ASU Graduates Work to Earn Solid Reputations
This series of three profiles is a portion of the grad project conducted by Karina Espinoza for Cronkite News highlighting Latino journalists in Arizona who are making a difference in the journalism industry.
Arizona Cardinals reporter paves way
for other Latino
sports journalists
Sharing people’s stories is a personal obligation for former Arizona Republic investigative reporter
Telemundo reporter: “Your experiences
as a journalist makes storytelling all the more powerful”
Felipe Corral Jr., is no stranger to the world of journalism, especially sports journalism. He grew up watching his father Felipe Corral cover sports on Univision Arizona, but Corral Jr. didn’t always have a journalism career in his plans. He has two older brothers who have a degree in business, so throughout highschool he was mainly exposed to that and decided to head the same direction when he started college at Arizona State University. He was majoring in business communications, but during the second semester of his sophomore year, he decided to switch his major to sports journalism at the Walter Cronkite School.
He describes finding this passion for sports journalism as a combination of a “moment and a process.” The moment for him came as he started realizing that his personality didn’t quite fit what he was studying at the time; he described himself as a very outspoken person, someone with views to share and who wanted to tell the stories of others. He started breaking down his interests and realized that his true passion lied in covering sports. He remembers always going to sports events with his father and seeing him talk during community events. The impact that his father had on those communities really inspired him.
What started as an internship at The Arizona Republic in 2006, turned into a whole lifetime of experiences and stories for Dianna Náñez who currently holds a position of investigative reporter there. As simple as that may sound, Náñez’s life took a lot of twists and turns before she found that she belonged in the journalism field. When she was a little girl she described qualities that could foretell that she had the heart of a journalist, but she says that she was never really exposed to the field. Náñez, who is from Mexican descent, grew up in Northern California in a farm workers town and says that reading and writing were an important part of her life because it gave her the opportunity to imagine and see places and things that she was not able to in her town. The closest she got to something journalism related was as a high school freshman where she got to write an opinion piece to the editor of a local newspaper that was then published. After that, Náñez moved around to different states so her father could pursue his education, and by the time she moved to Phoenix, she was in her third high school.
When Náñez finally went to college, she said that she didn’t feel like there was a space or community there for her so she decided to drop out of college. For several
Juan Ulises Juarez fell in love with radio at a really young age: He was only in elementary school when he realized he wanted to pursue becoming a radio host. So, he planned his path in that direction and when he started high school, he joined a communications program. This program taught him many skills relating to radio and video, like how to conduct interviews, operate a camera, and shoot and edit video. A year into it, the instructor teaching him noticed Juarez’s talent and encouraged him to do more work with video because he was really good at editing and interviewing people.
Juarez started to dedicate more time to learn new skills. This is what gave him the opportunity to interview Phil Gordon, who was the mayor of Phoenix when he was in high school. This accomplishment at such a young age allowed his passion to grow as the years went by, but it wasn’t until the Arizona Law SB1070 when he really started to see the importance of journalism. That importance was reaffirmed in 2012 when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was established by the Obama Administration. Juarez was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and came to the United States when he was 10 years old. He didn’t have papers, so when DACA