5 things I learned in the first half of my JSK Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford University
Consider applying to become a JSK Fellow
Many of the most inspiring journalists I met when getting started in media were former John S. Knight Journalism Fellows. They stood for fostering dialogue, centering the needs of working-class people, and solving problems — not just documenting them.
So I started considering applying to become a fellow as soon as I had any standing in my career. I submitted applications in 2019 and 2020 before being selected for the 2022 JSK Community Impact Fellowship, a program adapted from the on-campus fellowship in response to the pandemic.
The remote program brings together journalists addressing journalism’s neglect of communities of color by working to meet information needs in their local community while also participating virtually in weekly cohort meetings.
During my fellowship year, I’m continuing to lead the Community Info Coop, a national journalism support organization with a local news lab in Bloomfield, N.J., called the Bloomfield Info Project.
In Bloomfield, we’re pioneering a new model for community-driven local news that centers the needs of the working class and people of color. (You can read about the project here.)
The fellowships are back on campus for the 2022–2023 academic year and JSK hopes to host more remote programs in the future. So I’m writing to share a few things I learned in the first half of my JSK Fellowship for anyone considering applying. (I did something similar after my fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.)
While many JSK Fellows lead outstanding projects, the fellowship is designed to encourage personal and professional growth as much — if not more than — project development.
Here are some of the personal and professional things I’ve learned:
It’s okay to be a leader
Everyone is a leader in their own way. But for many leaders of journalism organizations — especially those from historically marginalized communities — impostor syndrome puts limits on their success. So leadership has been one subject of deep discussion in our weekly cohort meetings.
At the start of the fellowship, it was uncomfortable for me to think of myself as a leader because I viewed being a leader as an aspirational role. It was something I would one day become — not something I was practicing in my day-to-day work. But leadership isn’t something that’s granted to you. Leadership is a practice. And though I have been a media organizer since 2013, I never realized that I had been practicing leadership all this time.
This self-awareness of my role as a leader has played an important part in helping me manage my impostor syndrome.
Decide to put off decisions
Leadership is about making a lot of decisions, often quite difficult and with limited information. And when your work involves addressing vast systemic inequity, the list of things you want to accomplish becomes long. So I’ve begun more actively limiting the scope of my decisions.
I practice this by making conscious choices about what to make decisions about. It’s not about dismissing a task but acknowledging that there are other tasks that take priority that may be more timely or manageable. It turns a vast, untameable project into something I can approach brick-by-brick.
For example, if I find a tech bug or come up with a new feature for our curation service, I’ll put it in our product development queue instead of addressing it at the moment. I try to work through the queue once per week, but there are still dozens of tasks in the queue, so I triage weekly. Nothing gets dismissed that needs doing. But I’m fully aware that not everything can be done with the resources I presently have.
It’s the same on a larger scale. We can accomplish so many things, but only certain things that will lead to the impact I want to see. Limiting the scope of my work has allowed me to become a more effective leader.
What got you here won’t get you there
Our leadership development workshops are facilitated by Dikla Carmel-Hurwitz, a Lecturer in Management and a Leadership Coach at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Dikla’s early lessons on the difference between a fixed versus growth mindset (inspired by Stanford Professor of Psychology Carol Dweck) have been critical to helping me let go of the stories about my professional identity that were limiting my potential.
Before the lesson, I firmly saw myself as a builder — someone who helps set something up and leaves it to run. As a result, I was making decisions about what professional development to pursue based on views of myself as an upstart innovator — not the executive director of established journalism projects.
Adopting a growth mindset has allowed me to fully embrace this new stage in my career.
Goal-oriented communication
Our cohort’s communication workshops have been facilitated by JD Schramm, who was recently a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior and Director of the King Global Leadership Development program at Stanford University for 13 years.
JD’s lessons on communication mastery have allowed me to practice more purposeful communication in more places. While I’ve practiced dialogue and deliberation, the ”AIM” framework JD introduced for assessing the audience, message, and intent of your communication has proved useful.
In particular, pausing to identify the intent of a message has helped me refine how I approach critiquing power.
Know your origin story
I’m a Soviet Jewish immigrant who grew up relatively siloed. English is my second language, and I spoke Russian at home. I grew up encouraged to hate Arab people and be suspicious of people of color. I didn’t have any friends until my teen years. I’m loaded with generational trauma that I actively work to unpack — poverty, pogroms, Nazism, Stalinism, Zionism, emigration.
I’m familiar with these parts of myself but have been surprised to find out how much my trauma actually drives my work. In many ways, I’ve found that I’m a community builder because I want to build the community I never had and that everyone deserves. A place free from hate, oppression, and alienation where people have the freedom to live their best lives.
This realization came in my interview for the JSK Fellowship before the program even began. Knowing this about myself has encouraged me to practice more self-care so that ceaseless work doesn’t manifest as a runaway stress response.
Select readings and resources
Here are the readings and resources that informed our professional development workshops so far this year.
- To Quickly Build Trust, Tell Your Origin Story by Andy Raskin
- Leadership That Gets Results, by Daniel Goleman
- The Authenticity Paradox, video by Herminia Ibarra
- Embrace the Near Win, video by Sarah Lewis
- Renewing and Sustaining Leadership by Anne McKee and Richard Boyatzis
- Chapter 15, “Know Your Tuning,” in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
- Dialogic Leadership, by William Isaacs
- The Art of Feedback: Giving, Seeking and Receiving Feedback, by ACT Government
- Space, Pace and Grace: How to Handle Difficult Conversations, by Collins Dobbs and Matt Abrahams
