San Jose City College’s communication department hosted a symposium on Oct. 25, inviting figures from media and public relations to speak on their career journeys. The symposium, spearheaded by professors Guadalupe Alatorre and Shelley Giacalone, also put a spotlight on projects by communication students.

The event lasted for three hours, headlining people such as Heather Knight, chief of the New York Times’ San Francisco bureau. The position, she says, is “the best of both worlds”, allowing her to live in northern California and write about circumstances in the region for one of the largest newspapers in the country.

Knight recalled her journey through journalism. She started out writing articles for a class at Davis High School, then moved on to attend Stanford. As part of her studies at Stanford, she lived in Washington, D.C. for six months, interning for the LA Times.

“I was really surprised that they would let this college intern go out and cover press conferences at the White House and whatnot, and actually run my stories in the paper,” Knight said about her internship in the capitol.

While interning for the San Francisco Chronicle, Knight worked her way through the ranks, starting out by covering the local school district. She was able to work her way up to covering broader city matters such as homelessness, as well as then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, and began working for the New York Times in September 2023.

The next speakers were Christian de la Cruz and Erick Morales, who spoke about their careers in radio broadcast. De La Cruz began his career in 1997, when he was offered an internship with a radio station doing a sports show. His company launched La Preciosa, a former rock station which was converted to Spanish music.

De La Cruz would go into sales, citing a desire to make money off of his own ideas. “Eventually, I got to the point where I said, ‘Well, I’m giving all these ideas to individuals. They’re making money off my ideas. I wanna make my own money, I want to do my own thing,’” he said.

Erick Morales is originally from Guatemala, where he pursued teaching. However, his dream was to host a radio show, so he emigrated to the United States in 2000 to pursue that passion. He was hired as a board operator for a radio station, putting commercials into the show, but it didn’t involve speaking on air.

Morales began to work at promotions for the station, giving out flyers and other merchandise, but he was still eager to talk to people. “My program director at that point liked the fact that I was really outgoing, and had the confidence to speak in a mic. So I started doing the radio show on the weekends,” he said. Morales continues to climb the ladder, moving to radio shows on weekdays, and then the morning show for La Kalle.

Later on, Morales was let go from this job due to budget cuts, and began working in sales for the Spanish-language radio station La Raza.

“One of the most important things in my life that I always tried to apply is to meet the person that’s next to you,” Morales advised. “You gotta meet people, you gotta be cool with people, respectful. Because you never know who you’re going to end up working with, working for, or who’s going to ask you for a job one day.”

De La Cruz and Morales spoke on the changing broadcast industry, including artificial intelligence. One phenomenon detailed is the existence of AI “listeners”.

“We’re getting to the point where, with AI, you can’t tell that it’s a computer-generated voice,” Morales said. “Even AI listeners are existing now in certain states. They’ve done that up north in Seattle, up north in Sacramento, where we have listeners now as AI. If they’re in a crunch, and they can’t pick up the phone, at a push of a button, someone will say ‘Oh, I want to listen to Taylor Swift!’ and you’ll think it’s a real person, but it’s actually AI.”

The symposium wasn’t just a way for professionals to talk about their experiences in their respective fields. Communications students used it to show off projects they’d made for their classes, which took the form of board games or research on particular countries.

One of these students was 42 year old Maxim Neymin, whose project was research on Egypt for COMS-030, Intercultural Communications.

“It talks about a country, and how it relates to intercultural communications,” Neymin explained the background of the project. “So it talks about a culture. It talks about, ‘What is this country’s government?’, ‘What is this country popular for?’, ‘What are the different things that are in this country?’.”

Neymin’s tri fold display board had a few facts about the country, and photos of iconic landmarks such as the Sphinx. The Egyptian flag was featured among cutouts of camels and names of notable cities, such as Alexandria and Giza.

This was the second communications symposium of 2024, with the first being held in April. That event invited writers from the San Jose Spotlight, a local newspaper dedicated to covering circumstances throughout Santa Clara County. It also showcased student projects much in the same way that the October symposium did.