2007 Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards

Communications: Lloyd LaCuesta
Sponsored by GMA Pinoy TV

One wintry December evening about 20 years ago, television news reporter Lloyd LaCuesta of KTVU/Channel 2 in the San Francisco Bay Area was dispatched to Stanford Hospital to do a story on a man waiting for a heart transplant. It was one of those human-interest stories that news organizations like to do around Christmas to encourage the spirit of giving. But LaCuesta, the consummate journalist, did one better by ending his live report with an appeal. Whipping out his organ donation card from his wallet, he told his viewers that by signing up as an organ donor, they could be giving someone the ultimate gift of life.

Weeks later, LaCuesta got a call from a woman who said she was watching that particular report when she got a call that her daughter was involved in a traffic accident that left her brain-dead. In her deepest grief, she remembered what LaCuesta had said and promptly called Stanford Hospital to donate her daughter’s heart and lungs. “She refused to give her name and wanted no story,” LaCuesta recalls. “She just wanted me to know that people are listening.”

LaCuesta, who has reported for KTVU for 31 years and is the station’s South Bay bureau chief, tells this particular story to aspiring journalists and his students at San Jose State University (his alma mater) to emphasize the awesome power of the media and the immense responsibility of a news reporter. “Always remember that whatever you say or write will affect someone,” he states.

Lloyd LaCuesta was 16 and a high school student in Southern California when he decided to become a news reporter. From then on he pursued this ambition doggedly, starting with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as a high school correspondent, and getting a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from Cal State Los Angeles and San Jose State University, and a master’s degree in journalism from UCLA.

A stint in the U.S. Army brought him to Korea as a broadcast journalist then back to Los Angeles and San Francisco as radio and TV news writer and editor. As his career flourished, he started reaping awards—several of them, including the Emmy—for the quality of his reporting, particularly of breaking stories.

Beyond his job, LaCuesta devoted himself to setting up the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) where he was national president for three years, and helping establish Unity: Journalists of Color, where he was the first national president. Unity is a vast organization of Asian, Hispanic, African-American and Native American journalists that wields a unified political clout.

He also actively lends his talent to Filipino community events. For the first eight years of the Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards, he was the emcee.

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