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New Orleans Loves Lucy!

By AnaMaria Bech

ucy Bustamante is a New Orleans-born journalist who recently returned to her hometown to receive special recognition for her successful career. She discovered her passion at Cabrini High School, when a teacher nominated her to participate in a teen television program on Channel 4, WWL-TV called Our Generation, produced by Dominic Massa and hosted by Sally Ann Roberts, that provided early exposure to many teens in the area. “It was an incredible start to a young career for sure, and I loved it all the time.”

She was first an intern at WWL-TV Channel 4 and then worked as a production assistant at WVUE Channel 8. She moved to Biloxi, gained more experience as an associate producer, and received a phone call two years later to return to Channel 4 in 2004 as a reporter. She was there when New Orleans needed her the most; in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Later in 2006, Bustamante took over the evening anchor spot. And for four years, she was on the television screens of thousands of Louisiana’s households daily, professionally telling the news and winning over viewers’ hearts with charm.

 

Bustamante made many of the area’s Latino residents proud because she could speak Spanish and was happy to talk about her Cuban tradition and roots. Her Cuban culture is strong. She married a Miami-born Cuban who moved to New Orleans when she was hosting the evening news. A few years later, it was her time to support her Navy SEAL husband in the next step of his career in Virginia Beach. She left her hometown, family, and a prime-time television job. Her company allowed for a lateral transfer to a sister television station in Norfolk, Virginia, where she continued to anchor the news for a few years before moving again and settling in Philadelphia. Being a military wife, she faced the many challenges of moving around and constant deployments while juggling the demands of working on the news and becoming a mother of four. She works in Philadelphia, anchoring the morning news at NBC10 and providing breaking news coverage in Spanish for Telemundo62.

Lucy Bustamante visited New Orleans last May for a few events, including her induction into The Den of Distinction at Loyola University. This honor is reserved for” individuals who have distinguished themselves nationally through a lifetime of accomplishments or extraordinary achievements,” according to Dr. Kennedy Haydel, interim dean of the College of Music and Media at Loyola University. Twenty outstanding alums have been inducted into this hall of fame since its inception in 2012. A reception outside of campus became a special homecoming for the successful journalist. “Lucy is a generational talent. She has a heart for her community and a commitment to excellence that inspires everyone she touches. Lucy is an unforgettable force that represents the standard at Loyola’s School of Communication and Design. I’m honored to have her as our 2023 inductee,” stated Dr. Kennedy Haydel.

This event gathered some of the most recognized faces on television, producers from various channels, family, colleagues, and friends. The gathering was a testament to Loyola University’s impact on the journalism field of New Orleans and Lucy’s impact on her colleagues. “For Loyola to create an event that brought so many loved ones into a room and to be able to look 20-something years into this career and say this crew is truly my extended family was beyond special,” she said.

Bustamante made many of the area’s Latino residents proud because she could speak Spanish and was happy to talk about her Cuban tradition and roots. Her Cuban culture is strong. She married a Miami-born Cuban who moved to New Orleans when she was hosting the evening news. A few years later, it was her time to support her Navy SEAL husband in the next step of his career in Virginia Beach. She left her hometown, family, and a prime-time television job. Her company allowed for a lateral transfer to a sister television station in Norfolk, Virginia, where she continued to anchor the news for a few years before moving again and settling in Philadelphia. Being a military wife, she faced the many challenges of moving around and constant deployments while juggling the demands of working on the news and becoming a mother of four. She works in Philadelphia, anchoring the morning news at NBC10 and providing breaking news coverage in Spanish for Telemundo62.

Lucy Bustamante visited New Orleans last May for a few events, including her induction into The Den of Distinction at Loyola University. This honor is reserved for” individuals who have distinguished themselves nationally through a lifetime of accomplishments or extraordinary achievements,” according to Dr. Kennedy Haydel, interim dean of the College of Music and Media at Loyola University. Twenty outstanding alums have been inducted into this hall of fame since its inception in 2012. A reception outside of campus became a special homecoming for the successful journalist. “Lucy is a generational talent. She has a heart for her community and a commitment to excellence that inspires everyone she touches. Lucy is an unforgettable force that represents the standard at Loyola’s School of Communication and Design. I’m honored to have her as our 2023 inductee,” stated Dr. Kennedy Haydel.

