Bravo!

Publish a new book? Land a big client? Win a nice award? Move up in the world, or decide to take your well-deserved retirement? Drop us a note to share your achievements and accomplishments and we’ll share them with the Society membership.

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Tyler Kingkade ’11: How the job market made me better

I owa felt like a small place to which I had already reached my peak by the time I graduated from college. I had done TV reporting and realized it just wasn’t for me. I’d done print reporting and looked around to conclude I didn’t feel like I wanted to stick around in the Hawkeye state’s newspapers for my own reasons.

During my senior year I spent most weeks adjusting my resume and writing various cover letters until March, when I found a spot in Washington, D.C. I first applied to a program called The Fund for American Studies, mistakenly thinking it was the same as another Greenlee student had done a year before. Only later did I find out it was something most Iowans don’t participate in – but it was fantastic nonetheless.

The program had me living on Georgetown University’s campus, taking ethics, economics and media classes with a full-time internship as well. The internship at The Huffington Post was a result of my contributions to the site during my collegiate years. We also had visits to places such as the State Department, the World Bank, POLITICO and other Washington institutions, while hearing from professionals in the political media world.

I’ve continued my work at The Huffington Post beyond my initial internship term, and now have two alumni networks to tap into as I search for a full-time salary. The East Coast certainly fits me; the public transportation has allowed me to escape driving on my own, and traveling between D.C. and New York is merely a $30 bus ticket.

The entertainment and shopping is better, although groceries are significantly more expensive than Hy-Vee. Not to mention the higher rent, going from $275 a month back in Ames to $1,250 here. Nonetheless, the media world has so much more opportunity out here – not only in places to work but in what to cover.

I have had to learn the art of networking. Getting a couple editors at prominent news outlets to tell me they were interested in finding a spot for me was the result of playing a version of “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” to get informal meetings to begin the process. It’s a long process, not one that happens simply because you send out a single email to someone you sort-of know.

Starting with an internship, however, was a smart way to go for me. As accomplished as I may have been as an undergraduate, and despite my local internships, I had not worked on a fast-paced national level with hundreds of competitors and the HuffPost’s big reputation to uphold.

I’ve gotten more comfortable in this role and even began to notice where others fail. I have certainly grown as a journalist, and perhaps this rough job market has pushed me to a higher standard out of necessity. I need to improve, or get left behind. It’s not enough to be as good as the current reporters on Capitol Hill, in New York, or at city papers around the Mid-Atlantic; I need to be better.

–By Tyler Kingkade      

Tyler Kingkade graduated from Iowa State in journalism and political science this year and now works at The Huffington Post in Washington. The Des Moines native was editor-in-chief of Ethos magazine, and he worked or interned for the Iowa State Daily, ISUtv, KCCI and the Iowa Independent.

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Christine Romans ’93: Anchor, author makes the day last

For most people, a full day of work in the news business that begins at 3:15 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m. tucking three kids under 5 into bed would be plenty.

Not for Christine Romans.

The 1993 Iowa State journalism graduate also has managed to write two personal finance books in the past two years. How’d she find the time? Romans wrote on weekdays in one-hour chunks after her shift on American Morning at CNN and on Saturdays in the two hours and 11 minutes it took her husband to take their kids to Coney Island for an outing.

Romans started her first book, Smart Is the New Rich: If You Can’t Afford it – Put It Down (publisher John Wiley & Sons; Amazon; Barnes & Noble), in February 2010. She was pregnant and determined to finish before the baby was born. By May, she was done.

Romans delivered the book’s final edits on a Friday in July and delivered her third son that Sunday.

“I didn’t know to have the luxury of writers’ block,” says Romans, 40, who has been a correspondent at CNN since 1999. Since February, she has been filling in as co-anchor of American Morning, and is permanently the anchor of Your Bottom Line, which airs Saturday morning.

In November, How to Speak Money (Wiley; Amazon; Barnes & Noble), which Roman co-authored with CNN financial expert Ali Velshi will be released. The book looks at how men and women spend and invest differently. It also discusses managing student debt, budgeting and retirement planning.

“We cranked it out together,” Romans says of the writing process. “We both integrated it into our lives.” The two would write before work or steal away to a conference room after a meeting. The topics were things they could relate to and were living – so the book “wrote itself,” says Romans.

It’s been a fascinating time to be covering finance and international news, says Romans. “Covering the Arab Spring, I felt like I was in a chair to history,” she says.

As for her reporting and interviewing skills, Romans learned those from her professors at Iowa State.

She can still hear Giles Fowler saying: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and “Brevity is the byproduct of vigor.” Doing education coverage of what makes a good teacher, Romans says she thinks of Giles, Dick Haws and Barbara Mack. “The skills I have learned at Iowa State have really served me well,” she says.

While at ISU, Romans was editor-in-chief of the Daily and in 2009 received the James W. Schwartz Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism and Communication from ISU’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication. Romans stays connected to her ISU friends and gives the occasional tour of the CNN studio when someone is in New York.

As for the future, Romans says she always thought her first book would be a novel: “It’s still bubbling – maybe a financial thriller. I need to think about that.”

