5 takeaways:
➀ Don’t automatically dismiss the “unglamorous” jobs. Before Brakkton Booker left NPR in 2021 to write Politico’s newsletter The Recast, he spent two of his 17 years with the radio network pulling an overnight shift in Los Angeles. Among his responsibilities was ensuring that the West Coast host of “Morning Edition” didn’t fall asleep during the show, which began at 2 a.m. Pacific time. “Nobody told me this would be part of my job, but what I really learned from that is not necessarily the journalism, but really the interpersonal skills, right? It was difficult because I had bosses on the East Coast who couldn’t see what I was doing. So I was learning to engage with them, try to get on their schedule and let them know what I was working on, because sometimes you’re out of sight, out of mind. And when you’re in a big company like that, it’s really hard for them to really know what you’re doing.”
➁ Managing expectations is an inevitable task for journalists of color. Despite the hard work of building a career, journalists of color have another mandatory task: “You’ve got to make sure your job is tight because, as you know as people of color, you can’t have really that many slip-ups. You don’t have as many chances as other people that don’t look like you because they automatically get the benefit of the doubt. [White managers] automatically [think] ‘Oh, Johnny, I know he can do it.’ How do you know? ‘Because he went to Harvard, so of course, he can do it’ or ‘He knows my uncle, so of course, I know he can do it.’” Booker congratulated Widening the Pipeline fellows for one important reason: “I’m talking to the crème de la crème in this room because somehow you guys got through your internships, your jobs — your connections got you through that gateway, got you through that door in the first place. You guys are the chosen ones, so don’t squander that opportunity, and keep those relationships going.”
➂ There’s that moment when all of your experiences make sense. For Booker, it was 8:30 a.m. on the day after Election Day 2016. He had been awake all night; within the press corps, the mood had shifted from “Of course, Hillary Clinton will win” to widespread adrenaline-fueled confusion. Around 6 a.m., he said, “I got back to my hotel room, but I was, like, ‘I can’t sleep. I don’t know what this means.’ Finally fell asleep, the phone rings: ‘Get down to Clinton’s concession speech.’ I couldn’t even get in by the time I got there. The line was so long, so I was just interviewing people outside. There were people in tears. I’m filing that tape and I’m, like, ‘The country has fundamentally changed.’ So, long story short — all these opportunities happen because I’m keeping options open. Right? I never said no to anything. I never said no to covering Republicans, even though people questioned why I wanted to do that, why won’t I cover the Democrats. Because I just want to tell interesting stories.”
➃ It’s possible to name it and claim it. Booker had the amazing fortune of describing the kind of job he wanted at Politico — and then getting it. As author of The Recast, he helped to coordinate the first-of-its-kind 2021 Power List of leaders at the intersection of race, policy and power. “Politico has done stuff like this before, but never with people of color being the focus. After George Floyd, after there was this national reckoning, at least there was this acknowledgment that race is an issue in this country. I’d never seen it really talked as forcefully about until 2020. “So when I arrived at Politico in 2021, we were still feeling the reverberations and also seeing all these companies that made all these big pronouncements — but are they going to follow through? Are they going to continue to make Black Lives Matter or all these equity pronouncements? And we found, like, ‘Eh, some did, but a lot of them didn’t.’ The landscape has certainly moved on. Now, we’ve moved on to democracy: Is democracy at stake? And so a lot of the D&I stuff that you saw in 2020 and 2021 has gone by the wayside. So we’re, like, ‘Who are the people on the ground that trying to continue this mantle?’”
➄ Keep your head in the game. Booker advises journalists to always be ready to leverage their experience. “My overarching thing is just keep working, be ready, because you’re not sure where the opportunity is going to present itself. And as long as you know that you are grounded in who you are and in your journalism skills, for the most part, things are going to work out. And if it doesn’t, hey, you got that experience — and you’ll be able to jump to the next situation that might be better.”
Speaker:
Brakkton Booker, Author, The Recast Newsletter, Politico
The Widening the Pipeline fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, Bayer AG, J&J and Twitter. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
