From Managing Director of a Major Wealth Management Company To CNN Intern

The Autonomous podcast with Vlad Duthiers of CBS News— on his reinvention at 40-years-old and his path up a new ladder in media

Most interns in the media business are somewhere between 18 and 22-years-old. Most are coming in without much life experience, without much job experience. Most aren’t 40-years-old, and leaving a life making six-figures. But Vladimir Duthiers’ path to the anchor chair was unlike most.

Duthiers discussed this and more in the latest Autonomous podcast, which you can listen to in full here. For Duthiers, the career reinvention was about taking a leap, and not wanting to say later “what if?” [41:40 in the podcast]:

For a lot of people, no matter what they do for a living, no matter who they are, there’s always a fear of the unknown, there’s always a fear of what happens next.

Duthiers details his rise in the media business, starting in Haiti, going through Nigeria and now at CBS News. Listen to the FULL podcast here, or below, more quotes from the overall interview:

Duthiers was born in Queens, New York, to parents who were from Haiti. “Being a first generation American really skews the way that you view the world, and the way your family views you,” he said. [1:10]

He “intended to go into journalism” after college but ended up on Wall Street instead, working for Lehman Brothers. That job, and others in the industry, led him to work from France for eight years, and travel to 20 different countries, working his way up the ladder to Managing Director, with 10 people reporting to him and raising billions in countries like Japan for wealth management company Bernstein. [10:15]

But he had an epiphany one day: “I just thought to myself, this isn’t what I saw myself doing, when I was 10 or 11 or 12. I thought I’d be a reporter, I thought I’d be a journalist.” [14:10]

So he went back to journalism school at Columbia, told the career office he wanted to work at 60 Minutes, CNN or Fox News, and ended up meeting Anderson Cooper, who would become his colleague, friend and mentor (after an internship with Christiane Amanpour at CNN). He went with Cooper to the Haiti earthquake, where he served as production assistant and interpreter — his first real journalism assignment. [17:20]

We talked about Duthiers work as a correspondent in Nigeria covering Boko Haram [27:12], his move to CBS News as anchor for CBSN and more [35:45] and his advice for young journalists (“don’t ever let your ego get in the way”) [22:20].

We also talked about what comes next in media — as Duthiers’ anchor work for CBS News’ streaming channel CBSN represents a dramatic shift in what it means to anchor the news [51:00]:

We don’t know how people are going to be doing things in five years, but it’s clearly not going to be the way it has been for the last 30 or 40 years. So being able to get ahead of that curve, or at least provide an alternative…that is huge for people who decided to be cord-cutters.

Thanks to Vlad Duthiers — please listen and give any feedback (good or bad) as we continue to shape the podcast!