How Dana Perino Is Helping Young Fox News Staffers Prepare for Their Futures

By Chris Ariens 

For the last year, Fox News Channel has taken steps to rid itself of an atmosphere that tolerated sexual harassment from the highest levels of the company.

The network has hired a new head of HR, it has set a zero tolerance policy, and it has relaunched its apprentice program. This week, the network is going on further, partnering with anchor Dana Perino and her Minute Mentoring Program.

“I started Minute Mentoring after I finished at the White House in 2009 to try to address a supply and demand problem,” Perino told TVNewser. “Young professionals are eager for guidance and mentors want to provide it but don’t always have a lot of time or all of the answers,” said the former White House Press Secretary-turned-TV news host.

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“I set it up the program to be like speed dating but with mentoring, not romance, as the topic,” she said.

Perino will host the first event Tuesday evening at FNC’s NYC headquarters. Mentors will be other Fox leaders. The mentees are FNC and FBN staffers looking for career advice.

“I ask the mentors to come with their three best pieces of advice and then encourage the mentees to be ready to ask whatever is on their minds,” said Perino. She then sets aside time for networking “so that every mentee leaves with a completed booklet of advice from a wide variety of people they look up to and new friendships that they can utilize as they climb the ladder.”

Mentees will have the opportunity to talk to 6 mentors for 10 minutes each.

“I have long believed it is important that those of us who have some experience should share it with those who are starting out or who are wanting to make a change,” said Perino. “If there are people in your organization who are stuck and unhappy, that’s a reflection on management as much as it is on the employee. We’re all in this together. We should act like it and make the most of it.”

“I always learn something that I can apply to my own life,” Perino said, adding that a good friend recently passed along this advice: “She didn’t think of work-life balance over the course of her day but over her lifetime. And that made so much sense to me. It has given me a better way to approach what continues to be a punishing pace of political news.”

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