By Dave Paone
Campus News
Helena Cheng sat as a reporter for Fox News four rows behind Donald Trump at his first trial in New York City.
She sat as a reporter in the courtroom next to a young mother whose one-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose while the judge sentenced those responsible to prison.
She was there when Congress sent a team of inspectors to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan during New York City’s migrant crisis.
Helena did all this while still a student majoring in journalism at New York University.
Here’s how it worked: in her first semester as a grad student, Helena landed a paid internship at CNBC, specifically at “The News with Shepard Smith.”
She edited individual, 90 to 120-second video packages for the nightly, live broadcast.
Helena took part in the daily, editorial meetings each morning where Smith and his team worked out the game plan for the day.
“During my internship with him, the show got canceled,” Helena said with a laugh.
In her second year as a grad student, Helena took part in an “associate program” with the Fox News Channel. It was a paid position designed for recent grads.
On her first day covering President Trump in court for Fox, she woke up at 4:00 AM to get a spot in line at the courthouse at five.
In the courtroom, she noticed Trump give “a look” to Attorney General Letitia James (the person prosecuting him) and made a note of it to relay to the Fox team outside the courthouse.
Upon graduation earlier this year, she was accepted to a “rotational program” at ABC News, which helps recent grads explore various career paths in broadcast news.
It was there she worked Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address from the control room at “ABC News Live.”
Her job was to listen to the president’s speech and make note of any key issues the network might want to report on in more detail or people they might want to interview immediately following the address.
She was confident POTUS would speak of Roe v. Wade, so Helena searched archival footage for the most recent protests to be used during the broadcast (called B-roll – also the name of her cat), which it was.
At ABC she works on both “ABC News Live Prime with Linsey Davis” and the “Good Morning America” digital team.
Helena’s story began 24 years ago when she was born in Guangzhou, a city near Hong Kong, in China.
As early as kindergarten she knew she wanted to be a newscaster.
However, if she wanted to be one in the United States, she needed to learn English. Fortunately for her, English language classes start in elementary school in China.
For many Chinese children, reading and writing English comes more easily than speaking it. Helena’s solution to that problem was to repeat everything Rachel on “Friends” said. (It’s a good thing she didn’t pick Pheobe.)
Both her parents have college degrees and her mother is a high school philosophy teacher.
“You know how Asian parents are,” she said. “They stress a lot on education. Education is the number-one, most important thing,” she said but credits her parents with letting her choose her own profession which led her to the US.
The first stop in America was a summer program at Harvard University, while she was still in high school.
Helena recalled her first day in New York City as a college student: “I opened the door and was like, ′Good morning, New York!′ and I bumped into a homeless guy on the street.” She describes the encounter as “very New York, very authentic.”
While at NYU (where she was also an undergraduate student), Helena was an on-air anchor and reporter, writer, and producer for “NYU Now,” which is a weekly, online newscast produced by students.
In 2020, NYU financed a “class trip” for the dozen students in her program (as well as their instructor) to cover the midterm elections as “boots-on-the-ground” reporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Another assignment she had at Fox News was to cover disgraced Congressman George Santos’ arraignment. When he spoke at a press conference outside the courthouse, Helena shouted a question to him and he answered it.
This might not sound like a big deal but for a “cub reporter” (which is what a newbie in journalism is called) it is.
At the Roosevelt Hotel, while covering the exterior press conference (known in the industry as a “presser”) a protest broke out. The crew she was with had two cameras and one had to stay framed up on the podium, where Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was speaking.
Helena described the scene as “very chaotic” and she couldn’t hear the congresswoman over the shouts of the protesters.
“I dropped my computer,” Helena said, “and I pulled out my phone.” She shot the only video of the protest the crew had and it was aired that night.
A cub reporter having footage she shot aired on national television is another big deal.
News people are supposed to be “hard-boiled” and not get emotional over the stories on which they report.
But the one on the dead one-year-old kicked her right between the eyes.
The backstory is the people convicted had used a daycare center in the Bronx as a cover for a fentanyl mill. While children were playing on the first floor, there was a drug manufacturing operation in the basement.
At the press conference following the sentencing, “Everyone was in tears,” said Helena. “Especially reporters who have kids.”
“I had to type down information even though I could not see anything with my eyes because I was crying so hard,” she said.
In addition to tugging on her heartstrings, the assignment was the key factor in the direction of her career.
When the judge read the sentence, he said it in Spanish. Helena had to turn to another reporter to translate for her.
It was at this instant Helena knew what path she would take.
“This is the kind of moment you realize how important a multi-cultural reporter is,” she said.
And that’s what she’s going to be.
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