NYWIFT Blog

By Mary Skinner

A warm welcome to new NYWIFT member Gabrielle Schonder!

Gabrielle is a multi- Emmy Award-winning documentary director who has covered politics, national security and foreign policy for over a decade at 60 Minutes and FRONTLINE. Her groundbreaking report about insider trading by members of Congress led to the passage of The STOCK Act. She had her directorial debut in 2020 with NRA: Under Fire and was a member of the FRONTLINE team that covered the insurrection on January 6^th in America After 9/11.

Gabrielle is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, East, and a 2022 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. We asked Gabrielle to tell us more about what it’s like to work as a journalist, producer, and director for some of the most respected news programs in the country.

NYWIFT Member Gabrielle Schonder (Photo Courtesy of Gabrielle Schonder)

First, welcome! What prompted you to join NYWIFT? 

A former Executive Producer on a prior project urged me to join and I said I’d always intended to. So why not now, when finding community in the non-fiction space is more important than ever before.

When and how were you first convinced that you wanted to become a journalist? 

From a very young age I was a huge fan of political reporting and even wrote a fan letter to then 60 Minutes humorist and reporter Andy Rooney when I was in the 4th or 5th grade. I told him about my frog collection. Little did I know I would join 60 Minutes as an associate producer just as he was retiring.

(Image from gabrielleschonder.com)

You seem to have gone from an internship to working on award-winning stories for 60 Minutes to writing, producing, and directing groundbreaking investigative stories for FRONTLINE. Can you talk about how to be successful in those difficult environments? 

I think I’m still figuring that question out! I feel a real calling to this important work, and I’m forever blown away by the sheer brilliance and tenacity of my colleagues to keep pushing boundaries in our reporting. The work is very challenging and even more so in today’s political environments, but I have to say it’s been extremely rewarding to push creative barriers and expand my skillsets over the years from originally working on 12-minute pieces for 60 Minutes to sometimes four-hour long broadcasts for FRONTLINE.

How do you identify a good story? How do you approach working on it?

[I know it’s a good story] usually if I’m intimidated to tackle the topic or I am having trouble focusing on anything else because the questions we are trying to answer keep me up at night. Those are the stories I can’t stop trying to talk to friends and colleagues about as I work out the big conceptual ideas in my own head. Those are usually the good ones.

(Image from gabrielleschonder.com)

What is a typical day like for you? 

Serving up breakfast and racing to school drop off with young kids. I also still read the print editions of the NYT and WSJ. That’s usually how I kick off my day.

Then I move onto checking in with sources and colleagues in different time zones who may have sent overnight updates or news on our ongoing projects. I wish I did this by phone more and more, but recently I’ve been following the Gen Z’s penchant for voice memos which are shockingly efficient and capture a lot of empathy and care in a way a typo-filled text just fails to.

Looking back over your career, what were some of the highlights and why? 

My early days at 48 Hours brings back a lot of treasured memories. The work was very intense as was the subject matter (true crime). But I showed up at the CBS broadcast center as a lonely intern from Arkansas and was a fish out of water in New York.

I had several incredible mentors there who took me under their wing and gave me a master class in journalism school. Chuck Stevenson, Nancy Kramer, Judy Tygard, Kathleen O’Connell, and Susan Zirinsky truly changed the direction of my life and provided opportunity after opportunity to get on airplanes and learn to talk to strangers and begin to learn how to listen in interviews and report. 

(Image from gabrielleschonder.com)

You’ve won many awards, but what is most gratifying to you about the work you do? 

Covering new topics because I find it terrifying in a good way, and getting to work with people who are much smarter than me. 

What would you tell the younger you, when you were first entering your profession?

 Say yes. Just take the meeting. Whatever you have to do, always take the meeting. You never know what’s behind that next door.

(Image from gabrielleschonder.com)

What’s the best advice you ever received? The worst? 

Start working on interview questions early (like a week or two) and keep working on said questions. Never stop revising your interview questions. They help you refine your story and edit your focus over and over again.

Also, never feel like you’ve followed up too much. Someone in D.C. once said to me, “you’ve only reached out to me three or four times. That’s nothing down here.” That really gave me the confidence to keep going at the hard-to-get sources.

Worst advice? That stoking the flames of competitiveness in a newsroom makes the stories and the work better. It doesn’t. 

How do you manage the stress of deadlines, controversial subjects and challenging assignments with the need to maintain a healthy personal and home life? 

Movement and lot and lots of reading for fun. Whether it’s a trail run or a just a long walk around the Washington monument after a long day of filming. Getting my body moving, and away from a phone and allowing my mind to wander is critical time for me.

I also adore fiction and always travel with a couple of great books. I’m also in too many book clubs, but I just adore recommendations from others with totally different tastes than me. Like sci-fi is something I always swore off and now I can’t get enough. 

(Image from gabrielleschonder.com)

In 2022 you were awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. Can you tell us a little about the work you completed while there? What was the experience like for you? 

I was pushed outside my comfort zone to study topics I frankly knew very little about. My fellow fellows were brilliant reporters from all over the world. I went in focused on misinformation in political coverage and campaigns, but I ended up going much broader and focusing on international affairs. I also took a hip hop dance class which was critical for my brain.

Some topics I focused on were very intense like a humanitarian law course at Harvard Law School. I took an incredible class at Harvard Business School where we studied the history of war from the perspective of the losers. A former President of Colombia spoke to that class and called me out and said he was a Nieman fellow in his early 20s. So that blew my mind. However, I won’t be entering politics.

I was fortunate to take David Sanger, Derek Reveron, and Graham Allison’s course at the Kennedy School, Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy and the Press, which has attracted some of the best and brightest policy servants in the world over decades. So it was fun to be a stowaway in there. It was a life-changing year and it helped me get my creativity back and really made me focus on what sorts of topics I wanted to take on in my journalism. 

Connect with Gabrielle Schonder on her website https://www.gabrielleschonder.com/ and follow her on Instagram at @GabrielleSchonder.