Perspective on journalism: Anne Davenport
Artist Ai WeiWei (left) with Anne Davenport. Courtesy: Anne Davenport, used with permission.
Anne Davenport is the award-winning senior deputy producer and arts and culture producer at the PBS NewsHour, where she has worked since 2000. Prior to that she was a political producer for ABC News and general producer for CBS News. Davenport began her career as a one-man band for an NBC affiliate in Iowa.
April interviewed Davenport in 2018 about a variety of topics including:
How I got started
Producing TV news
Changes in journalism
““. . . [I]f you are outside your comfort zone, you’re exactly in the right place because that’s how you’re going to learn.” ”
Here, Davenport describes how she got her start in journalism.
““I always tell correspondents, and I truly mean it, they miss out on the fun part.”
”
In this clip Davenport discusses the art of television news producing, how some of her stories were created and lessons she's learned from decades in the business. Some of the stories she mentions can be found below.
““I covered a presidential campaign in 1996, on the plane for a year, and they would travel multiple crews. And so, you could argue that was a bloated time, that that’s not really needed. You could also probably make the argument now that we’re pretty much as lean and mean as is possible to still get a quality, network-quality product out.””
Here, Davenport reflects on the changes she’s seen in broadcast journalism over the years.