Shannon Bream (J.D. '96)
Fox News Channel

Self-described legal nerd Shannon Bream has a job she loves, and she loves the university that prepared her for it. After earning her Juris Doctorate at Florida State's College of Law and practicing corporate law in Tampa for several years, she “dipped her toe into the news” and has never looked back. As a reporter for Fox News covering the Supreme Court, Shannon constantly draws on the skills she learned while earning her degree at FSU Law.

“I found that my education at Florida State, getting to dig in and find multiple sides of the story, to find the truth of any conflict, was the perfect setup for becoming a journalist,” she says, adding that the transition from lawyer to journalist was “a natural flow from one to the other.”

“As a college kid, or even in law school, I never thought I'd end up as a full-time journalist. But it is a true passion for me. I couldn't be more grateful for the way things turned out.”

Bream worked at stations in Tampa, Charlotte and Washington before she started talking to Fox News personality Brit Hume about a job at Fox News Channel. That led to her appointment as Supreme Court reporter in fall 2007. She's lived in Washington, D.C., for six years now and, though it took some getting used to, she loves its “hustle and bustle.” Now she often logs 12-hour days putting together long-form reports and on-air updates on Court proceedings, enjoying every second of what she does.

 “For me to get to go into that room and watch nine of the best legal minds of the country argue out some of the most important cases that will ever impact this nation ... ” she says. “I pinch myself every day. I really do.”

Brittany Stahl (B.A. '08)
CNN Heroes

	Brittany Stahl (left) with Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega, who has honored as a CNN Top Ten Hero for 2010 for providing health care to patients in the dangerous city of Juarez, Mexico, regardless of their ability to pay.

A broad education in print and broadcast journalism, starting at Florida State and culminating in a graduate degree from NYU, brought Brittany Stahl to New York, the world's most exciting media city.

Once there, Stahl made her move from graduate student to intern to producer quickly and gracefully, with stints at CNN Money, Rachael Ray and MSNBC's Morning Joe. Now, as a producer for CNN Heroes, she spends her day getting to know outstanding individuals who've made extraordinary contributions to help others.

She credits her rise to doing the best job she could wherever she was, always asking for more opportunities and responsibility. She calls it “a natural progression.”

“Florida State definitely gave me a very good base. I was involved in Seminole Productions, which taught me reporting skills and how to put together a profile package, that kind of thing,” Stahl says. “So going into graduate school and internships, I already had some of that knowledge.”

CNN Heroes collects nominations of people who have made substantial contributions to those less fortunate than themselves. Stahl selects finalists from among the nominations submitted by viewers and produces video segments on each one. The winners are honored at an annual awards event.

The program has allowed Stahl to work with some amazing people. One of her favorite interview subjects is Anuradha Koirala, a top ten Hero of the Year for 2010, who founded the organization Maiti Nepal to rescue victims of sex trafficking along the border between India and Nepal. Stahl produced another video with Mira Sorvino, who travels with the United Nations to advocate on behalf of women who have also been victims.

Ali Bell (B.F.A. '09)
Montecito Picture Company

	Bell on set. She helped produce the wildly successful "No Strings Attached."

Ali Bell got her bachelor's degree from Florida State's College of Motion Picture Arts and headed straight to Hollywood. Once there, she worked fast. By 2008, the Hollywood Reporter had named her one of the top film executives under 35.

Bell started out with an internship at Paramount Pictures. From there she moved up the corporate ladder at Nickelodeon. After two years working with David Heyman and Heyday Films on the Harry Potter movies, she ended up with producer Ivan Reitman's company Montecito Pictures six years ago, where she now runs production and development.

Bell's stunning ascendance in terms of titles doesn't seem as important to her as the opportunity to work more closely with writers, directors and actors to bring their visions to the screen, though. She's most proud, lately, of her work on the 2011 film No Strings Attached, directed by Reitman and starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.

Bell and her colleagues reacted positively to the screenplay by first-time scriptwriter Elizabeth Meriwether. They worked intensely with Meriwether and Portman on the strong female characters in this contemporary version of When Harry Met Sally.

To Bell, the most rewarding part of the job is helping writers and artists take their ideas from inception all the way to getting the movie made and released.

Every time they screened No Strings Attached, Montecito set up a focus group afterwards, and Bell says lots of women in the audience said, “Finally there's a film with female characters that are like me and not a Hollywood version of me.”

“I think that's a testament to the work we did with Liz and with Natalie on really trying to come up with an authentic female character.”

Kathleen Parker (B.A. '73, m.A. '76)
The Washington Post Writer's Group

	Parker accepts the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary from Columbia University President Lee Bolinger. Photo by Eileen Barroso, Columbia University

Kathleen Parker will be the first to tell you that she's had an unorthodox career path. Not many people start out by going for their doctorate only to get “so thoroughly bored” that they end up packing up their belongings, getting in the car and driving north, headed for who knows where.

That's how Parker describes how she ended up in Charleston, S.C. After earning a pair of FSU degrees (including a master's in Spanish), she went to work for the Buenos Aires Herald, never to return to the ivory tower.

Of her first ever journalism job, Parker declares, “He hired me. The newsroom punished me. I prevailed.”

