As a producer for CNBC.com, one of the most-visited business news websites, Paul Toscano ’07 is at the heart of today’s ever-changing economic issues.
Toscano is enthralled by his exposure to the economic crisis that began within a year of his arrival at CNBC.
“When the Bear Stearns, Lehman, and government bailout news broke, you could just feel the energy in the building,” he said. “It motivates you to just know everything that’s going on.”
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| As a producer for CNBC.com, Paul Toscano ’07 keeps the website updated with the latest news from the ever-changing business world. (Photo by Oliver Quillia) |
In his role, Toscano generates a variety of pieces for the website, including recaps of CNBC television programs and slideshows.
In addition, responsibility for finding stories to write about largely falls to Toscano. “I pitch stories to my editors,” he said, “but I’m really at liberty to create something that I think our audience would find interesting.”
Writing online business news is only a part of his day. “CNBC.com has mountains and mountains of content, and it is hard to have somebody easily be able to navigate that,” he explained.
To make it easier for CNBC.com visitors to make sense of all the content, a “news and analysis by topic” section, which Toscano now manages, was added to the outlet’s site.
“I’m responsible for ranking content. I find stories that are a little hard to find, and really bring them to the surface.”
Toscano got his start at CNBC only a couple weeks after graduating, thanks to a Colgate connection. During his senior year, the university’s Center for Career Services put him in touch with Marianne Schaberg ’02, who worked for NBC at the time.
Schaberg contacted Toscano when a position opened with CNBC’s primetime show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. After The Big Idea went on hiatus, management invited Toscano to join the CNBC.com team because of his understanding of web production.
One of the greatest challenges of the job, added Toscano, is constantly staying up to date. He said that even after short vacations, it is easy to “come back and feel like a second-grader in an eleventh-grade class.”
As for his future career plans, Toscano would like to pursue an MBA and aspires to an executive position at NBC, or its parent company, General Electric.
For now, he isn’t rushing anything. “I couldn’t have a better job, honestly, than the one I am in right now.”