Tish Graham To Receive Women in Tech Award

Tish Graham

TVNewsCheck will present its ninth annual Women in Technology Leadership Award to Tish Graham, vice president of broadcast technology at ABC Owned Television Stations.

The award will be presented during the NAB Show on April 9 at 6 p.m. in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Graham’s leadership in overhauling technology at the ABC Owned Television Stations Group has helped the company adapt to a multiplatform future and changing economic times. In her role, she has demonstrated an ability to make tough decisions and rally her team behind implementing a new plan.

Graham has also set herself apart as a leader, calling on the industry to harness the power of metadata to better monetize news and programming assets. Significantly, she is also the first woman to lead technology at a television station group and has broken — in the TV industry — what a recent presidential nominee called “the highest hardest glass ceiling.”

“Tish Graham has quietly overhauled technology and the engineering management culture at one of the television industry’s most iconic station groups,” said TVNewsCheck Co-founder and Publisher Kathy Haley. “She is a great representative of the values celebrated by the Women in Technology Leadership Award.”

Graham joined ABC in 1986 and held broadcast engineering and IT management positions at KFSN Fresno, Calif.; WTVD Durham, N.C.; KABC Los Angeles; and KTRK Houston.

She received a bachelor’s degree in communications from Washburn University in Topeka, Kan. While in college, she interned at KTWU Topeka and began her career as a staff engineer at KTSB and KLDH in Topeka.

TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Leadership Award recognizes women who have contributed substantially toward advancing their industry technologically. It supports the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s Technology Apprenticeship Program, which places graduating engineers, who are women or people of color, in broadcast industry internships.

Previous Women in Technology Leadership Award honorees are Diane Tryneski, EVP technology and chief digital officer at HBO; Dr. Glodina Connan-Lostanlen, now SVP and GM of playout and networking solutions for the Americas at Imagine Communications; Michelle Munson, co-founder and former CEO of Aspera; Renu Thomas, then EVP of media operations, technology and IT at Disney ABC Television Group; Darcy Antonellis, now CEO of Vubiquity; Wendy Aylsworth, former SVP of Warner Bros. Technical Operations; Cindy Hutter-Cavell, senior engineer and practice manager, Cavell Mertz & Associates; and Andrea Berry, now CEO of G.A.P. Media Group.