“Bring your life experiences to the Newsroom,” Gloria Pazmino, CNN correspondent, said at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Regional Conference 2025, Day 1, at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, hosted by SPJ New York chapter, Deadline Club.
Gloria Pazmino started her career as a journalist and learned from the grassroots level with her dedication to local journalism. She said she just “fell in love with that (local journalism).”
Pazmino was interviewed by Michelle Watson, Region 1 coordinator for SPJ, who introduced Pazmino as a “proud New Yorker, a bilingual journalist and a storyteller committed to truth, context and accountability.”
“I knew I wanted to be a journalist since I was a little girl, and part of the reason that I wanted to go into journalism was because I really wanted to tell stories,” Pazmino told Watson.
“Through high school newspapers, I really got involved with journalism,” she said. “One of my first jobs was at a very tiny local newsroom in Washington Heights, which is a neighborhood in Manhattan, and it was my job to cover the neighborhood. I made very little money.”
“I would say my first big story was Hurricane Sandy here in New York City. We never had a weather event like Hurricane Sandy in New York City ever before,” she said. “And it was also happening right in my backyard. Right in the city where I grew up. So that was a tough but great learning experience. It was really kind of the first time I felt like I was in the middle.’
Talking about how journalism sometimes struggles between the ideas of objectivity and personal views, Pazmino said, “It’s expected that we should not bring up personal views or experiences. But I think there are certain settings through which you lived that helped you to shape your ideas. As a journalist, the things that I want to cover are those that I’m interested in. So I cover immigration and racial policy.”
“I think that whatever your life experience might be, you just should bring that into your work,” she said, “I think that can ultimately be for the better. I think it can make you a better reporter, a better journalist, a better researcher, rather than feeling like you have to separate your lived experience from your job.
“Now we hear more than ever before about the importance of diversity and the importance of diverse news for you. But I think in addition to that, diversity of lived experience is also really important,” Pazmino said, “Because I think it’s important to bring different perspectives into newsrooms. I think it makes us better journalists, better researchers.”
Stressing upon the arts of local journalist, Pazmino said, “Suppose you are covering a community that’s having an issue with water. Maybe there’s lead in the water, and we’re trying to figure out what’s happening to the children in this community as a result of the lead that’s in the water, and it needs to be held accountable.
“So understanding how communities and cities work, I think it’s integral to what we do as journalists,” she said. “Develop your sources, stay close to them. Make sure that they can trust you and that you can trust them.”
“I think that we, as journalists, sometimes get confused between being skeptical and being cynical. And I think we should all be skeptical of everything, right? That’s our job to question things,” she said.
“But now to a point, where we become cynics, about the world around us, and about the people around us,” Pazmino said, “Don’t get confused, it’s okay to be skeptical, but not so much that you’re just cynical around the world, around you and the people, because I think it robs you of that empathy and that humanity that you can’t reach the story.”
