DU Journalism Professor Reflects on Emmy Win

PHOTO: Nolan Deck

Kareem El Damanhoury wears multiple hats—all of them, though, perch on one goal: living and teaching trustworthy news reporting. As a journalist and producer with CNN, El Damanhoury recently earned a News Emmy award for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage of the Israel-Gaza War. 

In addition to his work in the fast-paced world of journalism, El Damanhoury also serves as a multimedia journalism and digital storytelling professor at DU. He’s been at DU since 2019 and is the founder and director of DU Media, a platform for students to showcase their multimedia content. In 2024, he was named Educator of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists.

The DU Newsroom caught up with El Damanhoury to talk to him about his Emmy win, facts-based reporting, what student journalists should know, and more.

Congratulations on your News Emmy win! What does this honor mean to you?

Personally, I've always dreamt of it. An Emmy is a big accomplishment—I've always heard journalists introduce themselves as ‘Emmy Award-winning,’ so it was a dream come true. It’s also motivation that hopefully, in the future, I'll be doing more work that can be recognized for its journalistic quality.

Your team collectively won the Emmy for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage of the Israel-Gaza War, with you doing your part remotely from Denver. What were some of the most significant challenges you faced working on this topic?

This award is for the CNN team, which is a very big team, with people on the ground, people in the newsroom, people working from home, people doing a lot of different things. Some of the challenges we have are about, as folks would call it, the fog of war, right? The uncertainty of information. 

It’s about verification, making sure that information that is making the rounds is verified, but also that we're competitive in the sense that once it's verified as fast as it should be, as accurately as it should be, that it's going out as fast as it can. 

What was your exact role on the team?

My role was mainly in the news gathering side of things. I worked on a bunch of different things—I worked on [authenticating] video, I worked on news gathering, I worked on writing story updates. 

I worked on checking with sources within Gaza—health officials, doctors, nurses—in order to verify certain things like, let's say a social media video pops up and it says ‘X hospital’ has been hit. We don't know when that happened. Is that true or not? People are going to be saying ‘X number’ of people were killed, et cetera, so we had to check with the health officials on the ground. 

I wrote scripts and handled affiliate requests as well. CNN has a huge number of affiliates, over 1,000 of them, both domestic and international. So, one of my roles was writing scripts on those stories and making those videos available—once they are cleared, obviously, and verified—and handling any affiliate requests that come in, too.

How do you handle the emotional weight of reporting on such heavy topics?

I try to just turn off the switch after my shift is done. Then, before the next shift, I update myself on what's going on, so that I'm ready to hit the ground running. 

The other thing is something I learned in my research—I did a lot of research on ISIS and Al Qaeda visual media strategies. I remember one day, I woke up sort of screaming, because I was dreaming that I was stuck in Syria and there were militants running around me—it was a nightmare. And I started thinking, what am I doing that might have prompted that? And I realized that I was working on a very heavy topic until I went to sleep.

So, since my PhD days, before I sleep, even if I'm working an overnight shift or working on a research paper late at night, I have to take time—even if it's just 15 or 30 minutes—to just calm down and watch something that is fun, to try to disconnect from the heavy topic.

What do you think are some of the biggest hurdles that journalists face today?

The amount of data out there—this is a very big challenge, because you are bombarded with a lot of information and data every second. Making sure that everything is being looked into with an eye towards verification and making sure that you're not putting something out there that is not correct or not accurate. 

The other thing I would say is that the media and the journalism industry tends to evolve as we speak. Everything is moving so fast. A lot of different tools are popping up; a lot of different social network sites are popping up. So, keeping up with all of that is not just preferred; it is required, or else you're going to be rendered archaic in just a couple of years. 

What’s one piece of advice you would give to young, aspiring journalists?

I always tell my students that the days of wanting to be able to only do one thing are long gone. 

It’s about being able to essentially be a jack of all trades. Writing is definitely the core. But writing on its own is not enough. You need to be able to write, to shoot video, to edit, to podcast, to step in front of the camera—and do pieces that would be suitable for TV or video but also for TikTok, you name it. 

To learn more about DU’s Media, Film and Journalism Studies program, visit the website here.