Jose Diaz-Balart Bio, Age, Wife, Career, Net Worth, Family, Twitter

To mark the 15th anniversary of TVNewser this month, Adweek honored the 30 Most Impactful TV Newsers of the Past 15 Years, spotlighting the personalities and execs who were instrumental in the industry’s incredible decade-and-a-half evolution. TVNewser will be presenting expanded versions of each honoree’s interview.

Jose Diaz-Balart

• The job now: anchor, Noticiero Telemundo, and Enfoque con José Díaz-Balart, both Telemundo; anchor, NBC Nightly News Saturday
• Job 15 years ago: Hoy en el Mundo, Telemundo; anchor, NBC’s Miami 5 p.m. newscast

Adweek: What were you doing 15 years ago, in January 2004?

Díaz-Balart: In 2004, I was working for Telemundo. I believe that I was also anchoring for NBC in Miami, the local station, in English and in Spanish.

Spanish network in the mornings and in English, in the local in Miami. I’ll have to check the date on you though.

What’s your favorite professional moment of the past 15 years?

There are so many. The news is such a rapidly changing phenomenon, that I think of it as stories that I’ve covered. Anything from natural disasters to elections.

I don’t ever want to sound like it’s all negative. Covering things like the terrorist attacks in Paris or the earthquake in Mexico in September of last year. There are so many stories that stay with me. But stories also of positive impact on our communities.

I’m thinking, for example, immigration reform attempts in the United States, that have failed, unfortunately, that mean so much to my community.

There are so many stories that touched me in these last years, and sometimes that aren’t even the ones that one knows about.

I can tell you a story of a mother I met in Los Angeles that came to see one of our shows when we were doing it outside in the open air. And she said she and her two little small daughters were living in a car.

I asked them, did something happen, and she said, yeah, my husband was just deported and he was the breadwinner of the family.

So we ended up, my two little daughters and I, living in a car. She was there to tell me that one of those two daughters was going to become president of the United States one day because they were born in the United States.

And to see the hopes and dreams in the little girls’ eyes that came to see a newscast of Noticiero Telemundo to affirm that they would one day be president of the United States, told me a lot.

They were almost I think, pretty close to my daughter’s age. And I saw in them the hopes and dreams of people who refuse to let even the most difficult problems in their lives take away their dreams. That’s a story that I remember.

What is the biggest way that TV news has changed over the past 15 years?

Coming from a guy who started in TV at the end of 1984, when there was the amazing advancement of ¾ inch videotape.

They were carried by the soundman in a box the size of a large suitcase, connected by a six-foot cable to an Ikegami camera. And then that video had to be transferred over to an editing machine, to where we are today. 15 years seems like decades ago.

The immediacy of television has changed. That fact that We now don’t only work for half-hour national news broadcasts, but see ourselves as journalists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through the different platforms.

The immediacy of the interaction with the audience, because of the social platforms, is extraordinary. And that is something that in the last 10 years has changed. The immediacy is what strikes me.

Who have you learned the most from in your career?

I have learned the most from those who least are known. I have learned the most from that mother I told you about.

I’ve learned the most from a man that I met in Chile after the earthquake, who lost his entire family, his wife, and his little daughter.

His brother, his wife, and their son were all camping when the earthquake hit Chile. The tsunami ripped his little daughter and his wife away from his hands, as he was trying to hold onto a tree, to try and survive the tsunami.

And he saw how the waves took his wife and his daughter and his brother and his brother’s wife and his nephew. In one moment, he lost his entire family.

He was a paramedic in Chile. I met him two days after the earthquake. He was giving first aid to little kids who had been injured during the hurricane.

He was sewing them up and patching them up, and putting them on the head and saying, It’s okay, it’s gonna be alright.

His name is Luis Gatica, and I will never forget the life lessons I learned by seeing how he deals with adversity.

I could go on and on, because 34 years of experience, of meeting people along the way, is really what has defined me as a journalist.