Trying to follow the career path of Jay LaMonica is tricky, to say the least. Being independent by nature, he didn't want the constraints of one particular job, so he dabbled in lots of them, sometimes simultaneously.
Early in his career, for example, there was a time when he worked for ABC's Good Morning America from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m., went over to the State Department to work as an ABC News editorial assistant from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and then studied at night.
Besides working at ABC News and studying at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, LaMonica subsequently served as an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a noted Washington think tank; tried a stint developing movies in Hollywood; became an independent producer; and did lots of consulting work on the side.
With a background in national security issues, LaMonica made key contributions to the industry of policy gaming, in which high-level government officials are trained to respond to simulated crisis situations and mock newscasts. He gathered valuable firsthand experience in this field while working on interviews on behalf of NBC, with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and as a consultant to ABC News Nightline and 20/20 during the Iran hostage crisis and throughout the 1980s.
LaMonica's experience reads like a who's who of broadcast journalism — he has worked with, among others, TV greats like Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings and David Frost.
Despite such unique opportunities, LaMonica admits to having had trouble finding his niche. "I was too general for the academic world and too specialized for the media world," he notes. Because of this, he ended up double-dipping in both. He says he has found a better fit with the work he did for Nightline in the 1990s, where he was given a chance to do more in-depth documentaries that brought his investigative journalism skills to the fore.
With an interest in the Russian military and nuclear weapons, the high point of LaMonica's career was spending several weeks in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed and gaining access to "secret cities" that Westerners had never seen. It's taking viewers to places they have never been that he hopes to explore in more depth at Koppel on Discovery.
LaMonica is married to Teresa, a pediatric nurse practitioner, who teaches nursing at Marymount University. They have three children, Gabriel, a senior at Georgetown; Anna, a sophomore at University of Virginia and Laura, a freshmen at University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