–By Caralee Adams      

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John Arends ’77: Bringing the story of Jack Trice to life

John Arends was an Iowa State journalism student in the mid-1970s when naming the football stadium after Jack Trice was first floated on campus.

“It was the ultimate underdog story,” says Arends, who at the time was features editor at the Iowa State Daily and a varsity gymnast. He was fascinated with the story of Trice, the first African-American football player at Iowa State who died from injuries suffered in a 1923 game.

As a graduate student in English in the 1980s, Arends, a 1977 alum of the Greenlee School, wrote a play about Jack Trice for his master’s thesis. He tinkered with it over the years but got serious about it a few years ago when he turned 50. He revised his screenplay, Trice, and entered it in the prestigious Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Of the 6,000-plus submissions, it finished in the top 30.

“That told me there was enough of a story there,” says Arends, now president and chief executive officer of ARENDS, a marketing communications firm in Batavia, Illinois, which his father Don Arends, a 1952 Greenlee grad, established in 1958.  Arends and his wife, Anne (Butler) Arends, a ’78 ISU grad, sent all three of their kids through Iowa State. Arends has also served on a Greenlee School advisory council.

Trice caught the eye of Chicago Scriptworks, a non-profit theater group that produces four staged readings a year. On September 15, Arends’ screenplay will be performed at the 95-seat Theater Wit in Chicago.

“It’s so exciting to see professionals take your work off the page and give it life,” says Arends, who has helped with casting and has been tweaking the dialogue as the 20-member cast and crew rehearse for the big night.

Short-term, Arends hopes the audience members walk out of the theatre moved by the courage of Trice and will want to share his story. Long-term, he’d like to see the story become a movie.

“I hope it does lead to a filmmaker wanting to tell the story in the way that does Jack justice and does Iowa – and Iowa State – justice,” says Arends. “It took a long time to get there, but Iowa State has something that no other university has, and it’s because of the heart of university and the people of Iowa.”

–By Caralee Adams      

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Scott Stanzel ’95: From White House to the West Coast

Eighteen months ago, Scott Stanzel helped George W. Bush exit the White House, watching as the outgoing president transitioned to life as a private citizen.

Only then did he turn to himself.

“Those final days, I was as busy as I had ever been – and I wasn’t thinking that much about what my next job would be,” says Stanzel, who ended his tenure as deputy press secretary. “I was at the White House until January 20. I stopped getting paid at noon that day.”

He knew a couple things: His next job would not be in Washington, D.C., and it probably wouldn’t be in politics. Beyond that, he had a lot of things to consider.

Stanzel, now 37 years old, graduated from Iowa State in 1995 after a campus tenure that included involvement in VEISHEA, the ISU Student Alumni Association, and the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He only dabbled in campus politics, helping a friend get elected as president of the Government of the Student Body.

After graduation, however, the Sac City native built a career in Republican politics, spending time in the 1996 Robert Dole presidential campaign, the office of Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the Bush campaigns and the Bush White House. He left for two years to work in communications at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., and then returned to Washington for two final years in the White House press office.

Upon President Bush’s exit, Stanzel went back to Seattle, where he still owned his house from his Microsoft days. By June 2009, he had formed Stanzel Communications, a public relations firm that works for corporate clients as well as some political ones.

“It’s been a tremendous learning experience,” he says. “I had successes I hadn’t planned on, disappointments I couldn’t have predicted.”

One of those successes: He meshed his work for a company that produced online video advertising with his contacts in the political world to help them expand on their support of the successful Scott Brown Senate campaign in Massachusetts.

Despite the complexity and the challenges in starting a new business, Stanzel’s takeaway lesson is pretty simple: “If you do good work, and establish strong relationships with people, then you are setting yourself up for success,” he says. (In the video at left,  Stanzel talks about his career; the interview was with a Canadian public affairs program.)

His lesson for students coming out of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication is similar. Staying up-to-date with new technology is, of course, important. But relationships with people will always serve you – even as technology changes. “From my very first campaign, I took special care to keep track of people I spoke with,” he says. “I have records of every reporter I have ever talked with.”

“It’s very important to make sure you spend the time and take the care that is needed to develop relationships,” he adds. “And thank people for spending time talking with you – that makes a difference.”

Stanzel remains heavily involved with Iowa State, serving on both a Greenlee advisory council and the ISU Alumni Association’s board of directors.

–By Chris Adams      

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John Akers ’79: Helping Build Cyclone Basketball Greatness?

Eventually, I knew that my recent interview with Iowa State basketball coach Fred Hoiberg for Basketball Times would lead to a discussion of the many coaches in his career. With equal certainty, I knew he would forget to mention one of the first of those coaches.

That would be me.

Larry Bird and Larry Brown. Tim Floyd and Kevin McHale. Johnny Orr and John Akers. Which of these names does not belong with the others?

I was a co-coach of Fred Hoiberg’s fifth-grade flag-football team while I was the sports editor of the Ames Tribune in 1984. His coaches back then were such great talent evaluators that the eventual all-state quarterback spent his fifth-grade season at wide receiver. (In our defense, our actual QB, Bubba Lichtenberg, was an ISU assistant football coach’s son who would play quarterback at Ohio University.)

