Please tell us a little bit about yourself...
My name is Audrey Ash, and I’m an Investigative Producer at CNN. I currently live with my husband Ben, who is also a journalist, and my two dogs, Lenny and Fish, in Brooklyn, New York.
I’ve worked at CNN for 5 years. I started as an intern in the Investigative Unit in Washington, DC, and spent a little time working for CNN International, mainly producing daily newscasts, before returning to the Investigative Unit in 2021. My favorite projects have been the documentaries I’ve produced at CNN, which covered the events of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and various right wing and fringe figures.
But I’ve also reported on everything from sexual assault in the U.S. Coast Guard to mortgage practices that disadvantage minorities, and the drugs used in horse racing that can cause death. My team reports on all the mass shootings that happen in the U.S., and gets called in for complicated coverage of international news like the current war in Gaza.
As far as my personal life, I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and my favourite place in the world is the Appalachian Mountains. In fact, my most annoying habit is that I can expertly weave something about Kentucky or the Appalachian mountains into every conversation.
What made you choose this career?
I grew up watching CNN, and in high school would spend hours watching short VICE documentaries on Youtube. Those 30 minute documentaries, more than anything, gave me the chance to explore the world and learn about other people; at the time, I was still dialling into the internet through our landline in Eastern Kentucky, so I had to stay up in the middle of the night to watch them uninterrupted. The news was my first introduction to people who were completely different from me and my family, and it really shaped what I wanted out of the world around me.
When I was applying to colleges I discovered I wasn’t passionate about anything specific, it seemed so obvious to me that I was going to college to figure out what I was passionate about, but it turns out a lot of other people already knew what they wanted to do with their lives. I was interested in everything and couldn’t imagine just learning about one subject.
When I graduated, journalism seemed like a good way to constantly be learning something new, taking that information and then teaching others about it. And once I got into the journalism world, I returned to video and documentary journalism. There’s something really gratifying about taking a piece of information that on paper is desperately dull, and then finding a human voice to explain why it’s important that your audience not only knows about it, but should care about it. You’re also making a physical product, a video gives the viewer the chance to see, hear, and (if they’re like me and leave the captions on) read what they need to know.
Did you go through formal education? If so, what did you study and where? If not please explain your journey.
After graduating high school, I went to a liberal arts college in Kentucky called Centre College and studied International Studies and History. I like to tell people this is a made-up major, because all it meant was that I could take as many religion, history, politics and art classes as I wanted without having to focus on anything. I took several classes on Buddhism and ceramics; I studied abroad in France, Uganda, Rwanda and Cameroon; I learned how to meditate, attended mass, temple, and mosque, and generally tried to learn as much as possible from everyone around me.
But that degree didn’t exactly set me up for a job, and I was lucky to be able to do a masters in Investigative Journalism at City University in London. I had zero journalism experience, and I felt totally behind my peers, many of whom had been in the working world, but it confirmed my decision to continue in that path.
Did this have a positive or negative impact on your chosen career?
This is a tricky question for me, I got my first job because the person hiring was impressed that I had gotten a masters in investigative journalism abroad. But prior to that job, I had applied to more than 250 positions without a single call back, and the only reason I was considered for my first job was because a different applicant dropped out.
Day to day, I don’t use a lot of what I learned in graduate school. I think the masters made me confident I could be a journalist, but most of what you need to know to be a reporter or producer is painfully learned on the job by experimenting and getting things wrong. It’s also such a personal type of work, that regardless of formal education, you have to learn how to do the job on your own.
I use the foundation I learned in college and the general knowledge of different cultures and worlds every single day. I typically tell people that if you can get a job after college, work for a few years before deciding if you want to do a masters, and if you think it would help, you should go for it. I certainly would not be where I am today without it, but I also wouldn’t still be paying off student loans.
Who inspires you?
Christiane Amanpour is my hero, what a woman, and I’m so lucky that I now work in a place where I can accidentally bump into her in the bathroom. Same with Clarissa Ward, who is CNN’s Chief International Correspondent. Both of these women are groundbreaking in their reporting, and have such a strong moral and ethical grounding. More importantly, they’re both so incredibly kind and approachable, which is a rarity in the industry.
My mom is also the coolest person I’ve ever met, and definitely inspired my ethos on doing what I want. I don’t think my mom has ever looked at a challenge and thought “I can’t do this”; I think her first instinct is that she can get anything done if she really needs to, or that the situation will work out just fine. That’s given me such a good perspective on assuming I can do anything, but recognising I might not want to.
That being said, you know that statistic on the number of men that think they could land a plane if they really needed to? That’s me, I am those men.
What’s the scariest thing about your job and how have you overcome it?
The scariest thing about this job is that investigative journalists are naturally in conflict with the people and organizations they’re reporting on. Someone once told me it isn’t “news” unless there’s someone somewhere trying to prevent you from reporting it out, and I’m a conflict-avoidant introvert that sometimes cries when people yell at me.
Other journalists will tell you that if you don’t have thick skin you shouldn’t be a journalist, but I’ve learned being sensitive and introverted is a huge strength of mine. If you want people to tell you about the best or worst day of their lives, being kind, respectful and patient is the best way to get them to open up. There’s no one way to be a journalist.
What do you want to change about your industry?
A lot of journalism internships are not paid, and a lot of them expect you to be on call 24/7. That sort of lifestyle is unreasonable if you’re being paid, and leads directly to burnout, but if you’re trying to get your foot in the door, and are expected to treat your first experience as an “opportunity,” you’re going to lose talent that needs to pay the bills. A byline is not real currency, and cannot cover your rent.
But even for people who are getting paid, the 24/7 nature of news also needs an adjustment. Journalists are expected to work from the time they wake up until they go to bed, and be ready to go at any moment. People that establish boundaries are often punished, or miss out on opportunities because they foster a life outside of work. This expectation not only leads to unhappy journalists, but leads to worse journalism, if you’ve never left the newsroom, you lose touch with the reality of the rest of the world.
It also unfairly burdens anyone with dependents, and especially women, who are often expected to carry the vast majority of domestic life. When you’re expected to be on call and at the top of your game all the time, you have less time for the parts of your life that really matter.
What advice would you give someone who is starting out in your field?
I don’t believe in giving out advice, mainly because the best advice I’ve ever been given was that no one knew what they were doing until they did it. And that’s true: if you’re actually pushing the boundary, and excelling at reporting or producing, then every single day you’re running up against something you’ve never had to deal with before. Every conversation you have with a source or potential interviewee is just a shot in the dark until you come out the other side.
And the same is true for experience, this industry is changing every single day, and by the time you’ve mastered something, that something will be totally different. A documentary producer that’s won an Oscar and BAFTA and Pulitzer likely doesn’t know what makes someone watch a TikTok, and probably doesn’t know what the future of streaming looks like. And at the end of the day, if no one is watching what you’re producing, it isn’t having an impact.
And importantly, it means you shouldn’t ever feel like someone knows vastly more than you do about what’s going on. At some point, all your colleagues and peers had no idea what was going on, just like you.
Comments