Prime-Time Player

Life's been moving pretty fast for Dana McClintock '93, who, as a publicist for ABC News and Primetime Live, works three doors down from Diane Sawyer, the show's co-anchor. Already, at age 25, McClintock is in his third major-network television job. His career in television began with a coveted spot on an eight-person publicity team with NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, and shortly after graduation he was arranging interviews for the host and guests of CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman. McClintock, who wed his high school sweetheart, Jenna Maconochie, in September, has a humble perspective on the pace and direction of a life he never imagined.
"If anyone thinks I'm growing up too fast, just let them see my bachelor party photos," he said. "I'm much more interested in the lives of my Colby friends than the celebrities walking past my office door."
Though he's adamant in his belief that "celebrities breathe the same air we do," McClintock admits that being in the same room with Madonna, Vice President Al Gore or Seinfeld's Jason Alexander can be "kind of weird."
"You can't excel in this business if you're star-struck. Celebrities are put off by that," he said. "They think you're more interested in hanging around with them than doing a good job."
To understand how McClintock got from Waterville to Barcelona to New York City is to understand the power of persistence and the importance of networking. McClintock, who was Colby's I-Play coordinator and men's basketball statistician for three years, created an unpaid internship for himself with Harvard's office of sports information during his junior year at Colby. On weekends and holiday breaks, he drove to Cambridge to help Harvard's assistant sports information director keep statistics for men's basketball and ice hockey. When Harvard's director of sports information was hired by NBC for publicity work at the Barcelona Games, McClintock saw an opportunity.
"I flooded him with letters asking to do just about anything--even a chance to hold cables for camera crews would have been great. Six weeks before the Olympics, he called with an offer to work in the press office," said McClintock, who later capitalized on the NBC experience in a senior-year Jan Plan internship in the Boston Celtics public relations office, arranged by Jan Volk '68.
Following graduation, he planned to work in a Boston-based public relations firm but was pleasantly sidetracked when a Barcelona colleague who had since become publicist for The Late Show with David Letterman contacted him about an opening at the show. When the position at Primetime Live became available, unbeknownst to McClintock, a New York Post writer recommended him to ABC News.
"I got all the tools I needed at Colby," said McClintock, an American studies major, "but I had to build with those tools on my own." When asked whether he receives different treatment now that he rubs elbows with the stars, McClintock says classmates Jeff Zlot, Jason Soules, Jack Higgins and Dan O'Grady never let him forget who he is and where he's from. "If there's even a hint of superiority about anything, they jump all over me. They say, `You're only Doogie from Colby!'"