Curious, there, and always learning, CBS News Radio correspondent and Weekend Roundup host Allison Keyes practices what she preaches when it comes to doing the best you possibly can in journalism.
“Be curious. Be there. Do stories about things you don’t know anything about so that you learn something,” Keyes told Barrett News Media over a Zoom call. On her show, Keyes’ segment “Kaleidoscope with Allison Keyes”, she discusses topics like race, gender, income inequality, and other social justice issues on a weekly basis.
Born and raised in Chicago, Keyes got an early start in the industry. “I sort of had been doing journalism since I was in high school, writing for our high school newspaper, writing terrible ledes about volleyball, like ‘Service Smack,’ you know?” She added, “So I guess even then I was thinking radio, we had an in-house radio station in school. So I did interviews for that and did a little DJing. And then I got to college and was like, ‘Well, I can do this.’ So I DJed at Illinois Wesleyan University, which is where I went to school.”
She planned to DJ until, “I got out of school, or as I was getting out of school, I went and had an interview — and I’m not going to name what station — and the program director was pretty much like, ‘Well, sure, you could listen to that voice. What else will you do for me?’ And I was like, not that.”
After the close encounter, Keyes, who was inspired by Lu Palmer, went back to her roots. “I decided, ‘Well, okay, I can do news. I like news. I’ve written for papers before so I can change [from DJing to news].’ So that’s how I ended up in the business.”
Through the span of her over 25-year career, Allison Keyes has developed incredible insight into what makes a great story. “It’s getting people to listen to a voice or read quotes from or see on television from somebody that they might not meet in their neighborhood, at the neighborhood store.” She added, “As bad as the divide is in this nation right now, it would be less if people just ran into people of different colors and different socioeconomic groups at the grocery store, for example, or at an outdoor live music concert, at a park, or at a museum or something like that.”
Allison Keyes has won countless awards for her work, but one in particular stands out, “One of my Gracies. I won for my coverage of the anniversary of September 11th. And I’m going to try and tell this story and not cry, because I almost got killed that day. My parents thought that I was dead.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Keyes was in her Brooklyn apartment and saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “I went, ‘Oh crap!’, and ran for the car. They’re paging me and I’m like, ‘I know’, and I’ve just gotten waved onto the Brooklyn Bridge because I’m waving my microphone and I’ve got my press badge on. And I called my mother to tell her everything was okay and then the second plane hit. So she heard the second plane hit and my voice went dead. She thought I was dead.”
Keyes recalled, “I parked in front of City Hall and ran for the Trade Center. And people are jumping out of windows, holding hands as the building burned. I had never seen anything like that in my whole life.” She went on by saying, “When tower two collapsed, I was like a half a block away or less, and everyone’s running the other way and firefighters are running into that building still trying to save people. It was really, really something.”
At the time, Allison Keyes was working for both ABC News’ Good Morning America and WCBS Newsradio 880. She reported from Ground Zero for two months, “Because how could you be somewhere else? You would come out of buildings and there’d be fliers on your cars, people that were looking for missing people for weeks and weeks and weeks.”
She holds this specific Gracie Award dearly because, “It’s still to this day means everything to me to watch the unity that people are capable of when they’re not being jerks and when they care about what’s happening to others. New York City became a whole city. Nobody was fighting. People would do anything. It was a whole unified city.”
As for today, she does not see that kind of unity in America, “Every time I interview somebody on both sides of an issue, I ask them. Nobody knows. Everyone is so angry at everyone else.”
Allison Keyes later added, “I feel like it’s getting worse every day. Every time I cover another demonstration, people are yelling at each other in a way where the anger is so deep in their souls. You wonder ‘How do they get past that?’ Remember when you used to be able to go to a restaurant and people would disagree? You might not know them, and you’d sit at a bar watching baseball or whatever and you could have a conversation and people would disagree [but then when they leave] they’d be, ‘Well, nice to meet you.’”
She went on to add, “And now it becomes screaming matches where people are going outside to fight. I don’t know that. Something really has to be done. Because if it isn’t, I don’t know how we survive as a nation. I am hopeful that that can be done. But I don’t know that it’s possible because people aren’t listening to each other anyway.”
For those looking to better the world through journalism her advice is simple, “Never forget where you came from. Never forget who helped you get to where you are. Never forget the people that saved you and got you other jobs.” She later added, “The other advice I have for people that are trying to get into this business is to meet other people in it, because you will be standing on the shoulders of so many people.”
Krystina Alarcon Carroll is a news media columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. She has experience in almost every facet of the industry including: digital and print news; live, streamed, and syndicated TV; documentary and film productions. Her prior employers have included NY1 and Fox News Digital and the Law & Crime Network. You can find Krystina on X (formerly twitter) @KrystinaAlaCarr.
