For a man born and raised in California, Nik Heftman, an Iowa State alumnus, believes Iowa is where his dreams became a reality.

He had dreams of going to college — out of state — while growing up in San Bernardino, California. Heftman knew he “wanted to experience different things.” He started out at Iowa Wesleyan College as a freshman, playing football while majoring in journalism.

Heftman’s mind was not on the culture change of moving from the West Coast to the Midwest.

“I went to Iowa with a goal,” Heftman said. “I didn’t come there to be culture shocked. I went there with a goal in mind. It was to finish school, to become something.”

Somewhere along the way, he switched his major to liberal arts. 

After going to community college for a couple of years, Heftman decided to take a chance and head to Iowa State University, where he continued to major in liberal arts studies, focusing on pre-med classes.

Heftman found his passion for journalism again while he was in class, and he picked up a spot with Ethos magazine. He became a staff writer before moving up to the online editor position.

In addition to being involved with Ethos, he was also an editor for the Iowa State Daily, editorial director for Sir Magazine, Student Government LAS senator, ISU Boxing Club member, Greenlee Ambassador and the president of the Iowa State chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

He also won a Society of Professional Journalists award in the breaking news category for the regional convention in Kansas City.

After he won the regional award, he made it to nationals, and that is when he met with people who worked for CBS, which helped him start his career as a broadcast associate.

“I met a lot of cool people there, and I was talking, and we ended up going with this group of people that were bowling,” Heftman said. “They said, ‘Hey, come to the CBS booth tomorrow, and we’ll introduce you to some people,’ and so I did that and went to the booth and that’s how I got my job.”

When he sat down at the CBS booth, they asked for his portfolio. 

“If I didn’t have that prepared, they probably wouldn’t have considered me,” Heftman said.

When he sat down with CBS, he showed them videos he put together and articles he wrote. CBS enjoyed his work and began the hiring process.

The national convention took place in California, his home state. He and his friend Emily Barske, an Iowa State alumna who was the editor-in-chief at the Iowa State Daily from 2016 to 2018, decided to go to the convention together.

While she was there, she got to meet some of his friends and family.

“It’s always really cool that the people you meet in college — as opposed to people that you’re friends with growing up — you don’t really get to meet their families and see where they came from, and it was kind of cool to get to know his family a little more,” Barske said. “I know that he really cared about his family and was really close with them, but it was just cool to see that, and you can see why someone became who they are.”

Barske also witnessed Heftman land his position at CBS.

“It was just obvious that his drive was the reason why he got the job at CBS,” Barske said. “I just remember once we were actually at the conference, I barely saw him because he was just going to all of these interviews and just talking to everyone, so he’s definitely someone who makes the most of opportunities.”

Even though Heftman has a lot of accomplishments, he also makes sure to be there for his friends’ achievements.

Barske said he’s been a cheerleader for her. 

“He’s very humble and just a real cheerleader,” Barske said. “I remember at the [Society of Professional Journalists] conference, I think I had to give some speech at it, and I think he just livestreamed it on his Instagram, and he was just always doing stuff to really be a cheerleader and help raise people up.”

Heftman spent most of his time at Iowa State getting involved in print journalism. While he was studying, he took video production classes from Jeff Ames, assistant teaching professor for the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, which helped him get experience for his job as a broadcast associate at CBS.

“I was really glad that I took those production courses because they write about everything that goes into producing a piece or producing a show,” Heftman said. “All those lessons translated into our professional life.”

Growing up

Heftman grew up in a family of five siblings. He has two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. 

Growing up in a community known as the high desert in California, his parents made sure he was highly involved in after-school activities. He ended up becoming an athlete who played the piano and sang in the choir.

Even though he loved being involved in sports and music, his favorite thing to do was write. He developed his love for writing when he was in elementary school when his teacher would let him write books for class. 

“The first story that I ever wrote was called ‘Super Cat,’ and it was a cat with superpowers who fought this dog with superpowers — it was his archnemesis,” Heftman said. 

Heftman said his teachers published the books, and students would receive a hard copy.

“When I was in first grade, I wrote a story about this kid who got scratched at school or something, and it was about how antibodies fight infections, but I made it seem like the antibodies were people, like they were alive or something,” Heftman said. “I thought of that myself right on the spot.”

After elementary school, he continued his passion for writing short fiction stories. He took writing classes and would write stories for his mom.

“I was reading and writing way beyond my age,” Heftman said. “… They had this thing in my school where you could do work for the grade above, so when I was in second grade, I was doing third grade work, and then I asked my mom if I could skip the next grade, but she didn’t let me because she didn’t want me to be around older kids.”

Facing hardships

Growing up, Heftman experienced racism in his own community, but he did not let it get to him.

