After working for a brief period in political campaigns and for "one losing candidate after another," Elissa Rubin decided it might be more interesting to cover politics, so she tried her hand at broadcast journalism. In 1991, she went to work for the political unit at WABC-TV in New York.
Coming up through the business at a local level was a great experience, she says. She counsels students in the field that working for a local broadcast station presents opportunities to learn as many parts of the business as possible, such as reporting, editing and shooting.
After a few more years working in local news in San Francisco, Rubin went back to New York to join ABC Network News, and developed an interest in covering law and justice stories. She then moved to ABC's Washington, D.C.-based Nightline in 2000. As a producer at Nightline, she worked on a mix of stories and gravitated toward those with criminal justice elements.
Looking back over her career, Rubin remains most proud of a pre-Nightline series she did on the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She was able to help personalize the story in a way that resonated with viewers who lived on the other side of the world and who had no connection with the people involved.
While she says it's a challenge to find "new" stories, she thinks there are ways of telling them differently — not just to give clarity to important issues, but to make people think about things from a different point of view, and even to find solutions for the problems that journalists may pose.
AtKoppel on Discovery, where she is also a producer, Rubin hopes the programming will become the place where viewers come to think about the big issues of our time that other outlets may write off as being too complicated or "messy" to cover.
