Kristen DelGuzzi never planned to be a journalism major, she fell into it.
She is currently between jobs after working as Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but her career started at Kent State University.
DelGuzzi was a political science major, convinced she would be going to law school until her junior year when she took a journalism class, News Writing, just because it fit into her schedule.
At first she thought, “This will be easy, this will just be my sort of throwaway class, and by about six weeks into the semester I had changed my major.”
The class challenged her to think and write in ways she had never thought about before, and she said she realized she was spending more time thinking about the journalism class than on any of her political science classes.
“They talk about that moment, where you’ll kind of just know, and I just knew,” she said. “After that I was all in.”
From there, DelGuzzi spent all of her time in Taylor Hall, which was the journalism building at the time, and she held multiple Kent Stater positions from reporter to editor.
Her most memorable story was from 1992, when a gunman was on campus. It started with her interviewing residents at the Glenmorris Apartment complex where gunshots were fired and ended with her recounting her experience in the middle of a shoot-out.
Weeks prior, DelGuzzi had reported on two other shootings. One person had been killed on campus and another, a grad student, was shot and wounded. After that, she had written a story about how they matched the ballistics from both shootings.
That Monday night, the Stater got a call that someone was shooting into the windows of the apartments.
“I grabbed a notebook and went running out the door,” she said.
All of the residents were describing someone in a long black trench coat. After interviewing residents, conscious of her deadline, DelGuzzi started to head back to Taylor Hall.
As she passed the old business building she saw someone in the same trench coat she had just heard described countless times. Her first instinct? Follow him.
While following, DelGuzzi and another Stater reporter at the time, Adam Leonatti, saw a police car pull up and shortly after, a shot was fired. Next thing she knew, she and Leonatti were diving face-first in the snow, waiting for the shoot-out to end.
Read DelGuzzi’s full account of the night here.
DelGuzzi got an internship with the Cincinnati Inquirer and was hired right out of that before graduating, where she worked for about five years as a reporter. She also worked in New Orleans at the Times-Picayune as a city hall reporter, eventually getting promoted to city hall editor and has held editorial positions ever since.
She said Kent State gave her a foundation of everything she felt like she needed. She didn’t graduate overly confident, but knew she could always be learning and growing in her career.
“If you don’t feel like you need to ask questions or you’re afraid to ask questions, you’re never going to be a good journalist,” she said. “Your entire job is to ask questions.”
To student journalists today, DelGuzzi said, “Keep going, be brave, the world, the democracy needs you.”
Savana Capp is a beat reporter. Contact her at [email protected].
