Living History: Seeing the News First
Perita Carpenter '02, ABC News Assistant
By Julie C. Grady ’82
Perita Carpenter '02 remembers the night the war began in Iraq. As a production assistant for ABC News in Washington, D.C., she had a special assignment to operate the profile, a machine that loads video and merges it with graphics for broadcasting. She remembers seeing the bombing and working on the news that night and reporting the news that was happening that moment.
"I was living history," she said. "I was absolutely amazed. I was seeing the news before anyone else was. To think that some people are so far removed from what happened. I felt like I was living it."
Carpenter is part of the 24/7 team, a group that works in the Washington, D.C., bureau on producing ABC News live briefs that are broadcast on the air and uploaded to the ABC News website. She is responsible for graphics and video editing, as well as editing voice-overs and other sounds which are called sound on tape, or SOT, for news briefs. She also designs the lower third of the screen - or chyrons - that include the correspondent's name and other information. Her team does two live news briefs each night, and one day she hopes to do the writing as well as the production work.
At Trinity, Carpenter was an English major with a minor in education. She graduated cum laude and was the editor-in-chief of the 2002 Trinilogue. In addition, she wrote for the Trinity Times and was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., America's first Greek-letter organization established by Black college women.
Though she is just two years removed from Trinity, Carpenter has already learned the power of networking. It was through Alpha Kappa Alpha that Carpenter first got production experience. A fellow sorority sister, Stephanie Leonard '97, contacted Carpenter about a part-time job working in production for America's Most Wanted, where Leonard was production manager. "What started as a way to make extra money turned into something that I absolutely loved," Carpenter noted.
After graduation, Carpenter was offered a job at ABC News through a connection at the Eastern High School Choir in Washing-ton, D.C., a group Carpenter belonged to in high school. A board member from the choir and Carpenter's mentor, Marianne Brown-low, introduced her to A'Lelia Bundles, former producer and deputy bureau chief at ABC News. Bundles, now the director of talent development for ABC news, hired Carpenter in August 2002 as a desk assistant.
The first big story Carpenter worked on at ABC was the Washington area sniper in October 2002. She remembers the events vividly.
"It was kind of crazy reading all the papers and the wires," she explained. "The shootings always happened at the oddest hours. We would get a report there was a shooting, then send a crew out to do stand ups."
Carpenter worked closely with producers to get the reports on the air. "I was at the heart of all the madness. You really get to see how a newsroom operates. It was crazy, but it really made me realize how much I loved working in the news."
Though Carpenter has been at ABC less than two years, her appetite for network news has been whetted. "I hope one day to produce and write the news," she said. She would prefer to stay at the network level, and loves the experience she is gaining at ABC, even though her current work hours are from midnight to 9:00 a.m. Eventually she thinks she might want to branch off into entertainment, and perhaps do production work for news magazine shows and sitcoms. "Hopefully one day I'll be doing feature movies," she said.
Carpenter hasn't lost her Trinity connection either. She's currently the resident director for Cuvilly Hall and knows many Trinity students. She advises current students interested in pursuing broadcast journalism to work diligently. "You definitely need to be a go-getter," she states. "You can never give up, not even on a day where everything is going wrong. You have to keep on striving."
She's also learned that broadcast journalism is a tough business to be in. "You have to have a backbone to work in news. There is nothing to sugar coat it," she said. But, armed with her degree and Trinity education, Carpenter has the courage to pursue her dreams. "Trinity gave me confidence!" she declared. "When I left Trinity, I felt that I could do any thing. Trinity helped me realize that dreams really do come true."
