Jemele Hill Transcript: May 5, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
For session three of the May, 2025 widening virtual training. We’ll be hearing from one of the most prominent names in journalism today. And sometimes we can forget that these high profile journalists were once just like us. They were trying to maintain a beat and navigate newsroom drama. Well, today we’ll get some advice about assessing our skill and negotiating career opportunities from Jamele Hill. She’s an entrepreneur, contributing writer for the Atlantic Host of the Politics podcast and author of Uphill, a memoir that was published in 2022 prior to the Atlantic. Jamel Coan anchored SportsCenter with Michael Smith. And she is the executive producer of the ESPN documentary on former NFL Quarterback and Civil Rights activist Colin Kaepernick. You can read Jemele’s full bio on our website@nationalpress.org. Jamele, it’s such a delight to have you join us with widening today. Thank you so much.
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:01:11):
I appreciate it. And you forgot to mention in that lovely intro and also the mentee of one Rachel Jones, we go back a long way.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01:22):
We go back an extremely long way. So that was really going to be my first question for you when we knew each other back at the Free press. I know you were a teenager, and I know it’s hard at that point to know what you want to do or whatever, but did you have a vision for the kind of journalist you wanted to be and what you wanted to be doing?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:01:44):
I didn’t know if I had a vision when I first started in this about the kind of journalist I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to be a journalist and to be more specific, I wanted to be a sports journalist. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. And that possibility started to emerge for me when I was in 10th grade. And I always tell other journalists is that in a way I’m a really bad example because I always knew what I wanted to be. And most young people, it’s not that way. It’s that you change your mind four or five, six even more times. And even when you go to college, you might switch your major a couple of times, but I didn’t. It’s like once I got introduced to journalism, I was hooked. And that started for me because I started working in my high school newspaper.
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I’m from Detroit. I went to the Mumford High School, which if you’re of a certain age, I know these folks are a little young, younger. Then you remember that Eddie Murphy wore our t-shirt in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise because the director of that franchise, Jerry Bruckheimer, went to Mumford. And so Eddie Murphy, Axel Foley always wore a Mumford and people thought it was a fictional high school. And I had to tell people, no, it’s a real high school. I went there and graduated and in fact, one of the coolest moments I experienced out here, I live in Los Angeles even though I’m in New York right now, but one of the coolest moments I experienced was getting able to actually meet Jerry Bruckheimer so I could tell him, yo, I went to Mumford too, we’re alums and even cooler to brag to him that there’s an auditorium named after me in Mumford and not you.
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I got to rest him. He has made billions in movies. I was like, and to think I got the auditorium and didn’t. There’s nothing named after him at Mumford, so it’s pretty funny. But at any rate, so I knew very early on that I wanted to write about sports and write about the, not just the way, not just the results, but sort of the characters in the game. I knew I wanted to tell stories, but I didn’t know exactly what that looked like, hence why it was important for me early on in my career to meet people like you and to be exposed to other journalists so I could understand what kind of journalist that I wanted to be. So I’m writing from my high school newspaper and I got accepted into an apprenticeship program that was run by the Detroit Free Press. And this program, the design of it was to expose young journalists mostly of color from the Detroit metro area to what journalism looked like.
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And this is the early nineties. And so essentially as part of the program, you work 20 hours a week. They assigned you two mentors. One of the mentors they assigned me to was Rachel Jones. And through watching her and how she approached her job, I understood how this is supposed to work, what it’s supposed to look like. And not only that, the integrity that came along with being a journalist, because that’s a big part of our job and it was exhilarating for me to learn and to understand what it took to be successful. And so being a part of that program collided with another very important event because the National Association of Black Journalists had their convention in Detroit the same summer I was an apprentice. And so the woman who ran the apprenticeship program, Dr. Louise Reed Richie, as part of it, she marched us to NABJ and all of us young people, she made us become members and she made us go down there and pass out our resume and talk to people and talk to recruiters.
