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Maria comes to BreakThrough from Wilmington, Delaware, where she served as Medical Anchor and General Assignment Reporter for the Emmy-nominated First State News since 1995. She spent her first few years in the business learning it from behind the scenes as a production assistant/grip before landing her first reporting position as a sports reporter for The Inquirer High School Sports Show in Philadelphia. Maria is relatively new to the world of broadcasting, having spent much of her professional life in the corporate world of industrial engineering. She worked for such Fortune 500 greats as Scott Paper and Johnson & Johnson. The question most frequently asked of Maria is, "How in the world did you get into broadcasting, having been an engineer?" She answers that it happened with a lot of courage and a whole lot of support from her family. Maria credits her mother, a Registered Nurse Practitioner, for her love of medicine, and her father, a Professor of Mathematics, for her ability to troubleshoot problems and find the right answers. BreakThrough is the perfect blend of those qualities. Since graduating from New Mexico State University in 1986, Maria has lived in Dallas, Texas, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sicklerville, New Jersey, and now resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Peter is a life-long resident of North Carolina, born in Winston-Salem, and currently living in Hillsborough. He began his media career at the age of eleven, delivering the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel to the homes in his neighborhood. He also used his spare time broadcasting home-made radio programs to those same neighbors over an unlicensed transmitter he had built in his parents' basement. By sixteen, he had given up his paper route, working instead for the newspaper's television station, WSJS, as a camera operator and production assistant. He continued working in broadcasting through college, primarily as a reporter/producer at WCHL, Chapel Hill, WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, and as a "stringer" for several radio stations and newspapers around the state. In 1972, he was a winner of the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Mark of Excellence Award for a documentary on under-aged migrant tobacco workers. Peter's voice is often heard on radio and television stations, commercials, and industrial videos nation-wide. Prior to his work at BreakThrough, he appeared as a writer/producer on Home and Garden Television's Furniture Show.
Reporter Tom Gasparoli joined BREAKTHROUGH after an award-winning career as a long-form enterprise journalist with local television stations across the country. His latest stop, with the DIMENSION unit of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, led to two Chicago region Emmy awards and several nominations, along with numerous Northwest Broadcast News awards. Tom has reported extensively on government waste and wrongdoing, and investigated unsolved crime cases in a manner that led to significant new information for law enforcement authorities. Also in the Twin Cities, Tom has been a fill-in talk radio host, taking advantage of his name recognition to provide and provoke debate on important social issues using candor, humor, empathy and intellectual challenges to make his points and encourage community introspection. In Minneapolis and while in Nashville during the mid to late 1980's, Tom was involved in a number of in-depth medical stories that prompted officials to examine policies and actions that proved potentially harmful to the public health. He has been especially involved in stories involving domestic violence, child abuse, people with AIDS and addiction. Tom won more Emmys, as well as national investigative awards while with the CBS affiliate in Nashville, including the I.R.E. award, the most respected in investigative journalism. Two of the national awards came from a group that honors writing and reporting that aids the disadvantaged. Tom has also worked as a reporter in Albuquerque, Tucson and Columbia, Missouri. He received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1983. His undergraduate years were spent at the University of Virginia. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia. Tom is also hard at work on two books - a novel and a first-person designed as a guide for students enrolled in journalism degree programs. He has also submitted several treatments for TV-movie screenplays. Tom's wife is a local news anchor, and he has a 15-year old daughter who talks of becoming a pediatrician. For fun, Tom obviously writes, dreams of playing more squash, and reads voraciously. His favorite state, by far, is New Mexico, the "Land of Enchantment". A place where native Americans thrive in their remarkable cultures, and vistas always beckon.
Sarah comes to BreakThrough from Minneapolis, where she was weekend anchor and general assignment reporter for KMSP-TV. While there, she covered everything from state government to Minnesota's wild weather to human interest stories. In the process, she won a regional Emmy for spot news coverage and several awards for feature reporting. In her eleven years in broadcast news, Sarah worked all over the Midwest. She started her career at KCMT-TV in Alexandria, Minnesota as an assignment editor, weekend weather anchor and general assignment reporter. From there, she went to KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota as a general assignment reporter, eventually moving up to Morning/Noon Anchor. After leaving Sioux Falls, she joined KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa as the government reporter and weekend anchor. Sarah grew up in Minneapolis, the youngest of six children. She's a 1985 graduate of the University of Minnesota, with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and Political Science. Despite all her moves, she has remained a tried and true Minnesota Vikings fan. |
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Visit us at 415 Hwy 54, Durham, N.C. 27713 |
Maria E. Black 
Peter Deane 
Tom Gasparoli 
Sarah Jarvis 