Radio and TV show host and producer. Influencer. Oprah Winfrey Network ambassador. Fashion model. Writer. Former special education teacher. Kidney disease survivor.
Nicole Richardson ’04 wears her many identities with pride. While her primary role is host, producer and creator of the Nikki Rich Show, which airs on cable TV in the Los Angeles area, she has embraced both the challenges and opportunities that have come her way.
“I’m just an old country girl from Seneca, South Carolina, who has reached so many heights,” Richardson says with a laugh.
Online radio provided the foundation for her current career, but Richardson never aspired to work in media. Her first experience with broadcasting was doing announcements for her parents’ radio ministry when she was growing up in Seneca. She didn’t particularly like waking up early to go on the show with her brother, but the seeds of her future had been planted.
When Richardson graduated from USC Upstate with a degree in criminal justice, her immediate focus was on teaching. She had taken multiple education courses at Upstate, and became a special needs teacher in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, working with children with autism in grades K through five. She also instructed inmates in state prisons.
During her eight years as a teacher, she earned a master’s in business administration through the University of Phoenix. Then layoffs began affecting the district. After losing her job in the third round of cuts, Richardson was determined to become her own boss. “I didn’t want anybody to tell me there will no longer be a job,” she says.
Richardson decided to try her hand at online radio. She plunged into learning everything she could, researching what platforms to use and acquiring the equipment she’d need. Finally, on April 11, 2011, she was ready to go.
Her first episode of the Nikki Rich Show was her introduction of herself to her audience. She didn’t have a particular theme in mind for her show, she says, she just wanted it to have a positive message. To help spread the word, she posted a link on her social media accounts. “I think it was a Wednesday, and I got emails from a publicist and had a celebrity guest by that Friday,” Richardson recalls. “It was nerve wracking, but I did amazing.”
Richardson entered the world of online radio when audio blog posts, or podcasts, were still relatively new. People weren’t entirely sure what to make of the medium, Richardson notes. “They wouldn’t take those of us doing strictly online that seriously,” she says. “We’d have guests reach out and then say, ‘Oh, no, we want to be on real radio.’”
But the skepticism just made Richardson work harder. Like others in the field at the time, “we knew the time would come,” she says. “We had the vision.”
Richardson continued to grow the audience for her two-hour show, producing multiple episodes a week on BlogTalkRadio and promoting them all on her social channels. She also spent six months in New York working on a doctorate in business administration. While she eventually gave up the pursuit to focus full time on her show, the stay proved fruitful for booking noteworthy guests, including broadcaster Barbara Walters.
Richardson also decided it was time to pursue her dream of moving to Los Angeles. The entertainment industry provided no shortage of celebrities for her to interview, as publicists were eager for outlets to promote new movies and streaming shows. But Richardson also mixed in small business owners and local companies to help them build their brands.
“There’s hardly any light shining on those hard-working everyday people, and I definitely wanted their voices to be heard,” she says. “I wanted to bridge that connection between everyday individuals and the ones who are entertainers.”
Since being invited to produce her show for UVerse and Spectrum cable channels in Pasadena, Richardson has been able to focus exclusively on a weekly television program. That doesn’t mean she’s any less busy, however. She conducts virtual interviews during the week, which she posts to her YouTube channel, and often attends charity events to interview celebrity guests in person. On weekends she tapes the live interviews that will air Monday on cable.
“It seems like a lot, but it’s really not,” Richardson says.
Even illness hasn’t slowed her down. For more than five years she battled kidney disease, undergoing daily dialysis treatments while awaiting a transplant. She also underwent brain surgery in 2021 when the disease caused a blood clot. “Nothing stopped me,” she says. “No matter what you go through, you’ve gotta keep pushing. You gotta keep going.”
Richardson’s deep faith has also sustained her. “I put God first in everything I do,” she says. “Even today, I don’t know how it’s all working, but he’s been guiding.” In October, she celebrated the one-year anniversary of her kidney transplant – an event she shared with viewers in a short reel from her hospital bed right before surgery.
In the many years she’s done the show, Rich can name numerous highlights: interviewing Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, who was promoting her Amazon show “Daisy Jones and the Six”; catching up with rapper Flavor Flav after the Olympics; talking to actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry, an idol of hers. But one of her most treasured moments was becoming an ambassador for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Winfrey launched the network not long before Richardson started her show, and Richardson was an early fan. She identified with the challenges of building something from scratch, and used her social channels to support Winfrey and live tweet about OWN shows. The network noticed, and selected her as one of its ambassadors, social media influencers who help promote OWN to their audiences.
Not only did Richardson get to interview cast members of OWN shows, but she also got to accompany Winfrey on tours to promote her appearances. “It’s amazing to have a relationship with the people who inspire you,” she says. “It’s beyond words.”
Another recent achievement for Richardson was being one of the more than 200 credentialed content creators at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. A strong proponent of voting, Richardson was happy to use her platform to encourage engagement in the political process. As soon as the convention wrapped, she was off to Paris, where she walked the runway for Fashion Week in the Therese Marie Collection.
While she’s accomplished so much in building her brand and reach, Richardson isn’t interested in sitting back and coasting. “I’m doing what I love, but I want to elevate the show to be on a higher scale,” she says. That includes using her platform to raise awareness of organizations like the National Kidney Foundation and groups that assist survivors of domestic violence.
Richardson says there are no limits to what she might do next. “I’m going to do everything I like to do.”