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And so I say all that to say is that it made a big impact on me not only being assigned a mentor like Rachel, but also seeing 3000 black journalists. It gave me that sense of belief that this was where I belonged. And I think early in your career, that’s really important, especially I didn’t, as a black woman, I didn’t know. And as a black girl then I didn’t know that sports writing was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I didn’t have that disbelief because I never experienced, I had a mentor like Rachel. My other mentor was Jeanette Howard, who is a sports writer and sports columnist as well. And going with her to my first professional practice, she took me to Alliance practice. And so I saw her and how she approached the job, took note of the questions that she asked. So I understood like, oh, you have to be a good interviewer.
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You have to be able to ask these type of questions, and you have to have these kinds of relationships with your sources in order to get the information and in order to best represent what the story is supposed to be. And having that sense of belonging and belief early was really important because it wasn’t until later on, once I started going into different newsrooms, the free press was very ahead of his time to have, they had a couple of women who were on staff and who were sports reporters. So again, I didn’t know this was something that women weren’t supposed to do. And it wasn’t until I got more experience in the field and went into other newsrooms going into the other locker room, seeing that like, oh, there are no women or very few women and definitely not any black women. But by that time it was too late. I already had the confidence to think I belonged. So it was too late for me to realize, no, this is not what you’re supposed to be doing. And so I think those early examples and that early mentorship really was, it was very critical. And to me having a sense of confidence as I went into these different newsrooms and different places and spaces where there was never or very few representations of me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:07:39):
I think I also need to jump in and share the very powerful example you had early in life of Manifestation. And I say this to urge all of you to read Jam’s memoir, if you have Not Uphill, just beautiful writing, powerful writing, authentic writing, but she talks about being a little girl writing fictional scripts of the show, LA Law when she was a little girl and she watched it and she saw how the people on LA Law lived. And so she would just write these scenarios. And so I always find it interesting that she’s living that life now, but talk about your early connection with writing and with words and with journalism,
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:08:29):
The earliest connection started with reading opinion that if you’re a journalist, you need to be an avid reader because that’s part of how you learn about the world. I get it. It can be challenging because trust me, college, after you get bombarded with all these books, I didn’t want to pick up nothing I was required not to read. But nevertheless, it was early on going to the library, having a library card writing. The thing about reading is that it stokes your curiosity. And I think it’s impossible to be a journalist if you aren’t curious. I think it’s kind of the foremost thing that you have to have is curiosity. And so that’s how I fell in love with language and then reading made me want to write and made me want to try to duplicate what that feeling was, where something that you put on the page resonates with people, where it connects people, something that they can sort of relate to.
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And so when I was younger and writing those fictional strips and fictional stories and also journaling as well, that was also sort of a early, I still have, I mean, it is frightening to read now. And I remember I read it as I was writing my memoir. I still have my journal that I kept when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was like, oh my God, I was such a nightmare. It’s pretty starling to read. And then as in my twenties, I kept a journal. I should probably burn those, but that’s the point. Twenties was a different time, a different kind of writing going on then. But nevertheless, it was an important part of my growth and being able to tell my truth on a page. And it got me accustomed to that kind of early. And as I progressed and learned about different types of writing, the first English class that I had in high school was creative writing and understanding about poetry. And even though I was terrible at writing poetry, it still was exposing me to what different forms of writing looked like.
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I started reading newspapers on top of reading books. I started reading newspapers when I was young because back then kids, the only way you could follow your sports team is by reading the newspaper. And so my mother, and it’s a story I tell in my memoir, my mother used to clean houses, and so she cleaned the house of this older white gentleman who had a subscription to both newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. And sometimes I had to accompany my mother while she cleaned his house. And so to occupy myself, I would read the newspaper. I started with the sports section, worked my way to the front. I went out of order. I wanted to read the sports part first because the big reason I wanted to write about sports is I was a big sports fan. I also played sports, neighborhood tomboy. I also wanted to follow my teams. I was a big baseball fan, big tires fan. I wanted to read about the Tigers. So that got me interested in newspaper writing, is reading different columnists, reading different stories, seeing and thinking about how they were put together. And so it developed a love of language and the love of storytelling. That’s how it was kind stoked at me really early.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:11:44):
Tell us about your very first newsroom job, your very first journalism job where it was salary.
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:11:52):
All right. Now you mean as a professional or as an intern?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:11:55):
As a professional.
