Interview with Karen Ho, Writer at the Columbia Journalism Review
Karen Ho is a writer at the Columbia Journalism Review who mainly covers issues in diversity and business in journalism. She has also written for the Toronto Life, The Walrus, Today in Tabs, Torontoist, The Billfold, BNN.ca, Japanese Subculture Research Centre, YYZ Living Magazine, ZAITEN Magazine, and the University of Toronto Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Northern News Services Limited, and The Financial Post. Some responses have been edited for clarity.
How did you get into journalism?
I was in high school and joined the student paper. The first year that I joined, we had won a high school journalism contest. Basically that was run by a newspaper called the Toronto-Star which is famous, because the Superman comic books’ newspaper, the Daily Planet is based on it. I had also been listening to a really great radio show from during the time called the“Ongoing History of Music” that inspired me to think about connecting people to read great stories. Through the student newspaper I got to interview the host of that show and I was like ‘wow once you basically work for a newspaper, you can get people to talk to you.’
I liked doing photography, layout, helping other creative people showcase their work, be better writers, or how to pick out the best photos to go in. Then, I kept doing it in my university’s college paper. I worked for a publication called The Varsity which published twice a week in print. A lot of people in that community read that paper too, such as faculty and students. This was genuinely a paper that a lot of people cared about and looked forward to reading updates about what was going on in the community. During that time, I covered the entire campus and, since it was so big, it was really cool to write, take photographs, and learn about how to get people, such as administrators in the university, to talk to you.
How do you go about writing and researching for articles?
I do a lot of research on my tech databases. Columbia has a great library database, and sometimes I talk to librarians for help. Typically, I look for resources that are about women and people of color as much as possible because historically, they have not been represented in issues. For new stories, I look at journals. I call a lot of public relations professionals at universities, and then I also read a lot. Often times, it’s really enjoyable to work on something that isn’t really known, and so I try to find and read stories about such topics. For example, I read a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on the Asian American Writers Workshop, and there have been so many questions to answer. How long has the edit-a-thon been happening? How has Wikipedia been in the news lately? Or how do sites like Facebook and YouTube implement Wikipedia’s articles in helping other sites catch conspiracy theories online, and also what is this history of Wikipedia edit-a-thons? There is also a real cultural aspect to this. Figures are often predominantly English-speaking white males. So there’s a huge problem in diversity.
While researching, you eventually develop an intuition in knowing which sources are credible and which ones are not.
Since you write for the Columbia Journalism Review, what do you think are the biggest issues in journalism today?
The things that I cover are business and diversity. Right now it’s very obvious that there are a lot of different factors such as advertising. The money that media organizations earn from advertising is totally in the hands of Facebook, Google, and even Craigslist.
Hyper-concentration of media organizations and newspaper ownership went from having an owner who was in the building or in the town that the newspaper was published in, to having owners who are hedge-funds in New York City, thousands of miles away or even in another country. I think that this is a real problem because then you just care about what stories make the most amount of money. You’re not as connected to the real-world effects of having to lay people off, having to cut down the number of pages published on a daily basis, not being able to hire as many foreign correspondents, or having a freelance budget that is a lot smaller.
I think another big one is when you have less resources, you have less buffer time. People used to be paid a lot more and be given a lot more space or resources. There was a period of time where if you’re a foreign correspondent, for your first year you didn’t really write or report anything because you were so focused on learning the local language, getting established, and sometimes, getting your family established wherever you had moved to. Then, you really start doing the work. Now it’s more about hiring people who have the language skills, a huge list of resources, or people who grew up in that country.
Also, diversity is a huge issue. Honestly, in the last fifty years, the biggest problem in diversity has been in gender and ethnicity across the United States. There is still a problem in terms of newsrooms reflecting the populations in which they exist in and report on. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, when the Ferguson protests were first starting, there were national magazines or organizations like the New Yorker that didn’t really have the staff to think about the context or the history of these protests that were happening. They also didn’t have the staff that would be able to build the trust within these communities or get permission to access the sources that could really provide that context and clarity about the situation on the ground.
What is your favorite article that you have written? Or is there a certain type of article that you enjoy writing more? Why?
My favorite one recently was a profile that I wrote about a Korean-American writer and on-air host with the name Jay Caspian Kang. It took me a long time to write that feature, but I got to talk to a lot of people and I got to really write something comprehensive about his life, career, and what he represents, which is a really unusual person: A person of color of a specific minority that is extremely rare in sports and in magazine journalism. I like writing those hard stories because you’re trying to answer the question of what I call micro-to-macro, meaning that this is a profile of one person, but the bigger questions which I had to answer for myself were: In the seven or eight years he had been in American media, why had there been so few people like him? What were the systemic reasons as to why there weren’t more people like him(Asian American magazine writers or Asian Americans in the media)?
I think that that’s the method that a lot of people who write in long-form in magazines use. It’s always about what is the bigger question. It’s a really hard and challenging thing to do.
Is there any other form of media or a book that has heavily impacted you?
When I think of why I became a journalist, I can tell you that I listened to this very important episode of This American Life that was called “The Giant Pool of Money,” which made me realize that this is what I want to do, be a business journalist and explain issues that seem to be really foreign and complicated and why it’s relevant and interesting to people’s lives.