And from there, she says, “I went all over the place, covering everything from city hall to cops to federal court,” including stints in Jacksonville, to work for The Florida Times-Union and San Jose, to work for the Mercury News. By the time she arrived in California she had a son and became a features writer, since the schedule is a little less back-breaking than daily news. For awhile she was a food writer — the most fun she's ever had according to her.

But eventually Parker found her way to the Orlando Sentinel, where in 1987 she started a column called “Women.” The paper subsequently hired a man to write a column called “Men.” Eventually management canceled the Men column and asked Kathleen to write “Men and Women.”

“Once it became 'Men and Women,' it became about politics and gender,” she says. “The lifestyle-ish column that I had been hired to write became more opinion-oriented. And my column very much mirrored my son's life. My interests were very much home-focused, and then as he became part of the bigger world, I became part of the bigger world.”

Now Parker is an NYC-dwelling, CNN-appearing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. Not bad for someone who swears she chose Charleston by driving up I-95 “going eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”

Marion Taormina (B.S. '93)
NBC Sports And Olympic Sales

	Marion Taormina

While in school at Florida State, Marion Taormina reveled in the sports world that is so prevalent on campus. She quickly realized that you don't need to be an on-air personality to get all the benefits of a fantastic career that blends sports and TV.

“I thought the opportunity was to try to get on camera, but as I learned about the business side of media, it seemed like a better fit for me. There's only one Katie Couric,” Taormina says.

Today Taormina heads up Sports and Olympic sales and marketing for the NBC Local Media division. She helps brands achieve their marketing objectives through sports activations and media investment in the Olympics, NFL, Super Bowl, NHL, Stanley Cup, French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, the PGA FedExCup and another 20 tournaments throughout the year.

Taormina sells the local commercials for the NBC-owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Hartford, Miami and San Diego. She also works closely with NBC's 220 affiliate stations. Before landing in New York at NBC, Taormina worked in radio in Central Florida. But she jumped at the chance to get back into sports media.

You can tell by talking to Taormina how much she loves both sports and media and how her position combines her passions.

“When you're passionate about something, when you love what you do, it doesn't necessarily feel like a job,” Taormina says, reflecting on being at the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics with clients who were as moved by the spectacle as she was.

“That's the most exciting part of this. It's not even so much about selling as it is about making a personal connection — with sharing that important experience."

Amanda Brotherton (B.A. '03)
Hearst Magazines

	Brotherton, inside New York's Hearst Tower, helped promote Cosmopolitan Magazine's “Kisses for the Troops” campaign to support American military serving abroad.

It's fun to talk with Amanda Brotherton, but you have to catch up with her first. If she's not working hard to drive up circulation for 17 consumer titles for Hearst Magazines in Manhattan, she might be darting up to Albany to spend time with her husband Scott (M.D. '06), who is completing a residency in orthopedic surgery at Albany Medical College.

Brotherton found her way into public relations soon after graduation. She now works as a partnership and entertainment promotions manager for the circulation department at Hearst, representing titles like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. Her job is to help deliver new subscribers while holding onto current subscribers.

“I help make sure we stay on those numbers,” Brotherton says. “It's a matter of looking at each of the individual magazine brands and identifying potential partners that have not only a great reach of their audience or users, but also that it's the correct brand fit.”

For example, a recent project Brotherton worked on for Seventeen — whose readers tend to grow up and move on to read magazines like Marie Claire — partners the magazine with the online retailer Rent the Runway. The match means young readers can rent designer prom gowns from the likes of Christian Siriano, Nicole Miller and Catherine Malandrino and pay about 10 percent of what they'd pay retail. The membership-driven Rent the Runway then provides free shipping and dry cleaning. Dress renters also get help with accessories and beauty advice, as well as discounted Seventeen subscription rates.

“There's a lot of strategy to finding partners that share the greatest affinity with our individual magazine brands,” she says.

Tiffany Simons (B.S. '03)
SportsNet New York

	Tiffany Simons

Tiffany Simons wanted to be a sports reporter in New York City so much that she up and moved there, sleeping on a friend's couch while temping, selling jewelry at Bloomingdale's and setting up bagel tables at the Food Network — anything to get closer to her goal.

The move worked out for Simons in spades. This spring, she started a job with the New York Mets as host of Mets Weekly TV on the team-owned network. She encourages those thinking of following in her footsteps to hop to it. “Go for what you want,” she says — advice she learned at Florida State.

“I think that was one thing that all of my professors said. You have to try,” Simons says. “Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid of hearing no. Just go out there and do it.”

She used to fear being “a woman in a man's world” as a sports reporter. “But I found that's not the way to look at it at all.”

“There's a lot of women who work in sports. If someone who wants to do what I've done, go for it. All you need is one person to say yes. So far in my career, I just looked for that one person. You take that and make the most of it and hope that the next person will say, 'Sure I'll give you a try, too.'”

Simons fondly looks back to her time as an FSU student, in “an open, welcoming community of people who genuinely loved being there. When you leave college and you're out in the real world, you search for that again.

“That's the best thing about a career you love — being in a group of people who adore what they're doing and feel strongly about doing the best job they possibly can.”