Classic Episode: From Immigrant Roots to Media Pioneer: Paula Madison's Journey to Becoming a Media Pioneer

This week we're looking back on our conversations with Paula Madison, the trailblazing journalist and media executive. In this episode, Madison recounts her journey towards becoming a news director in New York and the groundbreaking achievements that followed - including being the first African-American woman to serve as a general manager of a top five network-owned television station. She also shares how her parents immigrated to the US and how they instilled a vision of success in her at a young age. Through it all, Madison has remained committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in media and society as a whole. Don't miss this compelling episode!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My dad said to me, if you retire from a
company and they give you a gold watch for twenty
five years of service, I will be so ashamed of you.
My father was a union man. You're ashamed if I
stay with a company for twenty five years and get
a gold watch. And my father said, why would you

(00:20):
stay one place that long and make the white man rich.
You must own your own. So from early on, my
two older brothers and I learned we were expected to
be excellent.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
You're listening to Money News powered by Greenview finance podcast
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I'm your host, angel investor, technology enthusiast and media personality
Tanya Sam. Each week we talk with guests who are
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(00:57):
are making their money through here someone who's looking to
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open up your notes app and lock us in because
this podcast will give you the keys to the Kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundance you so rightly deserved.
Welcome back to our first episode of season two and
we wanted to do something a little bit different but

(01:18):
special for you. Our executive producer had an opportunity to
interview trailblazing journalists and media pioneer Paula Madison.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I started out years ago in nineteen seventy five as
a print journalist. I worked for newspapers. I remained as
a newspaper journalist until around nineteen eighty two, when I
crossed over into the world of television news not on camera.
My role in television has always been a manager of boss,

(01:51):
so I ultimately, after working in Texas and Oklahoma, I
became assistant news director at ANBC four in New York,
my hometown I'm from Harlem. At that point, I was
so sure that it would just be a short amount
of time before I would be the first African American

(02:11):
news director in New York City. But it took six years.
And it took six years because they kept hiring pretty
inadequate white guys to be news director while I remained
assistant news director. Who was interesting was that every time
I stepped into the role of acting news director, our
ratings would go up. So ultimately, what did happen was

(02:33):
after six years, I did become vice president and news director.
For the first time in sixteen years, NBC four had
not been number one in every newscast in every day part.
So having accomplished that, I stayed in that role. I

(02:55):
think for a total of from nineteen ninety six to
two thousand, I was news director. And what ultimately did
happen after that was I was able to accomplish some
other kinds of successes, which led to me being promoted
to president and general manager of NBC four in Los Angeles.

(03:18):
My charge was not only to get the station to
number one, but to become the most profitable station in
the market. It took about three months for me to
pay attention to that, and I quickly concluded it was
an impossibility. When I met with the president of the
TV station's division and everybody's ultimate boss, the chairman of

(03:39):
General Electric, and told them that it was like, well,
you're giving up sounding defeat after a few months, and
I said, well, what was not accounted for was Spanish
language television. When you take into account Spanish language television,
for which the ranking in English language television the number

(04:02):
one market is New York, and Spanish language television the
number one market is Los Angeles. So what we were
facing here was a combined market, and when you combine
the market, the Spanish language market was actually going to
generate much higher ratings and therefore probably greater profit than

(04:23):
English language. So when I explained this, it was well,
so what do we do? And I said, well, I
think that we need to expand into Spanish language. How
so we're going to have to buy a Spanish language network.
So that was the beginning of the analysis which led
to NBC buying Telemundo. When that happened, I became the

(04:47):
president of NBC four, the English language NBC station and
the two Spanish language Telemundo stations here in La Historically,
that was the first and only ever triopoly that existed
in the history of television, meaning that one company owned
three stations in one market. The FCC generally did not

(05:10):
allow this, but because of the argument that we could
make that two television stations were owned by Telemundo when
NBC bought them, we managed to get that through and
so I had the distinction of being responsible for these
three TV stations. We set a number of goals, but

(05:32):
the personal goal that I set for myself at that
time was my hometown is New York and my hometown
station is WNBC in New York, where I had been
vice president news director. As I referred to earlier, I
wanted KNBC, the Los Angeles owned an operated station, to
be number one in profitability. Never happened in the history

(05:57):
of television. Remember at that point in the ranking English
language and Los Angeles is number two, market New York
is number one. I set a personal goal. I wanted
to beat my friend who was running the New York station.
We came up in the world together. He was VP

(06:20):
of sales, I was VP of News. Employing some strategies,
I was able to accomplish my goal. KNBC became the
most profitable station for NBC. We beat WNBC by more

(06:40):
than a million dollars. That got me champagne toast in
Bob Wright's office and a commendation from Jack Welch. And
ultimately what does that mean? So in terms of the accomplishments,
if I stay in that line, right in the line
of my journalism and television career, you know, I certainly

(07:04):
meet with my boss. With my then boss, I would
meet with my supervisor and we would set financial goals,
performance goals, et cetera. But then I have my own goals, right,
and they don't ordinarily end up on my list of
things that are going to get me RSUs and stock
options and a big bonus or whatever. But I put

(07:26):
in my head that I know I can beat the
New York station because I worked at that New York
station and I knew where there was significant inefficiency inefficiencies
and the strategies that were in place were not nearly
as good as the strategies that I put in place
in Los Angeles. So after a year, we ended up
as number one.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yay for me.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
So I think that the follow up to that is
really I want you to take me back right, because
I feel like what you said was really important is
you have your own spectrum for what success is. So
inside of describing what that spectrum is for success for you,
I really want you to take me a step back

(08:08):
and let me know where it came from. Sure, where
you first start to understand what success? Was it young
or was it professional life?

