The college has announced that the commencement speaker for PCC’s Spring 2016 graduation ceremony will be award-winning journalist Paula Williams Madison.
Madison has held many high-power positions throughout her career, beginning as a print reporter for the Syracuse Herald Journal in New York after graduating from Vassar College and working her way up to executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBCUniversal, where she retired after 35 years of working in news media.
Madison is also recognized as being a catalyst for better representation for people of color in both the work place and in society as a whole. According to “Diversity Woman” magazine, Madison was the first African-American woman to run a network-owned station in a top-five market, KNBC in Los Angeles.
In an interview with “Diversity Woman” magazine, Madison explained that during her time at NBCUniversal she took many initiatives to help develop a more prominent role for people of color in the work place and in the media.
“We [NBCUniversal] developed two shows with diverse leading characters: “Undercovers” featuring a married African-American spy team, and The Event, in which Blair Underwood played a president who was both African-American and Latino,” said Madison. “We very much wanted a process by which racial and gender diversity were not adds-on, but integral from the inception of the project.”