It doesn’t matter how prestigious, mediocre, elite, or expensive your college was, a common denominator among all higher learning institutions is the esteemed career fair. With all of our technology today, they seem almost quaint. Veteran KCBS radio reporter Keith Menconi earned his undergraduate degree from Berkeley majoring in economics and history. During his last semester, like many of his classmates, he attended a career fair on campus. Not as good as a kegger, but certainly more productive.
“I wanted to pursue a career where writing was the main component of the job,” Menconi said.
That much he knew. One of the speakers at the career fair was a senior editor at KQED in San Francisco. Menconi went up to her after she spoke.
“I asked her if she thought there was a career for a guy who read a lot of history and wanted to write,” Menconi said. “She told me about internships in either public affairs or a newsroom. I ended up getting internships in both of those. I did that three days a week for six or seven months.”
Nothing if not honest, Menconi said the job kicked his ass at first when he was hired at KQED. The job was a bit more demanding than he may have thought.
“It was a rough start,” he admits. “I was very impressed with the people I was working with. Everybody was able to focus, had the ability to boil things down to their essence. I was coming from an academic background, and there I did reasonably well, but, of course, in school you get a month to come up with a topic for a paper.”
A newsroom isn’t as forgiving as your college was.
“There is the daily grind of turning out copy, and at first I struggled to get up to speed,” Menconi explained. “They tolerated me despite my early stumbles and I made it through all right. I think it gave me a sense of potential for what this job can be. I really wanted to be good at it.”
He left KQED when he was offered a scholarship to study Chinese in Taiwan. Menconi was 22 years-old at the time.
Menconi is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
“My time in Taiwan gave me the chance to think about the nuances of culture,” he explained. “I think about culture now as an extension of language: just another way that you express yourself. How you accept a present from somebody; how you argue; how you order at a restaurant. All of these are different ways to express yourself that will be received differently depending on where you are.”
Menconi spent nine months teaching English in Taiwan. He then said he “lucked out” when he called an English-language radio station looking for work. The station was ICRT, which stands for International Community Radio Taipei. Menconi said he was in the right place at the right time.
“Broadcaster Eryk Smith had quit something like a week before I called ICRT,” Menconi said. “They were looking for somebody to take over his show. Eryk hosted Taiwan Talk, an interview series about Taiwan life and culture. It appealed to me as I always gravitated toward long form planned out productions. I think my past radio experience gave me a leg up. I worked there at ICRT for three-and-a-half years.”
Menconi said he enjoyed his experiences in Taiwan.
“Learning the language is a bottomless pit; you can continue studying forever.”
He explained there is always more to study. He learned a lot about Taiwanese politics and current events during his stay.
“You could spend your whole life diving into that kind of thing,” Menconi said.
Along with his reporting duties, Menconi has a weekly program titled KCBS In Depth. Topics from recent shows include; ‘Are Bay Area homes ready to go all electric?’ ‘What could follow this latest wave of gun violence?’ ‘Confronting the youth fentanyl crisis.’
“On the most recent show, we covered the lifting of Covid restrictions in California and the Bay Area. It’s a retrospective episode speaking with local health experts. Looking at what the Bay area did right and what it did wrong.”
Menconi likes to bring different opinions to In Depth on KCBS.That’s his goal.
Reflecting on his time in Taiwan he said, “I made a lot of friends in the local arts and music scene. I went to a few open mic nights.” His parents got him a guitar when he was young and he likes to play songs from The Cure and The Beatles.
“The few Chinese songs I learned to sing took a long time to get under my skin and commit to memory,” Menconi said.
Menconi was born in Milpitas near San Jose. Today he lives in San Jose and works as a general assignments reporter on most days.
He put together a small studio in his home and paid for it himself.
“Management is generally willing to buy my gear, but I’m working on some other projects and I just wanted to own the equipment.”
At KCBS, Menconi said the assignments for the day are generally figured out by 9 am or 10 am.
“It’s sort of your typical newsroom,” he explained. “We have our own sources, our own tips. We make sure we’re not missing any big stories. We pull stories from the wire service.”
Menconi will check in with the assignment editor and make sure he got everything, then hit the streets.
He’s able to stay in San Jose a lot of the time and said some reporters cover more physical ground.
“When it was flooding at the beginning of the year I was driving over the Santa Cruz Mountains regularly for a couple of weeks.”
If the news is breaking fast, Menconi said he’ll do live reports from the field.
“On any given day there are eight reporters running about and we’ve got six or seven anchors.”
Menconi said during the George Floyd protests in San Jose he started the day at 7pm.
“By then, police were squaring off with protesters,” he explained. “I believe tear gas had already been fired into the crowd. I was reporting for five or six hours straight.”
His work is gratifying and Menconi said he likes being part of a business that delivers and helps crystalize information. He likes to distill the information down to relatable stories.
“The good feeling for me comes from making something genuinely useful for an audience. A resource that people can draw on as they make decisions, perhaps about voting or perhaps deciding what Covid precautions to adopt. The hope at the end of the day is that I’ve made some useful contribution to the public conversation.”
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his new book: Talk To Me – Profiles on News Talkers and Media Leaders From Top 50 Markets, log on to Amazon or shoot Jim an email at jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
