It’s the people who make the story.

With a 30-year career encompassing thousands of stories written and broadcast, pioneering journalist Melba Tolliver said the stories for which she did her best work are those involving unique yet ordinary people.

Tolliver spoke on her career as part of the ArtsQuest “Artists Among Us” series at SteelStacks, Bethlehem.

After working as an operating room scrub nurse, Tolliver became a secretary at ABC News in New York.

She stepped in front of the camera in April 1967 when on-air personnel at the major networks were on strike, becoming the first African-American to anchor a network news program.

ABC News asked Tolliver to anchor “News With the Woman’s Touch” when regular host Marlene Sanders was unavailable.

During her career, Tolliver was host and reporter for many shows, including the ABC Network series “Americans All” and the New York City-based WABC Eyewitness News series “Profiles.”

Tolliver then joined the team of Channel 7 Eyewitness News, the New York local station.

“A network doesn’t work without its local stations,” she said.

Reporters knew the local area well.

“We lived in the neighborhoods the stations were covering,” she said.

Later, she went to Channel 4, becoming half of the first female anchor team with Pia Lindstrom.

The most important part of this pioneering career, though, was the more than 2,000 stories she wrote about so many interesting people.

The nightly audience for Channel 7 Eyewitness News was about 1 million viewers, she said. To be able to introduce those people to that large audience “was really a gift.”

Even with a distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, Tolliver still identifies strongly with being a writer.

Tolliver said when she tells people she is a writer, most ask, “What do you write?” but the question is really a matter of “why I write.”

Tolliver read from her essay on “Why I Write” for the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group anthology, “GLVWG Writes Stuff.”

“I write to stir the pot, to add my 2 cents to the conversations I care about.”

Writing shows “how we see ourselves and how others see us, and what we bring to the experience,” she said.

While she has reported on White House conferences, politics, and civil unrest, her favorite stories are the people profiles.

“I see those people as everyday people up to extraordinary things.

“Those are the people who get my curiosity going. I want to know about them and I want to tell other people about them,” Tolliver said.

Showing the SteelStacks audience some of her profiles, she said many of them are four minutes long, a time limit now “absolutely unheard of.

“I was so fortunate” to be able to do those extended profiles,” she said.

Tolliver is preparing an autobiography, “Accidental Anchorwoman: My Life of Chance, Choice and Change,” to be published in spring 2016.

“Where do stories come from? They can come from anywhere, right under your nose,” Tolliver told the audience.