Take 5 with Media Alumni: Kavitha Cardoza

About Kavitha Cardoza

Her work has been seen, heard, and read by millions on outlets like NPR, BBC World News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. She was also the host of Breaking Ground with Kavitha Cardoza, a documentary series on education that aired on more than 150 public radio stations.

Originally from India, Cardoza earned bachelor’s degrees in English literature, economics, and psychology, as well as a master’s degree in communication, before coming to the United States. Cardoza says her decision to get a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Illinois College of Media completely changed her life. Read more about this Media alum who has been passionately elevating stories on “the last, the least, and the littlest,” for the past 20 years.

*Q&A transcribed from Zoom interview and edited for length and clarity.

1. Most of your reporting focuses on underrepresented communities and giving voices to vulnerable populations. Why are you drawn to these stories?

When I came to the U.S., I was very surprised because you don’t see poverty the way you see it in India. Over here, sometimes we pretend it isn’t happening, or it’s not around us, when, in fact, there’s deep, deep poverty. I worked for many years for the local NPR affiliate in Washington, D.C., and my beat was education and poverty, and I would see children who didn’t have food, [living] in terrible poverty in our nation’s capital.

There’s this American [sentiment] of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and the belief that if you haven’t gotten out of poverty, you haven’t tried hard enough. That’s just not the case. There are all kinds of systemic issues that can impact poverty and so, I really felt strongly about bringing these stories to light and showing these struggles, and how people internalize them—thinking it’s their fault or they’re not good enough—when really there are much bigger forces at play.

There are people really, really hurting, and we need to tell their stories. Journalists can elevate those voices because of the platform we have. I cannot imagine doing anything else. I cannot imagine anything else giving me more meaning. I really do wake up every morning feeling like I’m doing something that matters, and I feel so lucky.

2. You’ve covered education, health, and poverty for decades, but you’ve said a story you wrote as a College of Media student about a roadkill collector stands out. Why?

My very first story for audio was to do a profile of someone, and at that time, I was driving from Springfield to Urbana-Champaign and noticed these marks on the road that I later learned were from roadkill. As an international student, I had never heard of roadkill so when I found out, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, wouldn’t it be cool and interesting to profile the roadkill man? Like, who does this for a job?’

I think this guy thought I was totally crazy when I first called and asked to do a ride along. He was this 6’4 African-American guy from the South and I’m this 5-foot-nothing brown girl from India—you couldn’t get further apart in terms of our backgrounds, and there we were, spending the whole day in the truck and talking and trying to learn about each other, because for every question I had, he had questions for me as well. They dig a kind of grave, usually at the side of the road, and bury the roadkill there, so he had got out to do that, and I had gone with him. We were at the side of the highway, waiting to cross to get back into this big orange truck and when you’re outside your car on the highway, the noises are so loud, the cars are just whizzing by, and it’s totally overwhelming and feels so much more dangerous than when you’re inside your car.

Both of us had to cross the road, and without thinking, we instinctively just held hands and ran across the road together. I thought to myself, that is such a metaphor for what we’re doing in life, right? It’s like we’re so different, and all we’re trying to do is get support from each other and understand each other and try and cross the road and not have something hit you. It just became this beautiful lesson to me that taught me to never say or think to myself that a person and I have nothing in common. I always believe we have common ground—I can understand someone, and they can understand me. All it takes is the willingness to start a conversation.

It’s also how I got my first job. Another professor had us ask a news director anywhere in Illinois to critique our work. So, I took my roadkill story to the news director of the public radio station in Springfield, Illinois, and I said, ‘This is a class assignment, do you mind critiquing it for me?’ He said he was born and raised in central Illinois and never thought of doing a story like this. Then he offered me a job. I really owe my career to that little story.

3. What led you to pursue a graduate degree in journalism at Illinois, and what was your experience like?

I came to the U.S. and I thought I’d get a degree and work for one year as a reporter and then start on my PhD. I did my master’s at Illinois, and the journalism bug just bit me and never left!

Illinois changed my life. I would not trade it for anything. When I was a student, I felt like people went out of their way to help. I feel like my professors poured into me, and they have been my educators for life. When I had to negotiate my first salary, I called a professor. When I moved to a bigger market in D.C., I called a professor. When I got married, I invited my professors. They are such a part of my life, and I’m so, so grateful to them.

4. How does your experience as a working journalist shape your teaching?

Most of my students are getting their news from social media. They’re not consuming and creating news the way I did, and so I wanted to keep up. I felt if I’m going to be someone’s teacher, I want them to have the most up-to-date kind of way of doing things. And when we talk about ethics, which I talk about in almost every class, I wanted up-to-date examples. I never want to stop practicing journalism so I can feel like I can bring my experience back to the classroom and my students and keep discussions relevant.

5. With journalism constantly evolving, what remains constant for you?

When I was at the U of I, we were still using something called carts—they’re like bulky cassettes you don’t even use anymore for broadcast journalism—and the format has changed several times over since then. I’ve already seen so many changes, and with AI, there are going to be many more. But I always tell my students, you can write with your finger in the sand, or you can write on the latest Mac computer. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing on, if you don’t have something to say. And that is my job—to help students figure out what they have to say. To me, that is most important, and so I’m sure by the time these students graduate, or by the time they are mid-career, AI will probably be old, and they will be wrestling with technology we haven’t even heard of or thought of yet. But really, learning how to think is why they’re in my classroom and that is what I focus on.