The next step in my journalism journey
A new platform for accelerating industry change
Ten years ago this spring I decided to leave The Washington Post, despite repeated encouragement to stay. I had some freedom and time to explore. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, but I had worried that at The Post I would get too comfortable and that my personal and professional growth would stagnate.
Since then, the exact opposite has happened.
I walked the Camino de Santiago, where I discovered new depths of resilience and perseverance.
I joined the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where I worked with leaders in journalism, the arts and communities to experiment with ways of meeting news and information needs and helping people better connect with each other and the places where they live.
When I moved on to the JSK Fellowships at Stanford University, that work opened my eyes further to the heroic efforts of journalists both here in the U.S. and around the world, sometimes working under oppressive conditions, to hold the powerful accountable and to shed light in the darkness.
I supported the efforts of many hardworking fellows and alumni to better serve people left behind by the media. And I advised those change agents to find the space and the courage to step into the fullness of their personal and professional selves.
I learned along the way the importance of developing work cultures where people are empowered and valued and feel unencumbered to pursue the mission-driven work that drives so many of us.
Now, at The San Francisco Chronicle, I have experienced what talented leadership, commitment and excellent journalism can do to help a legacy regional publisher find success in the digital age, even amid the uncertainty and tumult of a worldwide pandemic.
My colleagues at The Chronicle rank among the best in the business. I have loved working alongside them, and I am immensely grateful to our editor-in-chief, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, and our publisher, Bill Nagel, for their support and encouragement, even now as I step away. But each step over the last decade, I believe, has led me to this time.
I am grateful and excited to join the terrific team at the American Press Institute as the organization’s next CEO and executive director.
In the past 10 years, both of my parents have died. I only wish they were alive to see the fullness of how they shaped me. My dad lost his mother when he was only 6 months old. He was raised largely by his older sisters during the Great Depression.
Daddy went to work with only a sixth-grade education. He joined the Army, then went into civilian life after WWII. He worked hard, made some money, became a minister in his spare time.
He raised one family mostly as a single parent, and he put three kids through college, all of this during a time when segregation and virulent racism tried to limit the opportunities for them.
Then he met my mother, a widow with three kids of her own, and together they raised three more. My siblings and I came along later in life for them, but we benefited from everything that had happened to them before.
My parents were devoted readers. My mother was a crossword fanatic, and my father loved settling into his recliner with the daily paper. They showed me the power of journalism to inform, to engage, and to uplift.
But because of their lives, I know journalism also has the power to disappoint and even harm people in our communities, especially the people of color who have been oppressed for much of our country’s history.
This is why I am most excited for the next chapter of my life, as a son of the Deep South, as a Black man who has been called the n-word, as a gay man, who has been called the f-word, as a person who has sometimes felt too lonely and too powerless in too many rooms, no matter my title.
I am pleased to bring my full self into my new role at API, which helps news publishers navigate organizational and industry change. It is a chance to distill what I have learned over many years into this work and help the industry on a broad scale. I also want to share as much as I can from people across sectors and different types of media to foster better and more sustainable journalism.
This is a challenging time for news organizations. This is a challenging time for freedom of the press. This is a challenging time for our communities and democracy itself. To best serve our readers we must prepare for the gathering storms.
We have the 2022 midterms on the horizon. The 2024 presidential election is not that far away. And we can expect misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, including against news organizations and individual journalists, to mushroom. How prepared are news organizations to face the onslaught, to help their journalists face the storm?
The pandemic has increased many of the economic pressures in journalism. It also has accelerated changes in the workforce across our country. Newsrooms are not immune from The Great Resignation, as employees question whether they have equilibrium in their lives, and the pandemic compels people to continually reassess their satisfaction with everything. How prepared are we for this storm? It is a key element in maintaining a journalism workforce that doesn’t just attempt to cover our communities, but that belongs to our communities.
We have to make sure there is adequate talent to fulfill roles in areas critical to our newsrooms, reporting and editing, of course, but also audience, digital design, engagement, engineering, and product. And our work cultures should compel journalists with such expertise to stay in our newsrooms.
Journalism has too often functioned as a closed ecosystem, with limited access to talent and ideas. That world can’t exist any longer, not if we want to reach new audiences and serve the ones our industry has neglected for far too long.
In this time of uncertainty, our diverse, multicultural society needs great journalism and the pursuit of truth more than ever, and the team at the American Press Institute stands at the forefront of guiding news organizations through this fog of constant change. That makes how we operate internally important.
I want to nurture a culture at the American Press Institute that is a model for how to operate an organization. By creating a paradigm at API, we can more effectively help publishers navigate the changes taking place in their newsrooms and help journalism leaders bring more empathy, transparency and understanding to their work. I believe this is just as important for the future of journalism as developing new products and subscription models.
I look forward to partnering with my new colleagues at the American Press Institute, our board, our friends at the News Media Alliance, our funders, news organizations across the industry, and concerned people from every walk of life to help journalism thrive — and to better serve communities everywhere.
