Newhouse School of Communications
ON THE JOB
July 13, 2009
Within a month of taking a job as a reporter for a TV station in central Illinois, Marissa Torres was placing phone calls to hot-tempered spokesmen in the office of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald about the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. A month after that, she was chasing the state’s newly appointed senator, Roland Burris, down the halls of the state capitol for an interview.
“I learned a lot really quickly,” she says with a laugh. 
Torres graduated from Newhouse with a degree in Broadcast Journalism in the summer of 2008. She began the program immediately after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in anthropology-zoology.
She had wanted to be a veterinarian since her childhood in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., but stumbled upon broadcasting in college almost by accident.
“I had a friend who was working at the campus TV station, WOLV-TV, and she said that they were short-staffed and needed help,” she says. “I started out working the teleprompter, and eventually I started doing the weather report.”
Her experience at WOLV-TV inspired her to seek an internship in broadcasting, and she found one at the Fox affiliate in Detroit.
She spent the summer before her senior year shadowing the station’s weather reporter and working with the health reporting staff. The following fall, she applied to graduate programs in broadcast journalism.
“I knew I really liked reporting, but I also knew that I had a lot to learn,” she says.
When she arrived in Syracuse, she was struck by how intimate her program felt.
“Coming from a really big school, it was amazing,” she says. “I was able to develop relationships with professors.”
She was grateful for the care her professors took in walking her and her classmates through each step of reporting a story and putting it on air.
“No matter how unsure of yourself you are,” she says, “the professors are amazingly patient.”
She still keeps in contact with Professors Frank Currier and Chris Tuohey, updating them on her progress and seeking their advice when she needs it.
Newhouse’s Broadcast Journalism program concludes with a six-week reporting project in Washington, D.C. Torres was assigned to cover D.C.-based stories for WCIA in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. As a result, she got to spend time covering the state’s upwardly mobile junior senator.
“My partner and I would stake out the Obama office all the time,” she says. “We got to go to one of his press conferences. I kept my press pass as a souvenir.”
The time she spent in Washington allowed Torres to experience the thrill of covering politics, and she began to imagine making a career out of it. As fate would have it, the central Illinois station that she had reported for in D.C. had an opening, so she took it.
Torres now works as the station’s nightside reporter in the state capitol bureau in Springfield. She delivers two to three stories each day for the evening and nighttime newscasts.
Torres couldn’t have imagined a more auspicious time to be reporting on Illinois state government. When the Blagojevich scandal broke, she was still getting used to her position but thrilled to be on hand for a story that captivated the nation.
“Since the story broke, I’ve gotten so much airtime, and exposure, and practice in every aspect of the business,” she says.
Torres plans to be in her current position for at least the next two years. At some point, she hopes to move into the station’s main newsroom, but beyond that she is open to any opportunity that comes her way.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better situation,” she says. “ Everybody I work for is so supportive and helpful. My boss is great. And I’m really happy to be doing what I’m doing.”