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Sure? Well, my parents are They were immigrants to the
United States from Jamaica. My mother's father immigrated from China
to Jamaica, and my father's parents had been in Jamaica
some generations, right, so when they came to the United States.

(08:42):
One of the things that I learned early on, when
I was in the third grade, I who had always
gotten a's. I went to Catholic school. My brothers and
I went to Catholic school, always gotten a's in every
top every subject. And I came home one day and
present my report card to my mother. Now, I should

(09:02):
say that in my neighborhood, Harlem, there was a general
interest on the part of most adults about what the
children were doing, what our accomplishments were. So we had
people in the neighborhood. They'd see me walking along, and
they'd see you walking along with your you know, the
report card was in a little gray envelope and it
was like, hey, baby, how'd you do? And show them

(09:23):
your report card? Oh my god. And maybe you get
a quarter, maybe you get fifty cents. You actually got
rewarded from the elders in the community, because you know,
they were proud. So you know, I'm walking along happy.
I got my report card and I went inside our
apartment and I handed my report card to my mother

(09:45):
and she studied the front. She flipped it over and
studied the back and she put her face very close
to mine and she said, I did not come to
this country for you to get a be. It was
a threatening statement. It wasn't a hey, that was good,

(10:10):
It was do you know what you've just done? And
so I was chilled by that. But I was also
made very clear what my responsibility was. Right. It wasn't
why did you get a be? It was I did

(10:30):
not leave kith and kin, I did not leave familiarity.
I did not go into an entirely different place for
you to fall short. I said, but mommy, She said,
do you understand, yes, mommy, And that was that right.

(10:55):
So now what I understood was my role, my job,
my responsibility was to excel. So from childhood, what I
was told was you don't get to be adequate, you

(11:16):
don't get to be mediocre, you don't get to just
get by, because if you do that, this is going
to be hell to pay, right, And I knew that
years later when I started my rise, and I was
very young. In the rise, my father, who was a

(11:38):
tool and die maker and who had been deported when
I was three years old because he came to the
United States under an assumed name. He was a stowaway
on a ship. Years later, my dad, who was the
first black shop steward for the United Auto Workers Aircraft
Engine Division on Lawe Island, New York. My dad said

(12:01):
to me, if you retire from a company and they
give you a gold watch for twenty five years of service,
I will be so ashamed of you. My father was
a union man. You're ashamed if I stay with a
company for twenty five years and get a gold watch.
And my father said, why would you stay one place

(12:22):
that long and make the white man rich. You must
own your own. So from early on, my two older
brothers and I learned we were expected to be excellent. Sure,
get a job, but then what do you do with
the proceeds of that job. Proceeds of that job, you

(12:46):
invest as much as possible, as long as it's not
conflicting with your company's rules. So my mother's saying was
three moneies is better than one money. There were three
of us, so the expectation was we would jointly put

(13:06):
our money together. So when I was twenty one years old,
we started buying Brownstones in Harlem. Mind you, we had
grown up on welfare, right, But as my mother said,
this is a one generation circumstance. You will not be
poor in the next generation. She actually said to me,
if the Rockefellers can do it and the Carnegiese can

(13:28):
do it, then you're going to do it too. And
I wanted to say, Ma, do you know we're black
and this is different to my mother and my father.
That was inconsequential. It did not matter. Now. When I
was in college, I came home. My parents split when
I was like four years old. When I was in college,

(13:50):
I came home to my dad's house in Queen's and
he said, my nickname is p Pee Pee. Come here,
Sit down, Sit down. It's like, okay, Daddy, sit down,
listen to this music. Listen to this man's message. I
was like, okay. My father put this music on and
the music was Fela. So understand, I am nineteen years

(14:14):
old and my father is telling me listen to this
man's message. Listen to the fact that he's talking about
pride and nationalism and what you're not going to do
is succumb to whatever racism has done and whatever the
beliefs are that in the United States hold black people back.

(14:36):
My father was like no, and my mother's adage was
better that you die fighting than live going along just
to get along.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Tune in Wednesdays we continue the conversation with pale blazing
journalist and media pioneer Paula Madison. Thanks for listening to
today's episode. If we helped you make your money move,
please share it with your communitybscribe and leave us a
review on iHeartRadio and Apple podcasts. Follow us on social
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(15:08):
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