Duquesne Alum Turned Successful Evening News Anchor: Meet Tracy Carloss

 

It was just 35 years ago that Tracy Carloss was walking down Academic Walk, proudly wearing her sorority letters and waving to friends as she passed Rooney Field, which was then just a parking lot. While she has made many accomplishments throughout her career as a weekend anchor/reporter for News5 in Cleveland, Ohio, she recalls her time at Duquesne like it was just yesterday.  

“Oh gosh, I loved my time at Duquesne,” she said. “My favorite memories are definitely the ones connected to my sorority.” Tracy was a sister of Zeta Tau Alpha. Through events such as Greek Sing and Carnival, she made lifelong friends whom she still gets together with to this day. She was also the chapter president of Zeta, which provided her with valuable leadership skills. But between the sorority events in the Union Ballroom and the struggle of living in the non-air conditioned yet infamous St Ann Hall, she was attending classes in College Hall, which according to her, still looks the same.

When asked if she had a favorite class at Duquesne, she was quick to mention Vic Vrabel, a professor who worked for KDKA before teaching an evening course. “He really brought into the classroom what he saw every day,” she said. “There was a field trip there (to KDKA) during class and it made an impression on me. It definitely solidified that I want to go into news,” she continued. Although he is retired now, his work is something that Carloss has carried with her throughout her 34-year career. However, not all professors were as great as Vrabel, as she recalled a class (she could not specifically remember which one) where the professor told her she would “never make it in news” due to her name ending in a Y. “They don’t like that on TV,” the professor had said. Carloss has proved her wrong, anchoring each weekend’s evening news with her name Tracy spelled just the same way it was back then. 

“I was in that same class when that professor said that, and I sat right next to Tracy and cringed too,” said journalism graduate Kris Meldrum Denholm, who worked in ATF’s press office in DC for ten years before becoming a freelance journalist for the next two decades. “And I remembered that comment right away when I turned on the news when we lived in Cleveland, and there was my classmate from the next desk, Tracy with a Y,” she laughs. “Tracy is a phenomenal reporter and anchor, and I’m so thrilled to see her success. And I remember going to KDKA-TV with Vic Vrabel’s class too. He really was a fantastic teacher who taught us all so much about what a newsroom is like. Great discussions, and he distracted us as we wrote our stories, because he said that’s what a newsroom was like. Duquesne journalism was a great experience.”

Carloss has nothing bad to say about her Duquesne experience either. “I wish my daughter would go there,” she said, as her daughter is a junior in high school beginning to tour colleges. While her experience was “fabulous,” she almost had a completely different college experience, as she originally wanted to study nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. “I took a speech class in high school and really liked it, although I do not like speaking in front of groups, that's not my thing,” she noted. However, a classmate of hers wanted to be a reporter, and she thought, “That would be a pretty cool job.” So, as she and her dad were walking onto the Oakland campus for a tour, she confessed, “Dad, I don’t want to be a nurse.” To which he said: “Well, what do you want to do?” She replied, “I want to be a reporter.” As they spoke to the admissions man from Pitt, he said, “Our communications program is not that good, I would look at Duquesne.” Although her father was supportive of her sudden switch in aspiration, her mom was not. “My mom threw a fit and did not talk to me for 2 weeks,” she said. “Because she knew to be a journalist, I would have to leave,” she added, which is exactly what she ended up doing.

 After earning her bachelor's degree in communications, with minors in journalism and criminal justice, Carloss decided to stay for an extra year at Duquesne to earn her master's degree in liberal studies with a concentration in political science. In the winter the year after graduation, she moved to Clarksburg, West Virginia, to work for WDTV as a producer. In the years following, she moved all around, from Syracuse to Buffalo to Cleveland. 

           While there have been many stories she has covered that impacted her, one sticks out to her the most. It was days before Christmas in Syracuse, New York, and a charity that had been gathering gifts for those in need was burglarized. When they reported on it, the story generated more donations than the charity had in the first place. “That hit home,” she said. “The power we have in the media to do good.” Although this was a positive turnaround from a bad situation, not all stories that Carloss reports on have the same outcome. She reflects on one that affected her negatively: Jailyn Candelario, a 16-month-old baby who was left alone for 10 days while her mother went on vacation to Puerto Rico and Detroit. Carloss covered the sentencing for this case. “Although I wasn’t in the courtroom, those kinds of things stick with you,” she said. She mentioned how a photographer said to her while she was pregnant: “Once you have a child you will never look at a story the same again.” She thought, “That’s not true, I'm pretty sensitive, I get it.” However, she states now the photographer was “completely right.” She adds how she and her husband, who is a police officer, usually do not talk about work, because “by the time I get to the end of the workday, I don’t want to have to talk anymore,” she said. However, after reporting on that case, she states her husband knew it affected her because she wanted to talk about it. Another case that made national news that Carloss covered was the three girls who were missing for almost a decade in Cleveland, Ohio, Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight, and Carloss covered the story from beginning to end. “I would have never thought that it would end like that,” she said, referring to them escaping the Seymour Avenue house and calling for help.

Having won the Edward R. Murrow award for team coverage of University Hospitals makes all the hard-to-stomach stories worth it, though, as Carloss expressed it is one of the biggest accomplishments of her career thus far. She only quietly admits Emmys when asked if there were any other awards or accomplishments.

Carloss’s experience provides valuable insight to current journalism/communications students, and she has lessons that she wants them to take with them. “The world of news started to go sideways when cable came out with all these shows that people started taking them as fact,” she said. “As a journalist, it is not your job to put your opinion into a story whatsoever.” She says, “You cannot make half of your audience mad and expect them to come back.” 

While the accomplishments outweigh the negatives, there is one thing that she would change while looking back. “I always wanted to go home and work in Pittsburgh,” she says. “But Cleveland is a bigger market and hired me. Now Cleveland is home and where I'll finish my career,” she says. (When asked if she roots for the Browns or the Steelers due to the fact she was born and raised in Pittsburgh, she said, “I’m not going on the record with that” with a laugh.) While the rivalry between the two cities is strong, Carloss believes the two cities are more similar than people would care to admit. “The people build up the rivalry between Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo but they really are all the same people. They’re friendly, they’re warm, they are welcoming, and that’s why from the moment we moved here I felt so at home. It’s a Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland city that I’m at home at,” she says. 

Through and through, Tracy Carloss has made admirable strides to overcome hurdles she faced and prove wrong those who did not believe in her. “You have to learn in this business that you need a thick skin. Every time someone tells me ‘no’ it just makes me more determined to do it.” 

Though the years spent at Duquesne are only a small part in the grand scheme of her life, the university’s impact sticks with her, as she attends alumni events and gathers with the families of her college friends. “Duquesne has been a part of my life since I walked through the doors,” she said. While students are still subjected to the conditions of St Ann Hall, Tracy Carloss’s story is a reminder for them to continue working hard, and they will accomplish great things.