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:11:56):
Okay. So my first newsroom job was at the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Now I interned in Raleigh. I went to Raleigh after I graduated from college. So I was the perennial intern man. I had five internships at college. Raleigh was my fifth internship, and I got my first internship after my freshman year and just kind of moved up the chain, so to speak. And so senior year, this is actually sort of a two part answer in some ways. So senior year I was actually offered a two year internship. Knight Riter had two year internships, and the internship was you had to spend one year at the free press, and the second year you spent at the Charlotte Observer, I was sick of being an intern. I was like, I want a full-time job that I don’t have to worry about. What am I doing in another two years or this kind of thing.
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So I actually turned that job down, which in hindsight, I was like, man, that was kind of crazy to do that. I turned down the two year internship, rolled the dice and decided to go to Raleigh to intern. And the reason I chose Raleigh was because a really good friend of mine worked in Raleigh. He was a full-time staff writer, and he had also interned there. And he said, Raleigh’s a really good newspaper. They tend to hire their interns and it’s a great place for a developing writer. And this was all true. They had just won a Pulitzer Prize. They were considered to be one of the best mid-size papers in the country. So I rolled the dice and took the internship with the Hope that by the end of it, I would convince them to hire me. And so after about two and a half months that I was there, they extended my internship.
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I had another very impactful conversation with a fellow staffer. He covered hockey actually for Raleigh. And he was like, yeah, I’d started here as an intern as well. And he told me that they extended his internship. They just kept extending it to the point where he wound up interning for them for 11 months. I was like, oh no, that will not be me. That will not be me 11 months. No, it is cheaper to do that. I think as an intern, I think I might’ve been making 400 a week maybe. I feel like it was like three 50 ish, 3 75 ish, somewhere in there. So not a ton of money. And so I decided, I was like, no, they’re not going to do me like that. I was like, I’m going to go out and get another job offer. And once they extended my internship, I started looking at other places that I could work as a full-time staffer.
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And I came across a job opportunity at the Savannah Morning News. And Savannah, they were smaller than Raleigh, but they had a good reputation. They had just did a redesign. They were doing a lot of exciting things, and they had an opening for a school reporter, so I’d be covering high schools, and they wanted somebody who had an enterprising mentality, but bring it to high school sports, meaning that they wanted on top of your nuts and bolts coverage of certain high schools. They also wanted somebody who could do takeouts and big features and that sort of thing. So I went to Savannah, but before I went, I told Riley like, yo, I’m going on this job interview, just so you know, FYI, because I wanted to plant the seed. And they were really shocked, and I don’t even remember, I think it was just talking to different professionals in the business that sort of put me on game about frankly how you can pit one job offer against another one.
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And so the idea was like, I really wanted to stay in Raleigh, but the Savannah job was a good job, and if need be, I would have gone there. And so I think the Savannah job, I went there, interned. I mean, I went there, interviewed, crushed the interview, everything. They offered me a job literally within a few days after I interview. So I was like, be, and I think the salary they were offering me was like 24. I feel like it was $24,000 a year, somewhere between 24 and 26,000. I think that’s what it was. And so when they offered me the job, I went to Riley and I said, Hey, I got this job offer and I just want to see if you guys are going to respond in any kind of way. And they were like, okay, yes. Give us a day or two. We’ll come back with something. And they actually came back with an offer that was lower than what Savannah gave me. And I was like, okay, oh, I see y’all not serious. Oh, y’all don’t think I’ll leave. I will leave.
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And so I was like, okay, well, it’s not as much as what they’re offering me. And so then they wanted to know what their offer was. And so I told ’em, they’re like, all right, hold on, hold on, we’ll come back to you. So they came back to me with an offer that was, I think a little bit higher than what Savannah was. So I was like, Hmm, should I go back to Savannah? Say, Hey, guess what? The paper that I’m at, they offered me more. And I think I did go back to ’em and say like, Hey, they offered me more than what you guys offered me. So they counter offered, and then Riley Counter offered. I was like, all right, I can’t do this too many times. I’m young. And even though I’m young and brash, I’m also a little self-aware. And I talked to some other people on staff who also started as interns.
