Perspective on journalism: Isaac Salazar
Courtesy: Isaac Salazar, used with permission.
Isaac Salazar is a video journalist who has worked for the CBS affiliate in Corpus Christi, Texas, the NBC affiliate KVOA in Tucson, Arizona, and for ABC 15 in Phoenix. He has been recognized for his outstanding editing and video journalism with an Emmy, multiple Associated Press awards and a 2008 Edward R. Murrow Award.
April interviewed Salazar in 2017 about a variety of topics including:
How he got started
Journalism as history
The importance of listening
Changes in journalism
““There was a huge fire downtown, one of the furniture stores was burning, and I videotaped it. It was really a great feeling to capture that fire, which got me to thinking, maybe I should be a news photographer.””
Here, Salazar describes how he got his start in journalism.
““Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy was shot and there’s a camera and a bunch of cameras right there when it happened. ... [T]hey were there recording history, and we would never have had that had it not been for journalism.”
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Salazar next describes the value of journalism as history, and refers to the shooting of President John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. A video of that event follows this discussion
““People want to, especially if it’s an emotional story, they want to tell you something. But you don’t ask the right question and they’re not going to tell you. They’re not just going to just spit it out and say ‘that person was the love of my life . . . .’””
In this clip Salazar talks about the skill of listening and its value to journalists.
““We used to tell three-minute stories. And three minutes was the average story. Now if you’re going past a minute five, you’re not going to air.””
Salazar discusses changes in the television news business in the following clip.