Welcome to Journalism @ St. Peter’s College.  My name is Ernabel Demillo and I am making the transition from professional journalist to full-time college professor.

I was born in Manila, but even before I took my first steps, my parents moved to the United States.  It was in a foggy, working class neighborhood in San Francisco a dream was born.  I loved to write and tell stories.   I was  11 when I declared that I was going to be a television newscaster.  It was big goal for an immigrant girl, whose parents struggled with English.  But I was determined.

I left chilly San Francisco for sunny Los Angeles.  I graduated from the University of Southern California with a double major in Journalism and International Relations.   But it was a bad time in TV News, companies were laying off people, not hiring.

After dabbling a bit in the worlds of investment banking, editing, and publishing I decided to go to graduate school.  I left California for Chicago to attend Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  While interning in Washington D.C., I got a job offer to return to Southern California to work as a reporter for the Orange County NewsChannel, one of the country’s first 24-hour regional news stations.  As a young reporter, I had a front row seat at some of the biggest stories to break in the 90s, including the Laguna Beach Fires, when more than 400 homes burned to the ground, the funeral of former President Richard Nixon, the bankruptcy of one of the richest counties in the country, and I was one of the news crews chasing O.J. Simpson up the 405 freeway.

After two years in Orange County, I was offered a job at the CBS affiliate in Sacramento.  I had broken into one of the Top 20 markets in the country.  There, I continued to hone my craft, covering major floods and fires and big trials, including the one arraignment of the so-called, “Unabomber”.    After 15  months, I left for New York, to work for one of the most popular (and quirkiest) morning news shows in the country, Fox-5’s, “Good Day New York.”  During my almost 10 year tenure on the show, I worked just about every on-air job -- general assignment and breaking news reporter, feature and entertainment reporter, investigative and consumer reporter and anchor.

I left Good Day in 2005 and haven’t look back since my final “sig” out on the show.  I freelanced at MSNBC and CourtTV, but I really spent most of my time raising my daughter who is now 5 years old.  I also started a small business with a fellow stay-at-home mom and my tennis partner.  We designed a tennis belt, called the TennisRAQ(tm), a fun an fashionable way to hold tennis balls while playing tennis.  But I’ve always wanted to teach and that’s how I came to St. Peter’s.