Katy Ramirez Karp talks chasing stories and casting conversations

Katy Ramirez Karp is the senior interview producer for Al Jazeera America’s talk show, Consider This. Each day, Karp is charged with finding the most dynamic guests to weigh in on a wide variety of conversations. In doing so, she draws on her experience from ABC, CNBC, MSNBC, and Current TV. In this “Meet the Staff” profile, Karp describes how she got started in television, recalls memorable stories she’s covered, and offers advice for those who might want to follow her lead.

­Q. What do you do for Consider This?

A. I oversee bookings for the show and get our day started with hunting for stories and pursuing guests.

Q. Is that a constant process or is there ever a particular part of the day that is more (or less) intense for you?

A. I think if you're a booking producer you’re more or less always attached to your mobile device. I'm always reading and looking for stories and in touch with prospective guests. That's just what booking producers are generally programmed to do. I would say that our big deadline is before the close of business hours, so that most people get requests before they leave work and head home and make their plans.

Q. What made you decide to pursue journalism?

A. My father is obsessed with coffee table books and the most arresting ones to me were [the ones] that focused on war photography. So for a time I thought I wanted to be a war correspondent until I became older and more aware of my mortality, and that morphed into journalism, generally.

Q. Were there ever any other fields that you also considered?

A. I always knew it would be within the journalistic realm, I just wasn’t sure if it would be writing or television or radio.

Q. Tell me more about your background and how you found your way into the industry.

A. I studied journalism in college at American University. At that point I wasn't sure if I wanted to do print or broadcast. A mentor of mine suggested [that I] study print journalism because he said to me no matter which area of journalism I chose, I'd need to know how to write and write well, so I’m glad that I took his advice. And after I left an Associated Press reporters’ training program, I decided to jump into TV because I accepted an opportunity that came to me. They picked my name out of a resume book to do a television program at ABC News and I couldn’t say no, so that’s how I broke in.

Q. Which program were you picked for?

A. It's the desk assistant program, so you start working on an assigned show or shift. I was assigned World News Now, which is their overnight program, and there were some pretty famed people who anchored that show — amongst them Anderson Cooper, Juju Chang, Asha Blake. And it was very early in the morning so it was challenging on many levels, but there was an attitude of “We're all in it together,” so it was a great experience.

Q. How did you find your way to where you are today?

A. A friend of mine on the overnight shift was a booker at Good Morning America and she wanted to get off the overnight shift so she approached me about taking her job as the overnight booker for breaking news and I didn’t know what was involved so I said yes. And it was the wildest year and a half of my time in journalism. But that's how I broke into booking. And it was a true overnight shift — 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., Sunday to Thursday. When Swissair Flight 111 went into the ocean, I had to wake everybody up, put people on planes, and chase guests, so it was definitely [the] “fasten your seat belts” school of booking.

Q. Were you the only person on the shift?

A.  Yes. Initially. Until they realized, why are we letting a 23-year-old girl do this all by herself? But it was a great learning experience.

Q. Are there any other stories [in addition to the Swissair story] that really stick out in your mind that you’ve covered over the course of your career?

A. I would say Hurricane Katrina — when I worked at Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC — because it was a tragedy that was unfolding in our own country, the images were just tragic, and at that point Keith was [doing pointed “Special Comments” directed at the Bush administration], so that was happening all at the same time. So it was a wild time to be a part of Countdown.

Q. As you’re reading in, are there any characteristics that pop out at you in terms of who might be a good [guest]?

A.  It depends on the story. If we’re going to do a story on [the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in] the Philippines, then given the time difference, it’d be great to find someone who’s actively in the field who can give us the real time situation through their eyes. Each story can be told in a number of different ways and I think something like the Philippines requires someone who's an observer firsthand, whereas for another segment on politics, it could be a sharp analyst who perhaps is an armchair analyst from somewhere outside the Beltway, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less able to capably give an opinion on dysfunctional Congress, or whatever other political topic we ask them to talk about.

Q. What's the most challenging story you've ever pursued?

A. The blackout in the summer of 2003. … I worked at The News with Brian Williams on CNBC and we were the only show doing coverage on that for the entire network and they just let us go for hours. And it's a lot of airtime to fill, especially when people have no power and are hard to reach. … People were sitting in the dark and this was before everyone was walking around with a cellphone, you know, it’s not like they could just go plug-in if their battery died. So it required a lot of extra legwork to try to track everybody down. … [Our studio] was fine, it was more a matter of finding the people who were out there suffering the consequences of what had occurred, be it an elected official or store owner or whomever, trying to find them, trying to even just connect with them, get in touch with them — I remember a lot of fast busy signals that day because phones were out.

Q. What advice might you have for someone who wanted to pursue a career in TV news and/or in booking?

A. Intern first. Get as many internships as you possibly can while you're in college so that you don't graduate with your degree and all that money spent, take your first job and think, “Oh God what have I done?” Get your feet wet.

Katy Ramirez Karp’s interview has been condensed and edited.