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They were like, Hey, where did y’all start at? I’m just curious. And I was above where they started at. So long story short, I think I wound up taking the Raleigh job and I think I was making like 27 5 maybe somewhere in that neighborhood. And the job description didn’t really change much. I was a general assignment sports reporter, and it really winning just because the average salary for a journalist was $19,000 a year. And I was like, look at me balling out. But it taught me a really important lesson. And look, I won’t lie to you guys. It was terrifying to do that. But there were other people I talked to in the business that told me that’s exactly what you should do. And it also taught me the value of sharing your salary, frankly with other people. I know it’s something that we’re taught not to do or people think it’s impolite or there’s a taboo around it, but these newsrooms and these companies kind of rely on the silence and they use that part of it against you because they think you won’t ask the question.
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And it also, especially in journalism early on in your career and even mid career, I mean, I don’t think this actually ever stops. So let me not just act like there’s a stop button for this, is that you really have to be your best advocate in these situations. And especially if you’re a woman, I think we especially sometimes get that conditioning that we are being too bold or too brash or that sort of thing by asking for these things. I remember, I’ll never forget this part of reading, Cheryl Sandberg’s who ran Facebook for a while. I don’t think she still runs it. Maybe she does, I’m not sure. But anyway, I remember reading this in her book and she was talking about how if there was a new position or a new project, all the men in the room would raise their hands, whether they had no experience, whether they were not right for the job, they would just do it anyway.
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And the women who were more experienced than them tended to not do that. And so she had some conversations with them and she realized that a lot of women, especially we have that fear of being exposed, if you will. And so what we will do is if a job has a hundred qualifications, we could meet 90 of those and because, but we’re focused on the 10 ways we don’t maybe fit the qualifications or maybe the little bit of experience that we don’t have. Meanwhile, a dude will have 10 of those qualifications. They’ll be like, I’m applying anyway. So that’s why I always say to myself, over and over, God, please give me the irrational confidence of a man. No offense, man. But I think men are naturally, that kind of confidence is more conditioned and encouraged in them, and as opposed to with women, it’s not really the same.
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So that early salary example was something that gave me the confidence to do it again. And the more you practice it, even if it feels terribly uncomfortable, the better you sort of get at it. And I should also mention in that as an addendum kind of to that salary story is while I was at Raleigh, and this was after I had accepted the job and I’m full time there and everything, the Sports Illustrated offered me a job. And Sports Illustrated was where I dreamed of working. I never dreamed about working at ESPN. I dreamed of working at Sports Illustrated because I saw myself very much as a writer. And that’s where the elite sports writers in my mind went to work for. It was Sports Illustrated. And they flew me out. First time I ever went to New York and I was at this amazing hotel room, I was like, oh my God, this is incredible.
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And Sports Illustrated the job they offered. It was as a writer reporter. And I asked them, what does that mean exactly? And when they gave me the job description, it’s like, you’re kind of a glorified copy editor. I didn’t get in this to do that, right? It is like that was not, I wanted to write stories for the magazine and long form stories that really resonated and made a deep impact. That’s what Sports Illustrated was really known for. And as much as that was my dream place, it was not my dream job. And there is a difference. And sometimes a lot of times in this business, there will people who will sacrifice development and job for place. And it’s like you can be at a great place that you’ve always dreamed of working, but if you’re not doing the thing you want to do, what’s the point of going there?
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I used to tell a lot of younger people that at ESPN that came in as say producers or came in more entry level positions, but their dream was actually to be on air at ESPN. And I would say to them, I said, look at who’s on TV at ESPN. Have any of them ever been in your job? And the answer was no, because ESPN didn’t hire people who came in to be on air. That started off as cutting highlights. There’s not a single person on ESPN right now that started off at ESPN cutting highlights none of them. Every anchor you see on ESPN, they got from somewhere else, they got them from another market because they were on TV every day. And so if you’re coming there to cut highlights and you don’t want to cut highlights, what’s the point of being at ES, ESPN just to say you work there?
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And so it was sort of the same thing with me and Sports Illustrated and also the salary for New York. I think they were offering me 47,000. I was like, oh my God. So I’m going to have about 10 roommates in New York, like tennis not going to make it. I was shout out to this cost of living here in Raleigh, North Carolina, way different if you’re living in New York. I was like, well, I’m going to be living three times away catching the subway every day. And as hard as it was, I turned them down. And I remember the recruiter at the time when I turned the job offer down, he said, I’m actually glad that you did it. He’s like, you have a lot of talent and you’re in Raleigh. You’re doing incredible work. I had just won also the Straight Press Association award for sports feature writing.