This event gathered some of the most recognized faces on television, producers from various channels, family, colleagues, and friends. The gathering was a testament to Loyola University’s impact on the journalism field of New Orleans and Lucy’s impact on her colleagues. “For Loyola to create an event that brought so many loved ones into a room and to be able to look 20-something years into this career and say this crew is truly my extended family was beyond special,” she said.

Bustamante’s accomplishments include four Emmy awards, one Telly, several Associated Press awards for best anchor, and three regional Edward R. Murrow awards in 2011 for writing a documentary about the Affordable Care Act in Virginia. She also received one for breaking news in 2004 in New Orleans and a Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Before that, she traveled to Cuba to cover the first gubernatorial trade trip between Louisiana and Havana under President Bush. She also co-hosted LIVE with Regis and Kelly with the late Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa.

Bustamante devotes much of her efforts to raising awareness about diversity in media, and she has been lucky to count on managers with the vision of supporting diversity before it was a global trend. As a young girl in New Orleans, she used to call the Spanish radio station to request songs at her father’s command, and the anchors would keep her on to chat with her live on the air. In Virginia, she served as the morning news anchor for La Selecta 103.3 at WVXX-FM, a Spanish-language radio station. In Philadelphia, she also anchors for Telemundo62. While she strives to neutralize her Cuban Spanish and takes advice from her Venezuelan and Colombian colleagues on certain words, she tells young Latino journalists who aspire to be in the news not to lose their Spanish language, as the need for information in Spanish is growing. She pays special attention to immigration news and strives to provide a balanced account of the stories of Latinos in town.

She has made it her mission to bring fairness to veterans’ stories in the media. In conjunction with NBC News, Bustamante created the “American Vets” reporting series, where she and other journalists around the country are covering issues impacting veterans in the states and abroad. In November 2022, she co-hosted and co-produced American Vets: Beyond the Battlefield, an NBC News Now Veterans Day streaming special highlighting the issues our veterans with PTSD face. “I realized there was this false sense of patriotism in the media when they would aim for the military and tell stories a certain way to propagate this idea that being military and patriotic means being extreme. I said that is not how we live,” said Bustamante.

Much news coverage is based on identities, which can celebrate diversity. “There is a movement for promoting culture with employee resource groups and corporate spaces where they want you to talk about your identity: as a woman, as a Latina, and as a person of color,” Bustamante explains. A superficial focus on those identities can create division and extremism, which happens more in underserved communities. “If you don’t tell the stories of what most of them [Veterans] are like, then you’re going to have these hate groups attaching themselves to only one trope of their identity, and it’s the violent side, and that’s not OK because that’s farther from the truth; and the media it could be farther from the truth,” she says.

With this project for NBC, Bustamante and her colleagues have been covering veteran stories more deeply as a network and in individual newsrooms. The project continues to grow, paired with an effort by NBC Universal to hire more Veterans in their newsrooms. “There is no need for corporate TV America to pin them [Veterans] against each other when that literally can lead to the destruction of our American society,” says Bustamante.

While championing important issues, Bustamante continues representing New Orleans wherever she goes. She misses her hometown’s sense of community and the South’s warmth, which she knows is hard to find elsewhere. “There’s a reason that you have three network morning shows anchored by women with New Orleans ties; we just know how to show the love, we know how to receive it, we know how to give it,” she says.

Returning to New Orleans isn’t a plan. For now, Philadelphia is good for her family. She will continue providing balanced information to English and Spanish audiences and champion the causes she believes in. She is now at the Den of Distinction of Loyola University and will continue to be celebrated here because New Orleans loves Lucy.

 

 

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AnaMaria Bech

Publisher

Colombia

Economic Development

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