Deepa Shivaram drives into the overflowing parking lot of WAHS on a rainy morning, greeted by a Journalist student standing in the rain awaiting her arrival. Eager to visit her old high school and connect with the budding journalists of Western, Shivaram walks into a school she finds both familiar and foreign.
This past Monday, the students of Journalism got to meet and talk with Deepa Shivaram, a reporter for NPR. A Western alum from the graduating class of 2013, Shivaram’s work focuses mainly on politics, as she is NPR’s White House Correspondent. That means if you’ve ever been watching a White House Press Briefing in Government class, chances are you saw Shivaram jotting down memorable quotes or asking questions. Prior to joining NPR, Shivaram worked for NBC News as an associate producer on “Meet the Press” and later trekked across America, reporting on the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
With all of her knowledge and experience in the field, Journalism students were thrilled to hear Shivaram’s advice and knowledge on the vast subject of reporting. Junior Maria Kinnan enjoyed connecting with Shivaram about their shared love for reporting.
“Her stories were very insightful as to how journalism and reporting kind of works in the real world… how quick the turnaround is from the event happening to an article being written and published,” she said.
Shivaram provided a multitude of stories to the class of young journalists, from visiting the Def Con hacker convention to her daily life as a reporter. One crucial story took place even before Shivaram’s career began. It was the story of how her love for photojournalism wilted when she discovered TV reporting.
“I went to the college paper at George Washington University as a photojournalist. What changed for me in college was that I got out of photojournalism and more into regular journalism… and that’s where I learned how to do a lot of video editing and interviewing and that’s where I was like, Oh, I think I want to go work in TV. I really liked the visual motion of all of it.”
This unexpected change led to a career rife with accomplishments. One of those accomplishments? Getting Chuck Todd on Instagram Live. Shivaram noted the importance of her youth and the opportunities it presented while working at NBC News.
“When I was working at the Meet the Press, I was the only person on staff who knew what Reddit was, or wanted to put Chuck Todd on Instagram Live. Nobody had these ideas…I literally built my career by making gifs of Chuck Todd because nobody ever knew how to say no to me because they didn’t even know what it was.”
Shivaram then stressed to the young journalists to use their age to their advantage just as she had done. “That’s applicable to whatever job you guys go into…The fact that you are very competent, maybe using Tik Tok or using a social media platform or being really comfortable using AI…bring that to the table and whatever job you go into.”
Within these stories was something crucial, the underlying lesson Shivaram was taught through her experiences. “I live by a very strict mantra that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Shivaram notes on the motto she learned during her time in Journalism class. “That should be how you treat journalism, because 99% of the time that you ask someone for permission they’re gonna say no. And the whole point of being a journalist is to not ask people permission.”
