On this episode we're joined by Jay Dow.
Jay is a well-known TV reporter and host in New York City. He's in his 15th year as a correspondent and host for PIX11, where he's won or shared 17 Emmys and 2 Edward R Murrow Awards. Prior to that he was a correspondent for WCBS TV for 9 years and did some national reporting as well. And he was a reporter for my family's favorite TV channel- NY1.
Jay is a native of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and a graduate of my alma mater, The College of New Jersey, with a degree in political science and concentration in economics. He was in my graduating class and we were profiled in the same article in the alumni magazine.
Jay gave a behind-the-scenes look at covering notable stories, and how he handles reporting on snowstorms. He explained how a planned venture into a legal career shifted when his uncle got him a job in TV news. And he provided advice for aspiring TV journalists and offered words of hope for local TV news.
The excerpt below is edited for length and clarity. Hope you'll listen to the full interview.
What led you into journalism?
My late uncle was in the business. He was a longtime correspondent for CBS News. His name was Harold Dow. He was one of the founding members of 48 Hours, the news magazine.
When I graduated from college,I thought I was on the track to go to law school. My late father was an attorney and eventually a judge, but at the time, he was an attorney practicing. And I thought it was going to be Dow and Dow. And I came home from college with plans to study for the LSATs and go to law school, and during that summer, my uncle knew that I was looking for a summer job, just to keep some money in my pocket.
I had already applied to some fast food restaurants in Hackensack. He took my resume, came back and said, "Yeah, I got a job for you." And I was like, "Oh, great. This is gonna be better than anything that I could, find in Hackensack working at, like, McDonald's or Burger King. It's gonna make me a lot more money."
Turns out that it was a news assistant's job paying $8 an hour, which was significantly less than I could have made in Hackensack, and to boot, it was the midnight shift. I couldn't say no. I said, "Thanks." I was like, "You know what? It's only for the summer." He went through the trouble to get me this job. I did it.
I started working- ripping scripts, running errands, doing nothing of significance. What a news assistant does. You're basically just running errands.
I'd already grown up watching my uncle do his thing, but now I was on the inside and able to see, the nuts and bolts of what he did in addition to watching the other legends of CBS News. And I just fell in love with that aspect of the business. While I was ripping scripts, off the machine and running them out to the studio to the anchors on the morning show I was able to watch these amazing stories by Bob Simon, and Steve Kroft.
I just knew that I wanted to try to give this a try. So I sent out my resume tape to about a dozen small stations across the country, and got hired in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Not the most diverse neighborhood. Not like Hackensack. I felt like a speck of pepper in a mountain of salt.
I was 23 years old and I moved out there by myself and did that for a year. And was lucky enough to have already interviewed with the news director at NY1. And he told me, "You know what? Call me back when you're ready to come back and we'll see if there's a spot for you."
I called him back a year later and there was a spot, and I made it back to NY1. I started there when I was 25 and been hard at it ever since.
You have a Community Close-Up TV show that is on PIX11. It's a combination of segments that you've done. How do you come up with the story ideas for those, and how do you determine what makes the cut and what doesn't?
When I pitched that show a couple years ago, I wanted to make it a local version of 60 Minutes. I grew up in the house of Murrow, right? I grew up in CBS, my uncle was a main player there. I worked at CBS for nearly a decade, just under a decade and, that was in my blood. I grew up watching 60 Minutes. My dad would sit me down, and we would watch 60 Minutes every Sunday. And the storytelling that they're able to put on the air every Sunday is incredible. I don't know if anyone has seen the piece that Scott Pelley did in the Vietnamese caves this year. One of the best stories that I've ever seen.
When I pitched Community Close Up, I said I wanted to do something that was not just living in the studio where we would do four studio interviews and four segments.
Yes, we do studio interviews, but I wanted it to showcase some really compelling in-depth reporting. It airs the first Wednesday of every month.
We're always looking with a crystal ball since we are on the air month-to month. We're always looking at the main issues that are either affecting us now or we see coming down the pipe. So we knew, for example a couple of months ago that the SNAP deadline was coming to New York, where a lot of people were going to be losing their SNAP benefits because of this self-imposed deadline that President Trump laid down.