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And so I was in a really good groove really developing as a writer, and he said, we can afford you now. I know we won’t be able to afford you later. And he was right. I have never worked at Sports Illustrated and now saying that they’re a shell of themselves. So that was another thing that I kind of learned early on was that a lot of the, it is fine to dream and envision of a place you want to want to work, but essentially it’s just a place. And I run into a lot of young people who want to work at ESPN, and I’m saying, well, ESPN is just kind of a place. There might be another network that will offer you a way better job than they could. And so you should keep your options open and don’t get so attached to working at a place. It’s about the job that you do.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:24:37):
Well, such great advice, and I want to give the journalists as much time as possible to ask you questions. So please get those Zoom hands up. But before that, I wanted to ask you about perhaps one more time, prior to ESPN where you may have felt you were being underpaid, overworked, and overvalued. Did you have any of those other kind of experiences and what did you do about it?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:25:03):
And you assumed that didn’t happen at espn? I, we’ll talk about them later. No, I was kidding, but not kidding. But at any rate, I definitely have some salary stories to tell up in there, that’s for sure. So before that, it was really interesting once you started having conversations around the business about what folks were making and what position and there was when the first time, my first column job was at the Orlando syndrome, and I was the third columnist there. So I think I was responsible. I had two days a week, I had Tuesdays and Sundays were my days. And they had a main number one columnist who was like the face of the sports section, if you will. And I think he had to write four times a week, four or five times a week. And as I talked to some sort of other people, I was like, man, I thought I negotiated right.
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I thought I did all right. And I made a pretty, so after I left Raleigh in, let’s see, this would’ve been 1999. I was in Raleigh for about two years, and I left Raleigh to return and work at the Detroit Free Press where I worked in high school. I answered phones in the sports department after the apprenticeship and also interned at the Free press as well. And so they had an opening to cover my alma mater, Michigan State, to cover Michigan State football and basketball. And they came in, their first offer was $25,000 more than what I was making in Raleigh. I was like, Ooh, Riley ain’t got a shot up in here. It was so much more money. But even with that, the free press was getting me on the cheap end because of what they were paying the previous writer who they had elevated to become a columnist.
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I didn’t even negotiate that. Now that I think about it, I was like, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a salary. I was like, oh my god, 25,000 more bet. I’m there. How fast can I get to Detroit? Which was probably a mistake, to be honest. It probably was. And so at any rate, but by the time I left Detroit, I was making pretty good money because Michigan State Basketball, I won a championship. It was like all these things that were happening, and they actually had me do a book on Michigan State winning a title. They just pretty much took a lot of the stories that I’d written about them through the year, and they gave me a bonus for doing that. And in Detroit, we had merit raises because Detroit is a union paper, I assume it still is, not sure, but it was a union paper.
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And so you also got a guaranteed 3% raise, but anything on top of that was based off the job that you were doing. So I was getting like five, six, 7% raises for a few years. So I think I was, by the time I left and I was there for six years, I think I was making close to 70 by the time I left Detroit. And so the job in Orlando when I interviewed for that, got the job. I think their initial offer was like 75, and I think I had to get them up to 80. And so 80 wound up being the closing offer. And yeah, I mean, I did go back to the free press because I did love working there, but I was ready for a different role. I really wanted to be an enterprise writer for sports. I wanted to do long form stories about players and that kind of thing. I wanted to get off the grind of a beat. And
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:28:49):
Can I jump in here just to ask you who advised you about salary stuff at that point in your career? I’m assuming you didn’t have an agent maybe at that
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:28:58):
Point. No, no, no, I didn’t. Not at all. So at that point, I am about, let’s see, because I was at the free press from 99, excuse me, to 2005, so I’m about seven, eight years in the business at that point when I got the job in Orlando. And so a lot of my peers, like Issa Rae says something that’s so true is that the best mentors you have sometimes are people who are right at the same level as you because you’re going through the same things and you’re on the same career path and you’re experiencing a lot of the same challenges in real time. And so it’s good to bounce ideas off of them. So at that point, in terms of salary, it was a lot of my peers and hearing things that they had gone through. I knew two people that worked in Orlando who were on the sports staff.