“They looked down on me because I was different and because I was from a different race,” Heftman said. “I didn’t let it hold me down. Successes are the best revenge.” 

He has gotten a lot of support from his family dealing with racism, especially from his father. 

“Both of my parents were more aware of it,” Heftman said. “If we were treated unfairly, they had our backs 100 percent.” 

He also found hardships in the sports he participated too. 

During the first month of his freshman year of college at Iowa Wesleyan, Heftman tore his ACL while playing football. Even though he was in pain, he continued to play.

During winter break, he realized it was more serious than he thought. After visiting the doctor, Heftman learned his ACL and his meniscus were torn, which meant surgery.

“Things happen for a reason, and that was just the universe telling me that football wasn’t for me, and I have to do something else,” Heftman said.

While Heftman was taking pre-med classes at Iowa State, he took care of a disabled man named Trent for several years and a woman with Down’s syndrome for his last two semesters at Iowa State.

“I was a caregiver actually. As soon as I got to Iowa State, I was pretty much over having a normal job because I wanted to be a doctor first,” Heftman said. “I didn’t want to do retail or work in a restaurant. So I was looking for jobs that kind of helped me in my career or what I thought would be my career.” 

Trent was the first person that came up when he was getting prepared to start his care-giving job. He decided to meet him and stayed with him three nights a week. Later, he decided to become his roommate, and they became best friends.

Unfortunately, Trent died; Heftman did not want to speak much about this sensitive topic.

Working as a Black journalist

Heftman was involved with several publications at Iowa State, and his mission was to spread more awareness and to build relationships with underrepresented groups.

He started out as an LGBTQIA+ reporter, covering topics related to the issues that the community faced.

“The first way that I learned about Nik is he was a reporter for the LGBTQIA+ community, and he is not a member of the LGBTQIA+ community,” said Alex Connor, an Iowa State alumna and former editor-in-chief of the Iowa State Daily. “He’s an ally, and my first impression of him is how well he covered that beat and that he was doing the best thing that he can do, which is building relationships, and he was just spending a lot of time with people and trying to understand their stories and build trust with them.” 

Heftman’s willingness to build those relationships with people helped lead him to becoming the diversity editor for the Iowa State Daily. He then covered a wide range of topics relating to diversity.

“He really understood that when you’re covering any topic related to equality, you really have to build trust with communities [that have] often not been included in the media or reflected badly or stereotypically,” Connor said. “That was the first thing that I noticed about Nik, and beyond that, he was a really hard worker and someone who just had a lot of passion and drive for what he was doing.” 

Barske and Connor said before they joined the Iowa State Daily, there was no diversity desk. This made Heftman the first person to become the Diversity Editor and LGBTQIA+ reporter.

“That allowed him to grow in a way, and you get to take this thing and invent it from scratch,” Connor said. “… He helped restore relationships that the Daily has previously not been the best at withholding, and so he was able to kind of mend our relationship with [The Center for LGBTQIA+] and make sure that they received the coverage that they deserved. For example, one of his stories he did on health care and transgender students — and that was such a huge thing in our coverage because, obviously, that’s still a prominent, ongoing issue in that community.”

In addition to building relationships with his interviewees, he also developed relationships with his reporters as well.

“He was always optimistic; he developed good relationships with his reporters and stuff,” Connor said. “Nik was more of a people editor and really developed a connection with the reporters for his desk, and that’s something that you can’t take for granted.”

While Heftman was at Iowa State, President Donald Trump was elected into the White House, and Heftman said he saw racism on Iowa State’s campus.

Heftman said this sparked his interest in covering the “Not My President” protest, which was a protest against the election of Trump because of his racist remarks.

When he got there to cover it, he had no idea it was going to be all day. This didn’t stop him from getting as many details as possible for the story.

“I was into it,” Heftman said. “I was very interested in what people had to say, and I felt what they were coming from to some extent. It was the kind of stuff that I wanted to cover. I thought it was awesome. It was a powerful experience to even be there.”

After the “Not My President” protest, there was a follow-up event Heftman covered about student organizations creating a community plan to support underrepresented students on campus. The story took him between 13 hours to the whole day to complete.

“It kind of feels like you’re watching history happen, like you’re a part of history,” Heftman said. “Because we obviously weren’t the only school they were protesting. It was happening around the nation.”

Heftman’s main goal was to bring more awareness to diversity at Iowa State. He did this by being involved in different organizations that allowed him to discuss topics going on in underrepresented communities.

By being involved in ISCORE, this gave him the opportunity to discuss media coverage for people of color and how to address issues they deal with. 

Heftman worked on a project for ISCORE called “Covering Diversity: The Media’s Role in the Conversation,” where they gave examples of news publications being unfair to certain underrepresented groups and how they could improve.

