Liberty Zabala Biography, Age, Career, Education, Award, Cronkite fellowship

Liberty Zabala Biography

Liberty Zabala is an American journalist and an Emmy Award-winning reporter, weather anchor and fill-in news anchor for NBC 7 San Diego. Prior to that, she worked as a multimedia journalist for KCOY/KKFX, the CBS/FOX affiliate covering California’s Central Coast.

Liberty Zabala Age

Zabala was born on July 3, 1986. She is 33 years old as of 2019.

Liberty Zabala Career

Previously, Liberty worked as one of four reporter trainees selected from across the country for the NBC Reporter Development Program. Under the program, she went through intensive multimedia training workshops alongside NBCUniversal’s top media executives, talent and coaches at NBC 5 Dallas, NBC 10 Philadelphia, and NBC 4 New York under the direction of The Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins. She would also write, shoot, edit and report enterprise stories for three live newscasts a day on NBC7.

Some of her most memorable stories include leading breaking news coverage of the Central American immigration crisis, covering the May firestorm that burned across San Diego County, covering the San Bernardino terrorist attacks and most recently, the Las Vegas mass shooting. She has also filed reports overseas from Belize and Israel.

She is a dedicated member of Asian American Journalists Association where she served as a board director for the Los Angeles chapter and currently serves the San Diego chapter as president.

Liberty Zabala Education

Zabala is a graduate of California State University, Northridge with a degree in journalism and collateral in political science with an emphasis in international relations.

Liberty Zabala Award

Zabala was awarded the Vada and Colonel Barney Oldfield National Security Reporting Fellowship by the Radio Television Digital News Foundation for her work covering Marines, sailors, active duty service members and veterans in the nation’s largest military town, San Diego.

Liberty Zabala Facts

She was born and raised in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of former LA Herald-Examiner reporter and foreign diplomat, Laurencio V. Zabala Jr. When she is not working, Liberty enjoys training in Krav Maga and working in humanitarian aid abroad.

Liberty Zabala Cronkite fellowship

Liberty was selected as a Meredith Cronkite Fellow at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism reporting for KPHO CBS5 in Phoenix, Arizona.

She is a dedicated member of Asian American Journalists Association where she served as a board director for the Los Angeles chapter and currently serves as the San Diego chapter president.

Her father, Laurencio “Larry” De Venecia Zabala, Jr., 85, passed away July 21, 2016, at 1 p.m. in the Intensive Care Unit of the Los Angeles Community Hospital. During the 1960s, Larry Zabala reported and wrote for the Manila Daily Bulletin, and during the 1970s and 1980s served as press attaché at the Philippine consulates in Singapore, Honolulu and Los Angeles under the late President Ferdinand Marcos.

Liberty told INQUIRER.net that she remembers her father as a man with integrity and a strong sense of duty. “My father was a very hard worker who believed in lifting others up. He instilled in me a strong work ethic and a sense of responsibility that I must use whatever gifts I am blessed with for good.”

“What I admired the most about him was his humble beginnings. He told me stories growing up dirt poor in Dagupan City in Pangasinan. I couldn’t imagine how my father did. He was truly blessed to be able to lift himself out of poverty to become such a successful and well-respected man,” she adds.

Her initiation to journalism came in junior year of high school when she needed electives before graduating. “I thought maybe I should join the campus paper since my father was a newspaper reporter. After her first article got published, she “cranked out article after article.”

“There were times half the paper were articles written by me. I became the go-to staff writer for breaking news. I became managing editor of the paper within a year of becoming staff. That’s when I fell in love with journalism and when I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”

Liberty Zabala Principal, 3 Vice Principals Removed From Lincoln HS

Article by Liberty Zabala;

The principal and three vice principals at Lincoln High School were removed from their positions on Wednesday, the day after the 2018/19 school year came to a close, the San Diego Unified School District confirmed.

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) said Principal Jose Soto-Ramos and vice-principals Zarpana Reitman, Devon Phillips, and Myeshia Whigham were let go from their positions because the district wanted to achieve a higher level of excellence at the school.

“The problem is that we wanted consistency in the achievement. We have pockets of excellence but we’d like to ensure that we have a uniform process of esteem that our students are achieving,” SDUSD Board Chair Dr. Sharon Whitehurst-Payne said.

NBC 7 was notified to the removals from witnesses who reported seeing four employees being escorted from the school by human resources employees.

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Lincoln HS Parent-Teacher Association President Cindy Barros said the employees were allowed to collect their belongings before they were asked to turn over the keys and asked not to return to the school.

None of the employees were being laid off, Payne said. They all have rights to apply for positions within the district.

The district chose to wait until the day after graduation to minimize the impact on students. Nearly 250 students graduated from Lincoln High School on Tuesday, Payne said.