So we said, "You know what? Let's do this for the show." And it timed out perfectly. We found an 81-year-old single woman living in the Bronx, receiving SNAP. Her monthly SNAP benefits were $298 a month And because of the myriad of changes that have been made to the SNAP program over the last year she was caught up in it, and her SNAP benefit went from 298 to $24 a month She had lost weight and she was starting to sell her own possessions in order to keep food on the table.
We look at the long game in choosing stories for Close Up, and seeing if we can then find a main character to help tell that story, and we go from there.
How do you get people comfortable talking on camera with you?
That is just part of the skill set that we all have to work on over the years. And I've gotten better at it. Our job, collectively, is to go out every single day, especially in local news, where you're turning a story quick,
For me, it's just being myself. I always try to look at every story through the eyes of just an ordinary person. And depending on the kind of story, you know, whether it's a tragedy affecting parents or an issue affecting parents, and I'm a father of four, I think about how this would affect my family. If it's a story affecting seniors, I have an 81-year-old mother. I always try to be relatable in that sense to allow myself to be just as open and honest and genuine. I've found in my experience that lens gives the person who we're interviewing the chance and the opportunity to say, "You know what? I can be real with this person and tell them how I really feel."
How do you view the role of TV news, specifically local news in 2026.
Well, I think local news has a longer shelf life than network news. I think network news is in real trouble. We're seeing that in real time. CBS News, this venerated kind of legendary news operation which at one point in the '60s, '70s, and '80s had, this massive international footprint, and has now been dwindled down to a skeleton of an operation that is now merged with CNN, and which now many people fear is going to be swallowed whole and absorbed into CNN.
I think local news is, here to stay because I think everyone wants to know what's going on in their area, what's going on in their neighborhood. How are the decisions that are being made in Washington going to affect them, whether it's infrastructure or social services.
These are real decisions and real impacts that I think everyone keeps in mind that will keep them paying attention to local news. The question is the delivery. How are they going to get that local news? And I think that's the pivot that a lot of local news management teams are wrestling with right now.
And how do you think that will go?
I think that it's going to be a very stop-and start-transition over to digital. At the end of the day, what we're talking about is trying to create a business model that is as financially profitable as it was. The reason why the analog linear television business was so successful is because there are companies who are willing to pay 10, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 for a 30-second commercial inside of a newscast.
A newscast is 22 minutes. You've got between eight and nine minutes of commercials. You do the math. You have three to four newscasts every day, and if they're highly rated, that's a lot of revenue. If you dwindle down the number of eyeballs, the companies that are buying the advertising are looking at that data and they're saying, "Why am I going to pay $50,000 when there are fewer eyeballs when I can look over at Instagram and see that this influencer has 8 million followers and is generating 500,000 views a week?"
News operations and networks have kind of ceded that ground to the new networks. The new networks, in my opinion, are Google, Meta, TikTok, Oracle. The influencers are their own stations without all of the journalistic guardrails that we operate by. So, we have to figure out how we're going to be able to do what we do and convince the public that we're still valuable.
E-mail me at [email protected] if you have any thoughts on the podcast. I’d love to hear from you.
If you’re interested in local TV news reporting, I also recommend my interview with Jen Maxfield
And also recommend my interviews with reporters Ana Valdez Saravia (Kansas) and Tim Furlong (Delaware), and anchor Chenue Her (Iowa),
In 2025 we had a new episode each week and featured more than 60 guests. I don’t know that we were the most diverse journalist interviews podcast out there, but we certainly tried to be.
We look forward to bringing you more journalist interviews in 2026 but we can use your help. Tell a friend, a relative, a colleague about us and let them know that our episodes are worth their time.
A reminder to professors and teachers
You can find episode guides that you can use if you wish to integrate the podcast within your classroom. There are more than 50 available. Each one has suggested questions for discussion and activities a class can do.
I’m also happy to help you find an episode that would be appropriate for what you’re teaching. Reach out to me at [email protected].
Additionally, I’ve curated some of the 2025 episodes into groups. If you’re teaching a class or unit in any of these subjects:
- Investigative Journalism
- Feature Writing
- Covering government policy
- Social justice, immigration, and identity
- Local News
Check out the sets of episode guides that would be useful to you. I don’t have a good term for them, so I’m borrowing from Bluesky and calling them “Starter Packs” - sets of 5-8 episodes in each category that may be useful in your classroom.