Journalist Alicia Chang on Media, Entrepreneurship and the Universe
As a reporter Alicia Chang covered the cosmos. Now she’s scoping the health and science landscape, hoping to discover new tools to explain the field to audiences in more compelling ways.
Alicia, a health and science editor for The Associated Press in New York, didn’t always plan on a career in media.
Instead, Alicia, who was born in Ecuador but grew up in Brooklyn, studied chemistry at Queens College, New York, taking some journalism classes on the side.
While a student there, she worked on the school newspaper where she helped expose a top educator’s disparaging remarks about remedial students. The educator later resigned, and Alicia became hooked on news. “This was my first experience realizing the power of the press and the duty to hold people in power accountable for their words and actions,” she says.
A meeting with an AP recruiter ahead of graduation led to a writing and editing test. Alicia passed, and spent the summer of 2000 in Detroit covering breaking news, writing broadcast copy and learning the ropes. “The rest is history,” she says.
Alicia spent the first five years of her career as a reporter, first in South Carolina and then in upstate New York.
In 2005, she headed out to California, where as part of her beat as a science writer based in Los Angeles she got to write about space exploration. “Covering the cosmos has been a treat,” she says. Alicia says the position offered her a front row seat to robotic missions to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, as well as giving her the chance to witness shuttle landings in the Mojave Desert before NASA retired the fleet.
“I’ll never forget the sound of twin sonic booms heralding a shuttle’s return to Earth,” she says.
Last year, Alicia returned to New York to take up her current editor role, working with other journalists on features and projects. Alicia says her transition from reporter to editor was smooth, mainly because of how AP works. “I’ve been a reporter and writer for most of my career, but I’ve also done editing stints,” she says. “When it came time to edit full-time, it wasn’t that huge of a leap.”
Alicia says people frequently ask her if she misses having a byline. And her answer? “Not as much as I thought I would,” she says.
Alicia’s currently enrolled at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism’s entrepreneurial journalism program. She says there has to be innovation at every media outlet, big or small, to keep up with the changing media landscape and more importantly, to stay ahead. “I want to learn more about digital media business models and what makes them sustainable,” she says. “This is a chance to explore and learn from instructors as well as like-minded fellows going through the same experience,” she adds.
At CUNY, Alicia is working on a project that looks at explaining complex health and science issues in simple yet engaging ways. “I think there is a huge opportunity in doing so through visuals, for example by creating short videos or using animation,” she says. “Those are areas that are ripe for research in terms of trying to find more ways to grab people.”
[This is part of a series of peer profiles introducing the 2018 class of Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism fellows at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.]