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They were, in fact, they were the ones that encouraged me to apply for this job as a columnist. And so they kind of told me what their salaries were one, and then they told me some of the things that they had gone through in terms of negotiations. So I can know, okay, well, are they hardliners? Are they this? So getting that inside intel, very important. And then talking to people around the free press, frankly, it’s like some of my really good friends that I went to college with were at the free press at the same time, Kelly Carter, Suzette Hackney, who I’d known them for years. And so they had gone through various salary negotiations in Detroit, and so I kind of had a lay of the land. So really it was across industry. And in terms of learning different negotiating tactics, I don’t remember. I wish I could remember who put me on this game of, okay, let’s say that it’s a place you really want to work, but maybe the salary isn’t a huge bump.
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You can always ask for a signing bonus, then it’s true, that does work. I was like, oh, snap. I didn’t even know that worked. But it’s true. Let’s say that, yeah, you really want to make 75,000 a year, and then all they can give you is 70. You could always say, all right, well give me a $5,000 signing bonus. And then in some ways they’d rather do that because that’s just a one-time payment as opposed to paying you 80 every year. And so you might be likely to get something like that, because I knew of a couple of my peers that had had done that at various places. And in fact, I want to say I just can’t remember who it was, but it was a paper that came after me while I was in Detroit before I took the Orlando job. And the free press not only gave me a salary bump, they also gave me a bonus, another bonus.
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I was like, man, those were the days when newspapers were spending money, the good old days. But in Orlando, to get back to your question, I realized once I was there that I probably could have negotiated harder given what the salary structure was for the other columnists and looking at what some of the more senior writers were making. Because the fact is, again, I had seven, eight years experience under my belt. I had covered in Olympics, I’d covered a bunch of things like National, done a lot of national reporting, and financially Orlando was in kind of a healthy place, and they were the only paper in town. So it wasn’t like they had the money for sure. And I think sometimes you have to take emotion out of it. And the free press, when they countered, I think they didn’t offer as much, which really kind of surprised me, but I think I was more insulted at the job. The free press offered me to stay, and I was like, I am not going to stay and do that. What was it?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:32:54):
What was the job?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:32:55):
So one, they offered me a job that somebody already had, and they offered me an opportunity to be the Pistons beat writer, and I didn’t want the grind of a beat. And the NBA grind is different. That’s 82 games. The Pistons were actually really good. Then they were coming off winning A NBA championship, and I had done, once Michigan State season ended in college basketball, I would transition over into the NBA and help them with their NBA coverage because again, the pistons were really good. So they were putting the force of the coverage behind them, and they did not like they were at odds with the beat writer who was there, who was working there. And I didn’t want a job that way. I didn’t want that just felt too messy. And I was like, okay, y’all want me to replace somebody that y’all told y y’all want to replace them? I was like, that’s already putting me in a bad spot. And to be perfectly honest, it was somebody I considered a friend. And that was the other tricky part of it too.
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Funny little side note on that is that same person wound up suing the free press and winning because of that. I told him I was honest, I went and told him, I was like, Hey, man, they offered me your job. I just want you to know. And because they did eventually get him off the beat, and then he was able to successfully prove that this was something they conspired to do to demote him because the union rules whole big mess. But he wound up winning. Anyway, they offered me that job, and the other job they offered me was to report on ergonomics, which was very strange because they were like, oh, well, you said you wanted to do Big 10 pole features. We’re developing this sort of ergonomic Centro beat. It didn’t make any sense to me. I was like, now, what would make you think I want to write about desk? I don’t even know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about here. And I was like, okay, so now I got to go to Orlando. This is, and I was so kind of pissed off about that, that I was like, you know what? Y’all put ad on the table. I’m there.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:35:00):
Let me see if there are any questions. Anybody. I don’t see any Zoom hands. So then let me then, oh wait, here’s Monique Welch, introduce yourself, Monique.
