Morena Basteiro

Profile

Assignment Editor, WABC-TV, New York, New York

Those who bring us the news aren’t often listed as essential workers, but their presence is crucial, especially during a crisis. Morena Basteiro learned this in 2020 when COVID-19 began killing people at an alarming rate, and she and her colleagues worked tirelessly to get out the news.

“The assignment desk is usually referred to as the nucleus of the newsroom,” says Basteiro. “We monitor everything that’s happening across the tri-state area and are first to get the breaking news. My job is to confirm what I find worthy of coverage and sound the alarm in the newsroom.”

“We worked day in and day out during the height of the pandemic,” says Basteiro. Then in May, two months after much of the world went into lockdown, a Black Minneapolis man named George Floyd was choked to death by White policeman Derek Chauvin. “Our focus shifted to covering the massive protests demanding police reform that swept through the city,” says Basteiro. The coverage WABC-TV News provided during the first wave of the pandemic and at the height of the George Floyd uprisings earned the station’s 11 p.m. newscast a National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in a large television market.

Basteiro says her success as a journalist owes much to what she learned about the real, day-to-day broadcast world in a Television, Radio & Emerging Media class. “A huge thanks to [Lecturer] Brian Dunphy,” she says. “His class and an internship at NY1 got me in the door that led to my career.”