Newsmakers: Melanie Hicken of CNN is shining light on fraud, corruption
Ten years ago, a Syracuse University football player drove on to the university Quad to blast the audio of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech from his SUV’s speakers shortly after the 2008 election.
As people gathered around the student-athlete’s car to listen and celebrate, Melanie Hicken (‘09) was on the scene interviewing crowd members.
“It was … the first time in a long time that college students had been so excited about an election,” she said. “The campus was just electric that night.”
Hicken worked as an assistant copy editor, assistant editor and head editor in The D.O. news department. She was also special projects editor her senior year and oversaw the paper’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election — her story was on the front page when Obama won.
Reporting on deadline with a group of passionate storytellers is one of the most valuable experiences Hicken had during her time working with The Daily Orange. She’s now living in Los Angeles and working on CNN’s investigative reporting team.
Over the summer, she co-released the book “A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History. Based on a CNN.com investigation about the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from “vulnerable people,” the book, by Hicken and Blake Ellis, includes an investigation into French psychics, elderly abuse and nearly $1 billion in mail fraud.
The con was one of the longest-running international scams in history. But even before her role on CNN’s investigative team, Hicken said deep-dive reporting interested her.
“I always tried to do pieces that were thinking critically,” she said of her time at The D.O.
This included a piece she and Matt Reilly wrote about concerns surrounding then-Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s contract being renewed before Cantor’s performance review had taken place. The day after the story ran, Cantor had to shake Hicken’s and Reilly’s hands at a ceremony since the two were were both Remembrance Scholars, Hicken recalled.
Being an investigative reporter, Hicken said she’s learned how important it is to be as precise as possible in her work. She recalled how terrified she and her D.O. colleagues were of making a mistake. Having that experience as a young journalist, and being supported by other young journalists, prepared her for much higher stakes, and her reporting focus has evolved since she graduated from SU.
Courtesy of Melanie Hicken
When Hicken and Ellis came to campus in the fall to talk about their book, Hicken spoke to a class in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications about investigative and data reporting tools. Although Hicken doesn’t use the skill set in her current job, she got into data journalism when she attended an Excel workshop at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference during her final months working for the Glendale News-Press/Los Angeles Times.
Hicken said she and Ellis wrote the book during their vacation time–something they wouldn’t have done were they not passionate about their work.
“It was just such a wild adventure,” she said of the overall experience.
The duo chose to write the book by treating each chapter like an article, since it was easier to manage the idea of writing something at a few thousand words long compared to tens of thousands of words long, she said. Because it was a book, Hicken said she and Ellis pushed themselves to write it in a more narrative way than what they’d typically do for a news organization.
Although nearly a decade removed from her time on campus, Hicken still still values her learning experience in Syracuse.
“I remember just having days where I was so stressed out, but in retrospect I would kill to go back and be sitting in The D.O. office,” she said. “There is nothing like The D.O. and you will never really have something like that again.”
