Spotlight

Utah's Storyteller
Communication is the byword for KUED's Ken Verdoia.

by Bruce Woodbury

As he was running through a lawless stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border, holding a small video camera, getting hung up on mesquite and prickly cactus, and not knowing whether he would run into a drug dealer or a Mexican family sneaking across to look for work, Ken Verdoia ex’83 thought to himself, “Am I crazy?”

Verdoia, a producer for the University of Utah’s public broadcasting station, KUED Channel 7, was working on the documentary A Shadow of Hope, which traces the trail of undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Utah. It is a story that no one else would touch, but Verdoia, with his usual enthusiasm and gusto, tackled it head-on.

The year-long project, which was first broadcast locally on KUED in 2004, required Verdoia and his film crews to criss-cross the border many times, illegally, and at night, as he intended to present the issue from both sides. “We wanted to show the people who were crossing illegally, but also the border patrol that was trying to apprehend them,” he explains.

For his efforts, Verdoia received the prestigious Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award a second time for producing one of the nation’s two best television news documentaries in 2004. He had previously won the award for producing the documentary Skull Valley, which examines the storage of high-level radioactive waste in Utah—again, a project no one else wanted.

What attracts Verdoia to these stories? “I came from a background of daily, deadline journalism where the emphasis on stories is keeping them short and simple,” he explains. “But so many stories I was running through the mill had layers and complexities that never survived the grinding process. I wanted a crack at sifting through those layers of human stories, in a sense finding the time to recognize that every story is actually the lives of people.”

Verdoia’s career at KUED spans 25 years, resulting in a matching 25 full-length documentaries that have reaped numerous awards, including 17 Emmys. Verdoia recently was presented the 2007 annual Service to Journalism Award by the University’s Department of Communication. And during summer 2007 he will receive the first Gordon M. Conable Award from the Public Library Association as a leading defender of intellectual freedom. Not bad for a guy whose only reason to come to Utah 30 years ago was to ski.

After graduating from San Jose State University in journalism, and working as an intern for Jim Braden at KLIV Radio in San Jose, Verdoia came to Utah to check out the famous Utah powder. While here, a job came open at KALL, and Verdoia was hired. “I helped get him a job in the mail room at KALL,” says Braden, now the press secretary for Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon. “He was the best mail room boy we ever had.”

Verdoia didn’t spend much time sorting mail, however; he quickly moved up the ladder to become a news reporter, and then took a job with the Intermountain Network in Denver. After a year there he returned to Salt Lake City and a job with KTVX-Channel 4 TV, where he remained from 1977 to 1979 before moving to public television and KUED.

While working at KTVX, Verdoia discovered that he and commercial television made a terrible match. “I kept bristling against the system,” he says, “which encouraged you to tell stories very short, very sweet—good guys, bad guys, real simple characterizations—and I kept finding myself wanting to tell longer stories, to provide more depth, more background.”

To fulfill his dream of producing longer, more in-depth stories, Verdoia turned to public television. He joined KUED in 1981 and found his niche. “Now, 25 years later, I haven’t looked back nor regretted it for one minute,” he says,

At KUED, Verdoia also met his wife, Carol, now a practicing attorney in Salt Lake City. They have two daughters, Amanda, 17, and Stephanie, 14.

Verdoia is a huge fan of public television and KUED. “People have been forecasting the imminent death of public television for years,” he says. “First, it was assumed the mix of documentaries, performance shows, educational offerings, dramas and history programs would fail to hold an audience. Then, it was assumed that the rise of competing cable channels would dilute the need for public television.”

The assumptions were dead wrong. Local support for public television in Utah is stronger now than it has ever been. The reason? “I believe it turns on the genuinely unique role that public television has created for itself in American media,” says Verdoia. “A surprisingly large segment of the public wants something more from television than contrived and controlled ‘reality’ programs.”

Verdoia maintains that local programs produced by KUED have become a staple for the Utah viewing market. “The production of documentaries exploring the past, present, and future of the American West has virtually stopped in Utah, save for KUED and public television.”

Public television has also allowed him the freedom he needs to create and produce. “I’m sure that I’ve made leaders of the University groan, at times, with a project, report, or program that may have ruffled some feathers,” he says. “But I have never had anyone in a responsible role at KUED or any other part of the University attempt to censor or control my work. If you want a living, breathing example of intellectual freedom, I offer myself as Exhibit A.”

Verdoia has also developed a career within a career, becoming known as one of the top media training experts in the country. His clients include athletes, coaches, and teams at the University of Utah and in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association.

Verdoia’s media training experience began while he was still working at KTVX. “I got an invitation from a public relations firm that wanted a reporter to come and talk to a group of business executives about what it’s like to be interviewed to help them understand the most effective ways to carry across their point of view,” he says. “So I went and did this for the first time, and what I found was that not only did the executives not know the best way to communicate, but this advertising agency, to which they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, did not know the most effective way to communicate through the media, either.”

Verdoia’s Ute clients have included football stars Alex Smith BS’04 and Morgan Scalley BA’04, among many others. “These types of young athletes, the finest quality of human beings, are who you want to represent your university,” says Verdoia. “We are trying to help these young men and women who come to the University of Utah to recognize that the way they communicate is how they are going to be judged for the 80 percent of their life that remains.”

Verdoia is now the director of production at KUED, mentoring young producers to help them turn out quality, award-winning documentaries—just as he has done for the past 25 years.

He admits that he misses the hands-on work. “The hard part is standing on the loading dock, watching the producers and crews leave to do their work. I do miss the excitement of traveling this state—and the world, for that matter—meeting people and listening to their stories and opinions.”

But now as director of production, Verdoia is helping to mold a new generation of journalists in their quest to tell stories and ask tough questions. And if any should ask the best way to navigate an arid stretch of desert choked with mesquite and cactus, while hefting a video camera, Verdoia can probably help them with that, too.

—Bruce Woodbury BS’72 is director of community relations for the University of Utah Athletics Department. He will retire July 2007 after 35 years with the U.

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