CNN Journalist Advances His Career with Radow College Master’s Degree

KENNESAW, Ga. | Dec 11, 2025

Marcelo Medeiros, a content producer at CNN, has traveled the world to report its stories. A master's program at the Norman J. Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences is helping him see the world with new eyes.

Medeiros works on stories with international network affiliates in his role at CNN. He is also a graduate student and soon to be alumnus of the School of Communication & Media’s Master of Arts in Integrated Global Communication program. His journalism career has led him around the globe, but his story begins in Brazil. 

“I grew up in São Paulo, so it’s a very cosmopolitan city... it’s really a melting pot, like with people from all over the world,” Medeiros said. “I like to joke that anyone can be Brazilian because no matter how the person looks like or what’s the background, he or she can easily be Brazilian,” he continued.  

A love of writing and local news led him to receive his journalism education from The Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where he spent three years reporting on education stories for the university’s local cable news station. He reported on health issues for The Federal University of São Paulo’s local cable news station for the next two years, then he joined one of Brazil’s five major broadcast television stations to be a reporter.  

 “I never thought about being [an] international journalist or [covering] international stories, but as I grew... inside this TV station, there came a few opportunities for me to cover some international stories,” Medeiros said.  

His first international assignment was to cover the 2009 Red Bull Paper Wings paper plane competition in Salzburg, Austria, which drew participants from all over the world. He traveled to Ecuador on assignment to cover political imbalance in the country, then went to Haiti in 2010 for the country’s presidential election, months after it was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. He spent three days in Washington, D.C. reporting on U.S. military operations in 2011, followed soon after by work as an international correspondent in New York.  

He ultimately decided to trade the on-air reporter's life for a producer role, which led to his current position as a content producer at CNN.   

“Global Newsource is a department where we deal with domestic and international affiliates, CNN affiliates,” Medeiros said. “My department itself... we are a huge department of Global Newsource, and I work for International Newsource.” 

“When I started working there, I thought, ‘okay, I need to have more knowledge... I need to learn more so I can be able to work with so many different cultures, so many different people in a better way,’” Medeiros said. 

Medeiros “always wanted” to have a master's degree, but the busy lifestyle of broadcast news reporting previously prevented him from achieving that goal. He explained that Radow College’s MAIGC program offered “exactly what I needed.”  

A class on multinational corporations required him and his classmates to study how global businesses operate and balance many different cultures within the same company. His course on political communication provided him with a better understanding of American voting patterns and the country’s election history. He explained that approaching the world from a research and analysis perspective in addition to a “news of the day” perspective has enriched his career.

“Each week after coming here and having to come to the classes, when I go back to work, I see my work with different eyes because there’s something new that I learned that I can bring to work. Or many times, of course, there are many things that I have from work or from my career that I can bring here to KSU. I think it’s a good exchange,” Medeiros said.  

One of his 2025 assignments involved traveling to Rome to cover the funeral of Pope Francis, the conclave, and the selection of Pope Leo XIV. Medeiros spent 19 days in Rome with his team covering the historic sequence of events for CNN’s international affiliates. He will never forget seeing the white smoke rise into the sky and rushing down to St. Peter’s Square to help report the news.  

“There were Italians, of course, but there were Americans, there were Brazilians, there were many people from Latin America because [it is] a strong Catholic continent, and people from Asia, from all over Europe,” Medeiros said. “It was amazing to see how many people were connected at the same time waiting for one single announcement.” 

Medeiros will graduate from the MAIGC program in December 2025. He hopes that his time at KSU will help him advance the mission he’s had all along: to help both himself and the public he serves better understand the world through his work at CNN.  

 

--Story by Noelle Lashley  

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