I Make a Living

If you think television journalism is glamorous, Erica Mandy is here to set you straight. She started as a “one-woman band” in a small TV news market, where reporting on location often meant that she was the photographer, camera operator, writer, editor...all while also being the on-air journalist. “That weeds out the people who are in it just to be on TV,” she laughs, comparing her small-town news experience to “grad school” for TV journalists. Over the next seven years, she worked in successively larger markets, finally landing at CBS News in Los Angeles. She was there for three years, working on-air in the second-largest TV news market in the country. But Erica’s passion wasn’t just the news—it was the news in a whole new way. In 2017, she left CBS to launch The NewsWorthy, a daily news podcast that offered a “fair, fast and fun” look at the day’s top stories, all delivered in fifteen minutes or less. When she started, audiences were tuning out the news altogether, saying it was too biased, time-consuming,