Brian Carovillano, class of `95, is the senior vice president of news at Versant Media, where he directs news standards at CNBC and MSNOW. He credits his time at the College for making him a lifelong learner throughout his career: from reporting local news in New Hampshire to working as an editor for AP News and, now, helping news organizations navigate the rise of social media, AI use in journalism, and the recent barring of reporters from the White House.
Carovillano moderated the discussion for last Friday’s Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism and serves as one of five members of the selection committee. “At some point in the past five to ten years, I just felt like I wanted to do more to give back, and I joined the Lovejoy Awards Committee and am re-engaging with the Colby community in ways that I hadn’t since I graduated,” Carovillano said.
Carovillano met his wife of 25 years at the College and says the school has changed his life both inside and outside of the classroom. “You don’t think about the value of liberal arts while it’s actually happening to you, but at some point in your life, you look back and you think, oh, that’s why it’s different from other kinds of education,” Carovillano said.
Carovillano remembers three classes in particular from his time at the College. As an English major, he took Hemingway and Fitzgerald with Charlie Bassett — the professor after whom the Bassett teaching award and a building in the New Residence Halls are named. He recalls the class being “really great.” Another class, The American Short Story, he recalls being “really really great.” He also remembers taking the anthropology class Religion, Witchcraft, and Sorcery with Constantine Riskos outside of his major.
He studied abroad twice during his time at the College: the first was a semester in Florence and the second a JanPlan in Rome with the American Studies department. “We were studying the tradition of American artists using Rome as a place to go as expats and explore the American experience from afar,” Carovillano said.
“After I went to Florence, I fell in love with art history, and I came back and I took as many art history classes as I could cram into my senior year,” he said. “For a while, I thought maybe I would go and become a medieval studies professor or something, and, as a kid who came to college from New Jersey without a real plan, to have ended up there in four years is kind of amazing. Just the fact that that was possible, I think, is the real hallmark of liberal arts,” he said.
After graduating, Carovillano started working as a reporter for a local paper in New Hampshire. “At some point, someone gave me some really good advice that going to work for a small town newspaper is just as good as journalism school,” he said. “You learn all the same things, but you’re also getting paid. So, I took a job in a small town in New Hampshire working for a weekly newspaper, and that was like my journalism school.”
There, he covered everything, from sports to the arts to breaking news to a column about his outdoor adventures, and even took photos. “There was a murder, which, in that part of New Hampshire, was an exceptionally rare thing. And so, even though I was the sports editor of the newspaper, I was dispatched to go cover the murder,” he said. The daily paper was so impressed by his coverage in the weekly paper that they immediately offered him a job.
Next, Carovillano went to work for the Associated Press (AP) in Providence, Rhode Island. There, he covered the corruption trial of the then-mayor, Buddy Sienzi. He then moved to Boston to work as an editor for the AP in the midst of reporting on the clergy sex abuse scandal featured in the 2015 film Spotlight.
Those stories launched him into a career as an editor, working his way up to AP’s vice president of news before moving to NBC in 2022. “I didn’t become an editor until after I had spent a number of years being a reporter,” he said, “which I feel like is always a really important thing to do in any kind of professional relationship. Being able to put yourself in the position of the other person is really important. Once I became an editor, reporters knew that I had been in their position, and I feel like that made me a more empathetic editor. But, I also knew all their tricks, and so I feel like that probably prepared me most for being an editor.”
Having two parents who worked as educators, Carovillano said that editing reminds him a lot of teaching, “As an editor, you have to find a way to take pride in the work that your reporters are doing, and to me, that’s kind of like being a teacher. I always wanted to deflect as much credit for the reporting as possible, because I felt like the more success that somebody that I was editing had, the better that would reflect on me, and I took a lot of pride in the work that they did.”
At Versant Media, Carovillano is in charge of standards and ensures that reporters are following the standards of journalistic ethics. “When we’re presented with problems, my job is kind of like ‘Problem Solver in Chief.’ I have to help figure out what the best way to deal with a problem is without compromising credibility,” he said.
CNBC and MSNOW serve mostly older cable news audiences, but Carovillano says they’re trying to adapt to a new generation. “We’re trying to take that audience loyalty and the people who tune in every day and reach a different generation of people and try to make them as loyal as the ones that we already have.”
Part of that shift involves incorporating AI. “We would not use AI to generate content like pictures or video, or even writing,” he said. “But, we want to make sure that we’re not missing the opportunity to help supercharge our journalism using these new tools.”
He said that AI is useful in helping reporters analyze large amounts of data and transcribe interviews. “If you assign that work to the robots, you can use the time recovered for those journalists to do more ambitious journalism,” he said.
Most recently, MSNOW has found itself in the midst of a legal fight with President Donald Trump, who barred their reporters, along with CNN’s and Politico’s reporters, from entering the White House grounds.
“It’s of incredible importance that journalists are not restricted in their access to our government because that’s how people know what’s going on,” he said. “Without that access, people have less visibility into what their government is doing and how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.”
The main topic of discussion at the Lovejoy Award ceremony that Carovillano moderated on Friday was the ban on reporter access to the Pentagon, where awardees Helene Cooper, Tara Copp, and Phil Stewart had previously served as members of the Press Corps.
“There are fights going on over access all over the place,” Carovillano said in reference to these bans, “but it’s not like people are seeking special treatment. They’re just seeking to protect the access that they’ve had for a long time, which frankly has served us really well as a democracy. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to make sure that that access is preserved. When somebody wants to cut off that access and doesn’t want a journalist looking at what’s happening, you have to ask yourself, why doesn’t that person want scrutiny on what they’re doing? What are they actually up to?”
Carovillano closed our interview with a reminder of the importance of journalism. He said, “I know that people are less likely to trust journalists and journalism than they were in years past, but, I promise you that there are tens of thousands of us out there who just want to report the news, and that’s all we’re trying to do.”
~ Cleo Rehkopf `28
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