Hell, high water and canned tuna: Alum tells global stories for The New York Times
- Nina Barbero
- August 6, 2024
- Alumni
- Contributors: Photos submitted
5 – minute read
Video journalist Alex Pena has slept in Black Hawk helicopters flying over Afghanistan, in a tent on the tarmac of a Haiti airport and inside a cave in Jordan. He’s subsisted on canned tuna and MRE — meals ready to eat — in war zones and filed stories while connected to emergency generators in the aftermath of natural disasters.
“I have found a lot of power in image and visuals,” says the 2011 Florida Gulf Coast University graduate. “The concept of going there, being there, the experience captured on camera … I find the work of video journalists to be vital.”
In his new role as a senior video journalist at The New York Times, Pena might sleep more nights in his Brooklyn apartment but says he’s still up for anything.
“I’m very careful about how I approach risky situations,” he says. “This is the story I want to tell, how do I do it in the safest way possible?”
Telling stories has taken Pena around the world as a “backpack journalist.” He reports, interviews, shoots photos, films videos and edits pieces, sometimes as a freelancer and often for national news organizations.
His record year for travel so far is 2017, when he spent over 200 days away from home while working for CBS. Pena’s international work is no surprise to Lyn Millner, professor and founder of FGCU’s journalism program.
“He was born to do this, and he was going to do it come hell or high water,” Millner says. She credits him with influencing FGCU’s journalism program, which launched in 2011 — just in time for Pena to become one of the first graduates.
Even as a student, Pena was taking risks — and spending his student loans to travel for stories. A 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, killing an estimated 222,570 people and displacing 1.3 million, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Pena had friends who were migrant workers from Haiti, and he followed them there to help search for their families in the wreckage — and tell the story.
When he returned to his NBC-2 internship in Fort Myers, Pena asked a stunned news director if he could run the piece on air. The answer was yes.
Millner still remembers how “rattling” some of Pena’s antics were, including one unconventional spring break trip.
“I’m on Facebook, and I see a post from Alex with a picture of the Juárez city limits. Juárez at the time was the murder capital of the world. Here was Alex going to Juárez, covering stories, and getting on CNN,” Millner says with a laugh. “That launched his career. I’ve never been so proud of a student and so fearful.”
Pena has covered terrorism in East Africa and embedded with the military to report on the war in Afghanistan. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he hopped on a plane to Poland, eventually crossing the land border with Ukraine. He says that before jumping into each story, he and his colleagues assess the risks.
“Every new front line is another gut check,” Pena says. “It’s usually two to three of us working together on a team. It’s the unwritten rule that if one person isn’t comfortable, we’re not doing it.”
Sometimes, stories hit a little closer to home. The Miami native was visiting family near Parkland, Florida, on the day of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. His girlfriend — now wife — was in the car with him.
Pena was one of the first journalists on the scene, he recalls.
“I had covered countless mass shootings, but it was always in the aftermath. It happened somewhere across the country and you fly in,” Pena says. “This was the first time I was there actively watching it unfold, seeing children running out of the school … it was a tough one.”
Pena and his colleagues followed the stories of the Parkland students from the day of the shooting to the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., eventually earning an Emmy Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award for the resulting documentary, “39 Days.”
While Millner says Pena isn’t the only FGCU journalism graduate at a national news organization, students get inspired by his story. He’s come to campus several times to speak with them. “Alex really left a legacy,” she says.
It’s a legacy he’s now building on at one of the most prestigious posts possible for a journalist.
“The dream for me was to be a journalist. As long as I was telling stories, that was a mission accomplished for me,” Pena says. “But it’s not lost on me that it’s The New York Times. The opportunity to speak to so many different people for so many different issues.”