Monique Welch/Houston Landing (00:35:14):
Yeah, sorry, I’m just slow to raise my hand on Zoom. Hi, Monique Welch with the Houston Landing. Thanks for being here today. I’ve always been a fan of yours. I remember back to the very first NAB conference I went to. I met you, you had really great inspiring words from someone who at the time was aspiring to be a sports journalist. Now I’ve pivoted in more intersection of race and culture news reporting. And I just wanted to ask you a question about, because earlier you said even ESPN wasn’t your dream job, and we’ve all of course known the career and the time that you spent there. And of course your exit as well that you’ve been very public about. Wanted to ask you in that pivot from being a sports writer, something you knew you always wanted to do, desiring to go to Sports Illustrator, but then ultimately not being in the dream role, how did you pivot from writing and being a reporter in the newspaper space, online space as we are now to being in television broadcast?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:36:19):
So a fun fact that people don’t realize, I guess because of the length of time I was at ESPN is they hired me as a writer. They never hired me to be on tv. So my first job into S ESP N was being a columnist for espn.com. And what does tend to happen, as you guys see pretty regularly now, is people who can generate opinion. They tend to put you on TV to talk about, especially if you, because you’re creating a conversation with your work. And so they started putting me a bunch of different shows, and it was funny because I had, again, back then it was a little bit different because the print people wanted to be print people and the TV people wanted to be TV people. And so there wasn’t a lot of blending in those roles. But now everybody who writes is on tv, so the job is seen much differently.
(00:37:10):
But then for me, it was just like, no, I just want to write. I don’t really want to even bother with this TV stuff. But my agent at the time, and it was the first time in my career, I had an agent when I got to ESPN, but my agent at the time, he was like, well, I think we should put in 20 appearances in your contract that ESPN have to use you 20 times on tv. And I was like, I think this is dumb, but okay, fine. And he had the vision because I was at ESPN not even two months and had blown through those 20 appearances. And I think because I came into television not taking it seriously, as bizarre as this may sound, that is probably what helped me the most on TV is because I just came in. I was just being me and very loose and casual in terms of my approach, and I sort of was a natural at it.
(00:38:09):
And so it just kind of went from there. And next thing I know, within the first year that I was at ESPN TV had become 40 to 50% of my job. And I saw based off the dynamics of the company that TV was really what stirred the drink. It was the straw that stirred the drink. And when there’s a lot of people who are trying to get to ESPN, and it was always a constant fight for real estate there, you have to go in there trying to be as valuable as possible. And I not only saw that television was probably the best opportunity that I had to stay at ESPN, and at that point there was a lot happening with newspapers. I mean, we thought things were bad in the industry then, but I’m looking at it now. Wow, that seems like the glory days now looking at it, right?
(00:39:05):
And looking at the contraction all across the newspaper business, I was like, man, I probably can’t go back to newspapers and certainly not make this money that I’m making now at ESPN. And I sort of shifted my focus and started to concentrate more on broadcast and a big part of it, it was really multiple fold. It was seeing the impact that television had, understanding the value that TV had within ESPN. And third is Matt Lauer. Matt Lauer was the one that convinced me, I need to make broadcasting a full time. I don’t know Matt Lauer, I’ve never talked to Matt Lauer, but what happened when I was at ESPN, maybe six, seven months in, he got a new contract at NBC way. They was paying him 25 million a year. And I was like, that’s possible in television. What? I’m not saying that I was going to make 25, but just to know it was possible, I was like, oh, I got this messed up.
(00:39:57):
I need to focus on TV because frankly, there’s only so much they’re going to pay a writer, generally speaking. But with tv, as you see, my former colleague, Stephen A. Smith, he about to make a hundred million dollars. There is no number. They will stop. They will not pay you in television. That number doesn’t exist to them. So after three or four years, I just really focused on TV and not only just being a talking head, then I started to realize that to make myself even more valuable, I need to learn how to host. So I started doing more hosting things, and essentially what I would do is that I knew in the summers, and I knew during Thanksgiving, Christmas, everybody took time off. And so instead of taking time off, I would volunteer to go to Bristol to host to be on tv. I was trying to just get as many reps as possible in order to do it and to be more comfortable, again, particularly in the hosting arena, because then if I could host and give an opinion, it was like two for one in terms of ESPN, and it just took time.