My life even took some parallel paths with Hoiberg after that. While I was covering Stanford’s sports programs for the San Jose Mercury News, he included Stanford among his finalists before becoming “The Mayor” and the most popular basketball player in Iowa State history. And one year after my wife and I moved to Minneapolis, Hoiberg joined the Timberwolves.

Hoiberg had no idea he was following me around – or thinking of following me. I know this because during his first media day with the Timberwolves, I reintroduced myself to him as his fifth-grade flag-football coach. A long and awkward silence followed. Stalker, I imagined him thinking.

Fortunately, my recent interview with him went much better. My story on Fred Hoiberg will appear in the September issue of Basketball Times.

–By John Akers      

Akers worked for the Ames Tribune, the Iowa State Daily and the ISU sports information department during his time on campus. He is managing editor of Basketball Times, based in Charlotte, N.C.

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Mark Flora ’87: From ‘The Law’ to Prison (In a Good Way)

In the mid-1980s, Mark Flora commanded center stage in what was then one of the top bands in Ames: The Law.

Packing Thumbs Up, Cy’s Roost, the Maintenance Shop and other musical hot spots of the day, The Law played a blend of edgy pop, with Flora on guitar and vocals. On campus, Flora edited the entertainment section of the Iowa State Daily. He graduated and worked at a small South Dakota weekly, freelanced for a pop magazine, and contributed to a beer magazine.

Today, Flora lives in Minneapolis and is out of journalism – but the music lives on. Daytime, he works as an audio editor for a music company that sells lines of music in kiosks at Target stores. Nights and weekends, he leads The Holy Rocka Rollaz, playing early American rock ‘n’ roll.

The group had its start about six years ago as a prison ministry band. Then last year, on the way back from a gig at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, Flora and his band mates decided to branch out.  “We’ve been building toward a live show to non-incarcerated folks since then,” he says. “We plan on hittin’ clubs and ballrooms this fall and winter. Hopefully the car shows next summer.  And rib fests. River fests. Beer fests. County Fairs. State Fairs. And prisons.”

He and his wife Lisa (they have two daughters: McCartney, 9, and Sky, 6) have worked together on music projects, ranging from their band Florapop to an Americana hymns project, including the song “Where We’ll Never Grow Old” (show in video).

–By Chris Adams      

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Former Professor Giles Fowler: Practicing What He Preached

Giles Fowler spent two decades teaching students how to craft the perfect sentence. It’s a painstaking process subject to multiple rewrites and plenty of frustration – and never more so than when Fowler retired from Iowa State and jumped into the biggest writing project of his professional life.

“When I was finally given the first copy of the manuscript, I read through it and was horrified,” Fowler says of the now-published book. “I was thinking, ‘How dare I submit this thing for publication?’”

He did, of course, and the resulting “Deaths on Pleasant Street” is a page-turner set in a stately mansion near Kansas City 100 years ago. Revisiting a sensational murder among the area’s moneyed set, Fowler’s book achieved an unusual twofer: an award from a Missouri historical society, as well as an award for true-crime book of the year award, given by an organization that highlights the work of independent publishers.

“Deaths on Pleasant Street: The Ghastly Enigma of Colonel Swope and Dr. Hyde” was put out by Truman State University Press, a publishing house better known for serious history than true crime — even 100-year-old true crime. (Links to purchase from Amazon.com or the publisher.) The historians who peer-reviewed Fowler’s book – as an academic book, it was subject to the same rigor as the typical tome about war or politics – didn’t know what to make this gothic tale with grisly crime scenes and a corpse so frozen it couldn’t be autopsied.

“Academic historians didn’t get it at all,” he said. “I was trying to write a page-turner.”

Not to say the research wasn’t exhaustive: Fowler spent months reading archives and trials transcripts – on microfiche – and every issue of two newspapers from the period the case made national news. At the time, the story of a high-society doctor possibly poisoning his own relatives was monitored from coast to coast.

Fowler spent 24 years on the Kansas City Star as a theater critic and magazine writer. He spent another 20 teaching ISU students long-form feature writing, literary journalism, and basic reporting, and was the faculty adviser to the Iowa State Daily for several years.

He first heard of the murder case as a young Star reporter in the 1960s; even then, more than 50 years after the deaths, the case captured the city’s interest. Fowler began work on the book after retiring in 2003, researching and reporting for about three years and then writing for another two. He wrote and rewrote and then rewrote again – agonizing over every paragraph, every sentence, every word. The book was published in 2009 – 100 years after the deaths.

“It inhabited my damn life,” he said. “I’ve never worked remotely as hard on anything.”

The story has attracted the interest of Hollywood. Bill Paxton, the actor known for roles in Titanic, Twister and the current HBO series “Big Love,” is a distant relative of an attorney involved in the 1909 case; he contacted Fowler to talk about developing it for the movies or for HBO. No word yet on whether those talks will pan out.

–By Chris Adams      

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