KENT – Stories sprinkled with humorous anecdotes delighted the crowd who came out to hear a veteran journalist and broadcast news producer this week.
Longtime journalist and former NBC producer Cheryl Gould spoke to 25 people Tuesday, June 25, at a program offered at Kent Memorial Library and sponsored by The Kent Good Times Dispatch.
Gould has been a supporter of the local newspaper since it was envisioned over two years ago. She was introduced by her friend, Karen Chase, who is a member of the Kent News, Inc. Board of Directors and helped found the online version that went live in October 2023. Chase and Gould met over lunch at The Villager and have been friends ever since.
Kent News, Inc. President Andrea Schoeny welcomed everyone and said the board members appreciated the support of local journalism.
“Just like the library is a community hub in person, we believe the GTD is a community hub online and we’re glad that we’re able to support local journalism and see how people can start in local journalism and rise way, way up,” Schoeny said, referring to Gould.
Gould described her journey from the “farmlands of South Jersey to the upper levels of network news.”
Graduating with a history degree from Princeton University at the very beginning of co-education in 1974, she found it to be good practice with a ratio of 10:1 males to females for every newsroom she entered.
Her career started in Rochester, NY, and she shared how difficult it was for her to find a job. Ultimately, she ended up working part-time at WAXC radio as a “super jock” reading the sports scores on the weekends. The news director liked her voice and she was promoted to doing a five-minute newscast every hour. Gould proved that she was willing to work hard and shared some experiences of those early days.
Her very first news assignment was to meet with Sen. Scoop Jackson from Washington state, who had just announced his candidacy for president. She had to meet him at the airport and she had lots of questions for her boss.
“How do I get the story to you?” she asked. “He showed me alligator clips, where you would unscrew the bottom of the payphone phone and hook the alligator clips into the two wires there and feed that into the reel-to-reel.”
She got into the car and it was a stick shift. “I had no idea how to drive a stick shift,” Gould said. She ended up driving the entire way to the airport in first gear. “It taught me a lesson. No challenge is too great, you have to get the story.”
She learned that lesson well and put it to good use when she got to Paris, France, and began working for NBC radio. She spoke fluent French and worked weekends and she was responsible to “call in the troops” when there was breaking news. It was the late 1970s and there a movement growing in Iran and there was “this guy in exile,” who turned out to be Ayatollah Khomeini.
She was able to record his sermon and he preached about getting rid of the Shah. She kept pitching stories about this guy to NBC in New York but they weren’t interested. Until Nov. 4, 1979, when it came across the wires that students had taken over the U.S. embassy in Tehran. There were no direct phone connections from New York to Iran, but there were connections from France to Iran, so Gould ended up leading the coverage of the Iran hostage situation. She was sent to Algeria for two months, which was the country leading the negotiations.
“I was one of the first Americans to see the hostages coming off the plane,” Gould said.
She later moved to London and was able to cover the royal wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles. Gould had an offer from NBC to be a producer and that brought her to New York where she worked with Jessica Savage and Jane Pauley. Moving to coordinate news broadcasts instead of being a reporter, she decided was a good change.
“I realized that I was more interested in power than fame,” Gould said.
She created a show called Overnight with Linda Ellerbee that was a parody of news and it became very popular. It aired from 1:30 to 2:30 a.m. and was in response to CNN that had just started the 24-hour news channel. It was very popular and developed quite a following.
“When the show ended there were demonstrations outside 30 Rock,” Gould said.
Her next project was a special report on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, anchored by Tom Brokaw. She was in charge of finding veterans and this became the book, “The Greatest Generation.” It was the start of a long professional relationship with Brokaw.
“I had plenty of experiences with Tom that are too numerous to mention,” she said. One highlight was when they were the first network to broadcast live from China in the Hyatt Hotel. She was able to be in the Forbidden City that dates back to the 1400s.
“I thought, ‘How did I get so lucky?’ I still get chills,” she said.
She related that NBC was the only network in Berlin, Germany, when the Berlin Wall came down and it was a “thrilling night.”
By the time she was 40, she knew she wanted to have a child and decided to move to a “front office job” to work in talent relations and hire correspondents.
She also worked for CNBC and later became the first woman to be a senior vice president of a broadcast network.
Gould decided to retire when she realized that the business was changing so much she didn’t recognize it any longer. The shift to live reporting and then 24-hour news coverage meant that “new technology was dictating content,” she said.
She has been a staunch supporter of local news because of the importance it holds in communities.
“It is the duty of every citizen to be informed,” Gould said. “Local news is the glue connected to our neighbors that has led to a decline in civic engagement.” She strongly believes in news literacy and teaching young people how to recognize fact from fiction, as well as training students in civics and journalism.
