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When you’re walking the halls of the buildings on the campus of Grand View University, you’ll sometimes stop and see headshots of students on the bridge or sitting in the CJ’s Place lounge showing off their smiles. The man behind those photos is none other than Todd Bailey. Bailey is known by many on campus as the ‘media guy’ or ‘photo guy’ because of his involvement with media happenings across GVU. 

Bailey grew up right here in the capital city of Des Moines and attended East High School just down the road from GVU. 

“As I kid, I was really into sports and was really into basketball but I have a serious deficiency in the height category so that could only go so far,” Bailey said. 

Through his love of sports media, Bailey didn’t have to go far for his collegiate learning as he attended GVU. During his time on campus, he worked for the Des Moines Register covering sporting events across the state along with working at the copy desk. After his brief stint with the Register, Bailey moved onto working for KCCI as an intern. 

“I wanted to get into a sports depart- ment, I wanted to be a sports reporter,” Bailey said. Post-graduation, Bailey continued his sports reporting upstart by working as a sports reporter/anchor up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After a couple years up north, Bailey found a job back in Des Moines working as a sports reporter for Channel 13 news. 

During his time at WHO 13, Bailey mostly worked behind the camera shooting stories and putting together reels. 

“I hated being on camera, if you can believe it,” Bailey said. 

“As I look back on it, it was very fun. I got to cover great things. I covered a lot of Iowa and Iowa State athletics… so I got to do some bowl games, a couple Heisman trophy ceremonies. I covered a Super 

Bowl because we followed former Barnstormers player Kurt Warner.” 

If you ever have the chance to step inside Bailey’s office in the communications department, you’ll see that he has a board on his shelf filled with several media passes from various bowl games, NBA Drafts, and even a Daytona 500 badge. It is an impressive showcase of all the major events he has been to and covered. 

While Bailey does admit that it was fun for a while, the coming of a family in his life after marriage changed his perspective on his work. “I started thinking about the hours, and I just didn’t want to keep doing it. People for sure can do it and find a good balance, but that just wasn’t for me,” Bailey said. 

When Bailey was at WHO 13, he connected with other reporters and they started to form a business on their own based on video production. After deciding to leave television news, he moved on to said business and worked on creating content for a former exhibit in HyVee Hall known as the Iowa Hall of Pride. With that came a great deal of media for high school athletes across the state and telling their stories to showcase at the exhibit. After a while, the business broke apart and it left Bailey doing mostly freelance work in the media game across the state. It wasn’t until a while had gone by doing some freelancing that Bailey got a call from the Des Moines Register. 

“It really came out of nowhere. It was a previous boss of mine when I was in college and he told me that they were creating a new position for an online sports editor to manage [the] website and sports content,” Bailey said. 

Around that time, sports media being presented over the web was growing in popularity. Bailey was to be at the forefront for the Des Moines Register in jumping on the changing market. Bailey worked for the Register again for two years in what he described as a “challenging time for the newspaper industry.” With that, Bailey voluntarily left the newspaper business during a round of layoffs and went back to his freelancing ways. 

After a few more years of working on his own, a former faculty member at GVU gave Bailey a call talking about how the university was creating a brand-new media position because of the growing landscape of social media and media in general. 

“At first when I got the call and he asked if I was interested, I said ‘eh not really, but I’ll think about it’ but after a while of thinking I started to get excited because at the time Grand View was really starting to expand and grow which was cool to see. I wanted to be a part of that.” 

Bailey started his media producer job at GVU in the winter of 2012 and has held that job ever since. Being in a single job for that long is already a big testament to someone’s ability, but with Bailey’s job, it is always changing. 

“I was hired to be a video guy. I was hired to produce video and then the reason my office is in with the communications department was because I helped oversee the video studio, oversee the checkout of equipment, and for students, I was a resource for them. That was my role at the time along with just doing video. Back then, you weren’t sharing and producing media like we are now.” 

When Bailey was hired it was thought that he would just be covering football but as the years passed by, that has evolved to covering almost every sport on campus. While it’s not easy, he says that it is important to the athletes. 

“Can we cover every single sport? No, not every day. But we sure do try our best and at the end of the day, if we can get one athlete who doesn’t get a ton of exposure, we’re doing things right,” Bailey said. 

While Bailey’s work to cover athletes and students is a huge plus for GVU, he also talked about how much the students can help by sharing through their media. 

“It makes me happy when I see people sharing photos, we’ve taken of them and start sharing them on their social media because it’s getting the word out and that’s what it is all about.” 

For now, Bailey is very happy with where he’s at and doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. As always you can either find him in his office over in the communication hallway, or maybe you might even catch him in his natural habitat of taking headshots of students across GVU’s campus. No matter where you see him, always make sure to thank the man behind the camera for all that he’s done, and all he will continue to do for years to come.