WHO hires Diagonal local
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Anyone who tunes in to the “Today in Iowa” morning news show on WHO-TV Channel 13 may well see a familiar face on screen.
That face would belong to 2022 Diagonal High School graduate Skyler Stamps, who recently joined the station as a multi-media journalist (MMJ) and on-air reporter.
“MMJ means that I do basically everything myself,” Stamps explained. “So I find the story, go shoot the story, edit the story, and do everything for it. So I have to do all that. And then in the morning, whenever I get in, I put it into the rundown, go live, and then I also have to write the web story for it, and then post it to our YouTube page and then also to our website.”
His first day on-air was July 9.
Stamps works Wednesday through Sunday on the morning show, reporting two times a day during the week and then going live four times a show on the weekends.
To prepare for his duties, Stamps must wake up at 2:15 a.m.
“It’s taking a lot of getting used to,” he said. “And it’s not necessarily the getting up part that is the worst. It’s going to bed at six o’clock at night.”
Stamps’ interest in journalism was sparked back in high school with an experience that ironically included a connection to WHO.
“My whole life I thought I was going to be a teacher. I wanted to teach high school history,” he said. “And about junior year of high school, I realized that path wasn’t right for me. I nominated Taylor Bentley for the Golden Apple Award, I believe, my sophomore year, and WHO came down and covered that and just the excitement around it, seeing how it impacted everyone in the town, that was really the point that I knew that journalism was the right path for me.”
Arriving on campus at Northwest Missouri State in Maryville, Stamps was immediately introduced to life as a sports media major.
“Within my first week of being there, my freshman year, I got accepted to be the sports anchor for the sports show at Northwest,” he recalled. “So within a week of being there, not knowing really anything about media, I got thrown on the anchor desk. So really it was, go out there, do it. You’ll learn it as you go. So I was a sports anchor reporter my first year, and then my second year, I dabbled in news a little bit, and then that’s whenever I realized that I really had a knack for news. Still love sports, but really got into news. And then my senior year, I was our anchor and also a reporter for our campus TV station, Northwest News.”
In 2023, while at Northwest, Stamps was awarded the Associated Collegiate Press “Best of Show Award” first place in the Broadcast Sports Story category. This is awarded to the best broadcast sports story out of all DI, DII and DIII colleges across the country.
Following his graduation from Northwest in May of this year, Stamps applied to three television stations in St. Joseph, MO, Omaha, NE, and WHO in Des Moines.
“If I’m being honest, I applied to Des Moines kind of just to get my name in there for a few years down the road, and not really expecting the job,” he said.
But a piece of advice at a student networking night at Northwest resulted in an unexpected invitation.
“The leader of [the networking session] said, ‘Hey, if you apply to a job, send the news director a quick email just saying who you are.’ So I did that, told him about my little ties to the station, and sure enough, 30 minutes later, I get an email back saying, ‘Hey, Skyler, we’re super interested in we’d love to have you for an interview.’ So that’s really how it all started.”
The transition from college journalist to professional journalist, though, has not come without some adjustments.
“I would say one of the more challenging things was covering a story every day that you work,” Stamps said. “I went from doing one or possibly two stories a week at college to now doing a story every day. So doing day-turn stories is a lot different than what I was used to, but I think that the adjustment has been pretty good.”
Despite the pressure of completing multiple daily assignments, Stamps values the variety that comes with those assignments.
“I’ve only been here for four weeks, but just no day is ever the same,” he said. “You get to meet so many different people, and that’s really what it’s all about, giving people a platform to tell their stories to a variety of
people.”
As with any young journalist, Stamps looks for advancement in his profession.
“That was kind of the talks going into it as well,” he said. “Kind of do my time reporting, and eventually I would like to make the anchor desk, whether that be mornings, day side or night side, just whatever opportunity comes up first.”
Since he began as a sports media major, Stamps has not ruled out dipping his toes back into that arena as well.
“[WHO sports director] Keith Murphy and I talked a little about it, and he said it’d be fun to send me over to Iowa City to interview Ben McCollum because I’d done that at Northwest, so it would be kind of a neat little story there. But yeah, they said, if you ever have a sports story that you really want to do or something, go for it. We’re not going to hold
you back.”
McCollum is head men’s basketball coach at the University of Iowa, a position he held at Northwest Missouri State during Stamps’ tenure there as a sports reporter.
Regardless of where his career path leads him, Skyler Stamps sees himself not advancing onto a national platform.
“I would say that my goal is to stay in local news,” he said. “I just see an importance of getting your local news. It’s just really important. In my opinion, county news, newspapers, state news, it’s just a great way to receive your information. I think sometimes national news loses touch with what happens in smaller communities and smaller states like Iowa and Des Moines. So being able to be that platform here in Des Moines is really
impactful to me.”
And staying local also has its advantages on a personal level, including over 500 followers on his Facebook page @SkylerStamps.
“I’ve been having a lot of support from Ringgold County and Diagonal especially, just everyone reaching out, super excited for the journey,” he said. “And I couldn’t be more proud to be from Diagonal and Ringgold County.”
