From serving as a volunteer with Temple University Television’s OwlSports Update to taking on a news producer role at WPDE in South Carolina, Ayanna Clark, KLN ‘18, has made rapid progress in her career. Recently, she accepted a position at NBC 10 Boston, an NBC-owned-and-operated station located in a national top ten media market. Clark plans to continue to draw from the lessons she learned at Klein College of Media and Communication to help her adjust to her big move and her new position.
As a student at Klein, Clark started as a communication studies major and switched to media studies and production because it aligned more closely with her career goal to become a producer. She decided to join OwlSports Update and considered the program a pivotal part of her success at Temple and beyond. The experience gave her newsroom leadership skills, and she moved up in the ranks from being one of the program’s volunteer reporters to a senior producer.
Matt Fine, executive producer of OwlSports Update, worked with Clark on the program and was impressed by how she conducted herself among the OwlSports Update team. She was especially helpful to other students who were new to the program.
“She was just persistent enough in raising her hand when we were looking for people to do things and she said yes enough that it was impossible to miss her, it was impossible for her to blend in with everybody else,” Fine says.
Combined with her experience as an undergraduate intern for NBCUniversal and Comcast SportsNet and her stint as a production assistant at NBCUniversal right before graduating from Klein, Clark was ready to hit the ground running. She started working as a weekend producer at WPDE in June 2018 and was eventually promoted to producer for the 5 p.m. news show. Now, she is the 6 p.m. weekday news producer.
“I definitely think that starting out in the real world as a news producer definitely gave me a more broader spectrum for when I’m able to go to a different station,” she says.
Victoria Spechko, news director of WPDE, recognized early on that although Ayanna has grown in her abilities as a producer, she already had a solid foundation from her previous experience producing for OwlSports Update.
“She was very outgoing and passionate about pursuing producing,” Spechko says. “She was very eager to learn and I think when you’re coming straight out of school, you don’t know what you don’t know. So you have to be a sponge and you have to be willing to open your mind and listen to constructive criticism and really want to grow and be better.”
When applying for her upcoming role at NBC 10 Boston, Clark utilized her love of learning and her talent for networking to reach out to contacts she gained during her time at Temple, particularly those at NBCUniversal in Philadelphia. Because Boston is a large media market with high expectations of its media practitioners, she knew she had to establish connections with her prospective colleagues before she could take on more responsibilities. She is excited to have more opportunities to grow as a news producer and looks forward to sharing the same space as other NBC Boston stations such as Telemundo and NBC Sports at the NBCUniversal Boston Media Center.
“You never know where you’re gonna go, who can help you get there, who other people know,” Clark says. “So I definitely think that that is one of the biggest things that I learned at Temple and that I carried on with me.”
Clark will begin working as a news producer at NBC 10 Boston in May.