Viewpoint: Spotlight Finds El Paso Journalist Behind The Scenes
The KVIA building on Rio Bravo Street off Executive Center Boulevard has glass front windows. In the northwest corner office, you?ll see News Director Brenda De Anda-Swann toiling away until late at night. She?s the hardest working news director I?ve ever known.
Brenda?s work ethic shows in our product, resulting in KVIA having the highest rated newscasts in our market.
Brenda and her managers take and develop a lot of entry-level TV reporters and writers and turn them into professionals. It?s a grueling task running a 40-person, round-the-clock news gathering operation that produces five hours of daily weekday news and another seven hours on the weekends.
Brenda is as pretty as any news anchor in El Paso, but chose to do her work in a less glamorous setting behind the scenes. These days her hardest task is dealing with a demanding and cranky general manager who wasn?t half the KVIA news director that she is today. .
I?m touched that her alma mater, the University of Texas at El Paso, decided to recognize Brenda as the 2011 recipient of the Hicks-Middagh Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award annually ?reflects the best of the communication department,? chair Frank Perez said.
Brenda began working at KVIA in 1998 as a part-time weekend audio operator, and she kept climbing the ladder until I named her news director 10 years later. She graduated from UTEP with degrees in electronic media and Latin American studies.
Her contributions to journalism don?t stop at KVIA. She is currently on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, where she served as a student mentor. She is also a member of the El Paso Press Club and the Lone Star chapter of the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences. She volunteered at KTEP radio for a dozen years and was a correspondent for the nationally-syndicated program, “Latino USA.”
Brenda grew up in Mexico and, obviously, Spanish is her first language. She?s the consummate wordsmith and I use her exquisite English language skills to proof my El Paso Inc. columns (except this one).
Next Saturday morning, amidst Homecoming festivities, an embarrassed-to-be-in-the-limelight Brenda De-Anda Swann will receive an award she justly deserves under the shady trees outside the Cotton Memorial building on the UTEP campus.
Bravo, Brenda!