“That was an awesome experience, and it was really inspiring,” Heftman said. “And there were a couple of opportunities I had at Iowa State to speak about covering diversity and diversity in the media, and those opportunities that I had were inspiring. I got to talk about my experiences and how we can make things better, and that’s the goal of it all, is how we can make things better for undermined communities.”

Heftman also participated in the Society of Professional Journalists organization and became its president.

His goal as president was to bring more awareness to communities of color, so he organized a Muslimedia event as a way for journalists and Muslim leaders to discuss the practical and ethical issues about reporting the world’s second-largest religion.

“I organized it between the Iowa State Daily and anybody else at Greenlee that was interested and the local mosque,” Heftman said. “The mosque was really accepting, and they were actually excited about it, which was great.”

Heftman worked alongside Barske on this project, which was her idea.

“At the time, Nik was diversity editor at the Daily and I was the editor-in-chief, so we were covering media and diversity, and we just kind of developed that based on some research and also our own experiences as members of the media and covering news and ethnicity issues,” Barske said. 

Heftman tried everything he could to make sure his goal of creating spaces for minority communities was complete.

“Every seat was full,” Heftman said. “That was a real proud moment for myself. To be able to build a bridge for a community like that is great.”

Another big accomplishment for him was when his story about National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) organizations was the centerpiece of the Iowa State Daily. 

“Reportedly there were [people making] racist slurs, and people were making monkey noises toward the organizations of color, particularly the Black organizations,” Heftman said. “And so a couple days go by, and I interviewed the members of the NPHC, and they told me about their experiences.”

Shortly after the story was made the centerpiece at the Daily, Heftman did his regular check-in with Reginald Stewart, Iowa State vice president for the Department of Diversity and Inclusion, to see how things were going between them.

While they were talking, Heftman noticed Stewart had some of his stories on his wall, but Heftman’s centerpiece story about Black Greek organizations was in the middle. 

This was a monumental moment for Heftman — doing what he loved and then getting honored for it by a mentor.

Because Heftman was involved in a lot of different activities, he never had downtime.

“I mean, everything was kind of routine, and during the day, I went to class, and in the evening, I work on a story, and I do my homework, I go to boxing, then I go to work with, you know, Trent or the other woman I work for, and I just repeated it,” Heftman said. “So everything was like a routine, so I guess that’s what I had, like a set time in my day to do certain things. I never broke that routine for anything, really.”

After he finished college, he interned at the Daily Times Herald in Carroll, Iowa, and covered stories in the community. Doug Burns, co-owner of the Daily Times Herald and close friend to Heftman, said Heftman also covered high-level political stories and was “particularly good on human interest stories.”

“He’s really good at sourcing and connecting with the community,” Burns said. “Very quickly, he became a part of our team. It is one of those things where when he left, it had a noticeable effect on our paper. … Nik was just extraordinary, just his versatility in terms of reporting was great — his understanding of different subjects. People in the newsroom really liked him.”

Heftman and another reporter, Annie Mehl, won an award for Best Feature Story at the Iowa Associated Press Media Editors conference. 

After the internship, Heftman and Burns became really close. Burns compared his relationship with Heftman to a father-son relationship.

“Personally, he and I became really close, and he considers me to be a mentor, and I consider him a super close friend,” Burns said. “As a news man, I could objectively tell you he’s one of the best interns we’ve ever had. As a human being, I could tell you he’s a close friend and something similar to a son to me. Nik and I kind of have the same temperament.”

When Heftman landed his job at CBS, he decided to travel all the way to New York from Iowa by himself. Once he told Burns about his trip, he decided to ride along with him.

“I mean, I never had any kids, so I never got to experience [things like] taking a kid to college or doing anything like that,” Burns said. “… To just be able to share that [experience] with him is pretty cool for me.” 

Till this day, Heftman and Burns still remain close friends.

“I’ve been lucky. It’s been good for me, too, and it’s reciprocal,” Burns said. “For his age, he’s 26 now. When he was here — when he was 22, 23 — he kind of presented himself beyond those years. I actually asked him for advice on various things from professional to life topics. I’ve relied on him as a friend.”

Heftman has been working at CBS since his internship in Carroll, Iowa. His daily routine consists of catching the subway to his job, being assigned a story and working on the story together with his coworkers.

“There are different challenges that come with that every day,” Heftman said. “Sometimes, my job involves rewriting a script, or sometimes I get to write a whole script on my own and produce a whole piece by myself, which is awesome.”

Since the pandemic, Heftman has been doing his work remotely and decided to temporarily leave Harlem to move back into his hometown with his family.

Even though he is pursuing his goal, Heftman said he still feels like there is more that he needs to accomplish.

“I’ll continue to tell stories that I hope will inspire change and action,” Heftman said. “I also want to put myself in a position where I can give young people like myself a chance to succeed.”