Matt Nelko
A perfect storm of procrastination, missing application deadlines for coveted internships, and a quote from the CEO of Salomon Brothers about the misery of working on Wall Street.
This was the confluence of events back in 1988 that forever changed the path Matt Nelko—an English, Economics, and Political Science triple major o—from a career in high finance onto an uncharted trajectory that started at Pitt’s very own WPTS-FM, led him straight downtown to KDKA Radio, and eventually launched him into the heart of New York City, inside the storied studios of CBS and ABC.
“My entire career was based on my procrastination,” Nelko told me a few minutes into our conversation. But look closer, and you’d never believe it. A driven overachiever, as an English/Economics double major, he'd maxed out the allowable number of credits in English while an undergraduate, so naturally, he chose to finish a third major—Political Science—while holding down three part-time jobs, including one in the English department. Nelko’s drive certainly evened out any repercussions from his penchant for procrastination.
A graduate of Ambridge Area High School, he arrived at his father’s college alma mater in the fall of 1987 with the goal of becoming an investment banker—hence the Economics major. “It was the ‘80s, and everyone wanted to work on Wall Street,” he told me. That is because the public received a mostly glamorized picture of Wall Street.
Already an avid reader of Forbes magazine, Nelko started reading BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg Businessweek) as part of his professional writing curriculum and remained a devoted reader who admired the fact that the publication avoided bias. And it was a single quote in that publication that would change the course of his career: the CEO of Salomon Brothers, addressing criticism of the boiler-room work environment at Salomon, essentially saying that “nobody likes working here” and that the whole purpose of working on Wall Street is to work yourself nearly to death, make your fortune, and take the money and get out. With this removal of Wall Street's luster, Nelko turned his focus to his English major.
As a writer, he envisioned himself one day writing for publications like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. But he also shared a writers' tendency to procrastinate. By the spring of 1989, he found he’d waited too long to start his search for internship opportunities, as all of the top magazine and newspaper internships had been snatched up months before. Fortunately, his internship advisor told him about a brand-new opening at WQED-FM for a newswriter. Up to that point, Nelko hadn’t even considered broadcasting, especially since he didn't see himself as a very competitive person. But with this as his last option, he jumped at it.
That’s when, as he says, he got “bit by the radio bug.” And his fate was sealed.
Nelko went back to Pitt in the fall after that internship and marched right into Pitt’s radio station, WPTS-FM, where he started writing and anchoring the news, eventually overhauling and running its newsroom.
And that’s when an even bigger opportunity opened up for Nelko. That fall, his Broadcast Writing instructor invited Richard Cook, the news director of KDKA Radio, to speak to the class. Nelko asked such an insightful question about KDKA that Cook pulled him aside outside the classroom and offered him a summer internship on the spot! Yes, Nelko landed one of the most competitive internship positions in Pittsburgh because he asked KDKA’s news director why KDKA Radio was owned by CBS when KDKA-TV was operated by ABC.
That internship at KDKA Radio not only led to a job after graduation but also launched a rapidly accelerating path of increasingly responsible positions, including producing live remote broadcasts, talk shows, Pirates baseball and Penguins hockey games, and—eventually—serving as news editor for one of the crown jewels of Pittsburgh broadcasting, KDKA’s venerable afternoon-drive broadcast, “90 to 6”.
By the spring of 1995, Nelko was running KDKA’s newsroom. He would be in the studio by 2:00 am, setting up the station’s morning-drive coverage, writing half of the newscasts, producing all of them as well as the station’s half-hour “News to Noon,” and then setting up the assignments for the rest of the day’s coverage. His ability to excel at multiple tasks put him in a position to man the editor desk one day on a whim, which, at the time, made Matt the youngest person to ever sit there in KDKA’s history. In between all of this, Nelko’s weekends were devoted to anchoring his own newscasts on WBVP-AM in Beaver Falls, Pa.
But Nelko still had an even bigger dream in sight: NEW YORK. And just four years after graduating from Pitt and landing at KDKA, he made that dream a reality by getting a staff writing job at CBS News/Radio—the very same newsroom where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite grew to be household names.
Over the next 25 years, Nelko’s career would see him writing for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, anchoring on Air America Radio and SiriusXM, and acting as executive producer for CBS News Up to the Minute, as well as head of writing for ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer, World News Tonight with David Muir, and Nightline. He earned a Daytime Emmy Award for his work on Good Morning America and went on to serve as judge for the national Emmy Awards for 17 years. Nelko also won five elections to sit on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, East.
Now, as a broadcast producer for ABC’s World News Now, Nelko is eagerly writing his next chapter. He’s managed to tap back into his first attraction—Wall Street—as the president of the board of trustees of the New York Financial Writers’ Association, and has performed in the annual Financial Follies on Broadway, the organization’s annual fundraiser that he now oversees. Did I mention that he also runs his own company, Nelko Media Strategy, too? It offers clients media training, crisis management consultation, and more.
Yet, he never forgets his roots, or the fundamentals that form the basis of his success. He’s taken a lot of knocks along the way, so he has valuable advice to give, not only for students hoping to follow in his footsteps, but for all students as they enter the world of work.
One of the most important, he says, is recognizing opportunity when it knocks. While anchoring at his weekend job in Beaver Falls, he learned this lesson the hard way when KDKA’s producer called, desperately seeking someone to anchor the Storm Center. The producer told him, “It’s you or it’s nobody.” As Nelko entered the KDKA newsroom the next day, self-doubt got the best of him, and he missed out on an opportunity that an experienced professional wanted him to take. “Never pass up an opportunity,” he told me. “If it’s something you want, take it. Do not worry about whether you’re ready for it. If someone is offering you the opportunity, they feel you are ready. Don’t second-guess them. Take it—and then fake it until you make it. Do whatever you have to do, learn whatever you have to learn, and figure out whatever you need to figure out to make that opportunity work. One of the most painful lessons of life is that opportunity really doesn’t knock twice.”
Nelko truly makes himself accountable for his decisions, which leads to his next tip: Keep your integrity intact. “The entire world is run on trust,” he says, “especially in my field. At the end of the day, all a journalist has is his reputation for fact-checking, honesty, and integrity. Once you lose that, you have nothing. Guard and treasure your character with your life—because your professional life will depend upon it.”
And finally, a twist on the classic It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know. “The problem with that,” Nelko says, “is that whom you may know is worthless if that whom doesn’t know you!” Nelko’s advice here: “It’s not whom you know, but who knows you.”
For Nelko, knowing how to navigate when coming upon a fork in the road is all part of the process, but his intuition, accountability, and work ethic continue to pay off. He stresses that, above anything, the best way to pursue opportunities, keep your integrity, and build a network is to know people beyond their surface level and to let them know you.
—Corinne Hebestreit
Corrine Hebestreit graduated this year with majors in German, and in Public and Professional Writing. With an interest in public relations, she has interned for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the National Blood Clot Alliance, and other organizations.