Real-time reporter, McClatchy News
    Matt works with a team of McClatchy writers and editors in Washington D.C. ,Kansas City, Georgia and California to rewrite and aggregate news so that it gets traction online by being placed on Google News, The Drudge Report, Yahoo News, and other sites. His stories appear on all 30 McClatchy sites, including the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Sacramento Bee. Matt graduated from the University of Texas in Austin in 2008, after completing an internship at the Cameron Herald and the Austin Chronicle. He also wrote a semester of news and a semester of sports for the Daily Texan student newspaper. A week after graduation he moved to Dodge City, Kansas, where he was a one-man sports section at the Dodge City Daily Globe, covering high school and community college sports in a town of about 40,000.  A year later he moved back to Texas to write high school sports at the Denton Record-Chronicle. Before he had been there a year, his position was eliminated and he was out of journalism for a year. He took a corporate job, which paid better, had better benefits and more potential for growth, but he was always thinking about how to get back in. He began attending graduate school part time at UNT, and in the fall of 2011, started covering high school football for the Star-Telegram, the paper he had grown up reading. In 2014 he quit his corporate gig to concentrate more on sports, helping with TCU football coverage and other assignments the full-time writers couldn’t get to. He began writing about food and music for the Dallas Observer in 2015, and the next year he became the Observer’s social media editor before landing his full-time job at the Star-Telegram the next year. He got more than 3 million pageviews on the national news stories he wrote in the last three months of 2017. His editors expect him to get 9 million in 2018, but he wants 12. At the end of March, he was at 3.2. 
     
    Shannon Murray
    Reporter, Fox 4 News
    Shannon is a reporter and anchor for FOX 4 whose career has taken her from Los Angeles to West Texas, Austin, and now back home to Dallas. She starts her day at 2:30 a.m. to be ready with live reports from the field for the station’s morning show, Good Day, from 4:30-9 a.m. Shannon grew up in DeSoto and graduated from Duncanville High School, where she anchored the school newscast, Eye of the Panther News. She won the state competition for broadcasting and went on to place second in nationals her senior year. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in broadcast journalism. In college she held internships with local news station KXAN and spent a summer in Los Angeles as an intern for The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Her career started at KOSA in Midland/Odessa. She was required to shoot video, edit, produce, report, anchor, and sometimes even run the teleprompter. While in West Texas, she also worked at KCRS Radio, where she ran the control board and filled in as host for a political talk radio show. She went on to work at KVUE in Austin as an anchor and reporter. She primarily covered crime and courts, sometimes spending weeks inside a courtroom on a high-profile case. 

    *Anahi Perez
    Consumer Investigative Producer, NBC 5/Telemundo
    As a consumer investigative producer, Anahi works with viewers who contact the station about issues they’ve had with consumer goods and services and helps mediate cases that have enough information to present to the corporation or business over their customers concern. Previously, she was a freelance assignment editor and freelance audio operator for Univision KUVN 23, where she also interned in 2016. During her internship she worked as a co-producer of a bi-weekly college newscast and assisted with coverage of the 2016 presidential election. She also interned with the Texas Catholic newspaper, where she wrote stories about the Dallas Diocese, and Revista Católica, a Spanish Catholic magazine serving the Dallas Diocese’s Hispanic parishoners. She recently received an award from the Catholic Press for her coverage. Anahi is a graduate of the University of North Texas, where she transferred after attending Eastfield College.
    *Chris Pilcic
    Media and community relations specialist, State Farm
    Chris is approaching his third year as a media and community relations specialist with State Farm, based at the company’s Dallas hub, City Line, in Richardson.  Until this year, Chris managed media relationships with journalists in all Texas markets, but he is now strategically focused on proactive media opportunities and philanthropy in Dallas and West Texas.  His role allows him to positively promote State Farm’s brand while using data to develop safety campaigns and pitch stories related to insurance and financial services. He also responds to major catastrophes in Texas and across the country for media interviews. Prior to joining State Farm in 2015, Chris spent nearly 15 years as a broadcast journalist, working in radio and television in his hometown in St. Louis.  Chris served as an assignments editor, web producer, multimedia journalist and corporate trainer for FOX 2 / KTVI-TV in St. Louis, Missouri prior to a promotion that brought him to Dallas’ KDFW-TV / FOX 4 as assignments manager in 2012.  He is currently working on a degree in Mass Communications/Journalism at Eastfield.
     
    Pedro Silva
    Sports Reporter/Anchor, Univision 
    Pedro is a bilingual, Emmy award winning sports journalist who was born in Caracas, Venezuela and graduated from the University of Central Florida with a bachelors degree in broadcast journalism. He began his career in the media in 2011 as a sports anchor/reporter at the Telemundo affiliate in Orlando, Florida. At the same time, he held a freelance job at Fox Sports Florida as a translator for the Orlando Magic and Tampa Bay Rays games. In search of new challenges and professional growth, in 2013 Pedro became the sports anchor for Univision Dallas, a top 5 for Hispanic viewers in the United States. Pedro has received awards for his community social work both in Orlando with the initiative “Leer para vencer” and in Dallas with “El estudiante de la semana.” He was nominated for an Emmy for his special report “Coraje Bajo Tres Palos.” 
     
    *Carla Solórzano
    Homepage/social editor, Dallas Morning News
    Carla is a Dallas native and proud Tejana. She has a degree in English from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she worked at The Shorthorn student newspaper as a reporter and social media editor after transferring from Eastfield College. Last fall she interned with the social media team at NPR in Washington D.C., and in the winter she worked as a social producer. She recently joined The Dallas Morning News as a homepage/social producer. You can find Carla discussing memes on Twitter at @Carla_Zano.
     
    Randal York
    Game designer, Game Circus
    Randal has seven years of professional game development experience and, at one time or another, has worked in every aspect of the production pipeline for Facebook games and mobile games. His primary responsibilities are conceptual design, design documentation, and data analysis and testing of all new features. Randal has a bachelor of fine arts in Interactive Design and Game Development from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
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