By Will Mari

CNN correspondent Alex Quade covering U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Body armor: vest, helmet and anti-ballistic eyewear protection are essential, as well as being aware of your surroundings. Photo: Courtesy CNN

Alex Quade got there just in time.

It was the mid-1990s, and the UW alumna was a TV reporter in Atlanta when she heard about an opening at an upstart cable network called FOX News Channel.

Quade had called a vice-president from FOX, who apologized. He was done interviewing people, and had to catch a flight in an hour.

Quade said she could meet him at the airport.

Racing across Atlanta, she met the executive at the terminal. Fortunately for her, he was the last person to board the plane.

“OK Alex, you have one minute to sell yourself,” he said. Quade answered that she would do whatever it took to ethically get the job done: her out-of-breath presence confirmed this fact.

She got the job the next day.

After a short stint at FOX, she was hired on at Headline News and CNN, and has since made a career out of “going to bad places,” in her words, as an embedded reporter.

 

Quade grew up on the Eastside, and went to high school in Sammamish. For as long as she can remember, she wanted to be a reporter.

A boundless energy characterized her time at the UW, where she earned three degrees in five years in political science, speech communications and communications. By the time she graduated in 1992, she had finished 11 internships, all of them unpaid, at radio and TV stations across the city, all while working part-time.

“I did everything I could possibly do in the media world around Seattle,” she said. “I was kind of a busy girl.”

 

While in school, one of her jobs involved working for minimum wage in the mailroom at KIRO-TV.

“The moral to this story is, no job is beneath you,” Quade said. “Get your foot in the door … honest, hard-work gets you noticed, and you never know who you’ll meet and what work opportunities you’ll be exposed to from there,” she said.

Quade wasn’t afraid to the think outside the box, either.

Dared by a friend to try out for the Miss Seafair scholarship pageant, Quade initially dismissed the idea, but after hearing that winning it would mean a $6000 academic scholarship, she tried out and won it.

This can-do zeal served her well after she finished her time at the UW and entered the hyper-paced world of TV journalism.

The next several years meant “boot-strapping my way up through the local broadcasting ladder,” she said.

Her first stop was a small station in Yakima, where she covered agricultural news as a “one-man-band” that involved covering topics such as the problem of tumbleweeds on local highways. That was at the 126th largest media market in the country.

From there, she jumped to Chattanooga, Tennessee, the 76th largest market, the second in a series of quick stints at little stations. Her hard work soon paid off, however, when she got a job at the CBS affiliate station in Atlanta, which is one of the nation’s top ten markets.

She covered bigger stories with more resources, and had a cameraman for the first time, but still did all of the research, production and field reporting on her own.

“Local news is a good grounding,” she said. It gave her the chance to experience a little bit of everything and exposed her to a variety of stories.

After her big jump to Fox News and then CNN, Quade was assigned to cover conflict and disaster zones.

“As I got to know her, she struck me as hungry, hard-charging and creative — impressive in every way,” said Eason Jordan, the former chief news executive for CNN. “She was and is the most upbeat person I’ve ever known in a profession that’s loaded with skeptics and cranks,” he said.

“Her positive, outgoing personality helps her gain access to some of the most challenging places and personalities,” he said.

She works independently for several months, often embedded with a military unit in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, as she gathers interviews and footage that she shoots herself for long-form special series and documentaries.

“The goal is to find something unique and compelling that the folks back home can relate to, answering the fundamental  ‘Why should I care?’ question,” Quade said, which she learned in her UW journalism classes.

This challenge is especially acute in large-scale disasters.

In the wake of the December 2004 South Asian tsunami, she said the big networks went to locations that had logistical support, such as the beaches in Thailand. When Quade asked to go to ground zero, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, she was told that it was impossible, as even aid groups couldn’t make it in.

That didn’t stop Quade.

She flew to Jakarta and found her way there in three days, and was virtually the only reporter on the scene.

“That was the worst stuff I’ve ever seen … 90,000 people killed in one area,” she said. Even three weeks later, bodies were still being washed up. While horrific, Quade thinks her role as a journalist is critical to getting the story of places like Banda Aceh out to the larger world.

Extreme story-telling lies at the heart of what she does. Quade said she sees the absolute best and worst in people: she’s drawn to war zones for the opportunity to witness people in these situations, in what she calls the “gut human stuff” that people back in the United States can connect to.

“If we do our jobs right, if we take care with the way that we tell their stories, we can get the audience to go ‘hey, this guy or gal is a human being too.’”

Most recently, Quade returned from a six-month embedded tour in Iraq and Afghanistan with U.S. Special Operations Forces, typical of the work she does. She travels light with a small camera, boots, helmet and vest, and comes back to put it all together.

This means, of course, that she spends most of her reporting time in dangerous places often under fire.  In fact, she’s had several close calls with death in war zones. She was with the Marines in Fallujah when a car bomb exploded nearby, and while covering an air assault in a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, the chopper in front of her was shot down by Taliban RPG.

“You can’t get the story out if you are dead,” she said. But while it’s important to be safe, the risk is well worth it to her.

Quade said she never wants to anchor a desk, as she puts it.

“I absolutely love what I’m doing … I worked my butt off to do this kind of so-called ‘old-school journalism’, in the vein of legendary war correspondents Ernie Pyle and Joe Galloway,” she said. The new experiences, people and the exposure to history are what help inspire her to put boots on the ground and get dirty.

Journalism has a real impact on people, she said, and it’s much more of a calling than just another job.

“People should go into this career not to punch in a clock, but to tell stories and to write,” she said. “You should want to do this for free.”

Quade admits she’s come a long way from the KIRO mailroom.

“Who would have thought that Miss Seafair would turn in her tiara for a flak vest and helmet?”