(00:41:07):
It just took a lot of reps, a lot of messing up a lot of those things in order for me to get comfortable in the chaos of television. So finally 2013 is when I got my first show and I sort of won the War of Attrition. There was some people leaving, it was a show called Numbers Never Lie, that was hosted by my good friend Michael Smith. And they had kind of set up the dynamic of the show is that two athletes debate the journalist, right then he was the journalist and the host, and one of the athletes was Jalen Rose, good friend of mine also from Detroit. And Jalen wanted to leave the show to concentrate fully on doing NBA countdown. So he left the show just to do NBA countdown and to just focus primarily on the NBA in general. And that left the opening.
(00:42:05):
They looked around and they were just like, all right, I guess you’ll do. But Mike and I, we had done television many times before. People liked our chemistry. And so that’s how I got on numbers Never Lie, which eventually became his and hers, which eventually led to me doing the six o’clock Sports Center, which was another job I did not have on the vision board to me hosting Sports Sports Center. I’m like, no, that’s for real. Anchors Stewart’s got, I can anchor, I can host. But no, no, no, it’s for the serious broadcasters. But again, the company really liked me and Mike’s chemistry, they approached us with the idea of doing the six o’clock sports center, and we were like, I remember the first time they asked us about it, we both bust out laughing. We thought they were, we dress up in weird costumes and do silly stuff. Y’all want us though sports that are like, you guys must be crazy. And yeah, then they were like, no, we are serious. And so the rest, as they say is history.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:43:04):
I guess that’s an example about staying open to the possibilities. Another question that I wanted to ask you about was the issue of media influencing people who are not necessarily a journalist, but they have the demeanor and the ability to communicate. What are your thoughts about whether or not people who sort of see themselves maybe in one silo, I’m a print writer or I write for whatever, versus being on camera or whatever, what advice would you give
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:43:40):
To What I would say, much like you just said a moment ago, is you have to remain open. And the reason you do is not just to be honest financially, it just makes too much sense not to, and as I mentioned before, the ceiling for television is infinite. And even now, I would even add to not just tv, but not just TV in the traditional standpoint of network television, but being open to doing digital shows, being open to doing video podcasting, all of these things are part of the skillset that I think journalists have to have now, and it’s skillset sets that I was able to pick up along the way. The first time I had a podcast was at ESPN, and part of the reason, by the way I should mention that they did put me on numbers never lie, is because Mike and I had our own podcast that we started his and hers was a podcast for us before it became a TV show.
(00:44:38):
And that was actually born out of frustration. We created the podcast because we kept asking to be paired together to some producers to build a show around us. And every time we see this producer, he became a friend, a good dude. But we remind him about how when we first approached him about putting Mike and I together on tv, he told us we wasn’t to jump off. That’s exactly what he said. And we were like, do you know you’re not using it? Nevermind. But we, oh man, we gave him shit for that for, I can’t tell y’all long, but once we wound up getting our show. And so at any rate, I say all that to say is that being able to pivot in this industry is vital. If you notice how the skills, the great thing about being a journalist is that the skillset you develop translates into so many different areas.
(00:45:34):
And now that I’m on kind of the behind the scenes, behind the camera side of things, being out in LA and doing some work on documentaries and different TV stuff, the ability to tell the story is a really rare and unique quality. And there’s a lot of people who can’t do that. And so I think we should think about it in a sense of, yeah, whether at one point it was a stone tablet, alright, then it was the newspaper and it was like the method is always going to change, but how we do our jobs is never going to change. That has lasted the test of time. It’s still how that has never changed. And so you have to give yourself the opportunity to do it in these other platforms because you have to look at where the trends are, where people are spending money. And for example, YouTube is hot, YouTube is hot, doing digital shows hot. That’s where people are spending money because for the first time in history, more people watch things on their phones than they do on linear television. And so all of these different platforms are trying to create digital content.
(00:46:48):
So my focus, for example, in the last probably six, seven months, has been purely on building my YouTube following because I see where the money is going. And so part of what makes you a good journalist, and it’s funny because early in my career, a lot of journalists that I know, we went into it with the mindset that we was just going to be broke, that we’re not doing this for the money, clearly not doing this for the money because of what the salaries were that we’re doing this for the greater good and nobility. Yeah, yeah, that’s all good, but that don’t stop them bills. And so I became think a much better journalist when I became a better business woman and understanding that, yeah, it is all right to do things for money or with the possibility of making more money. That doesn’t mean you betray your integrity of who you are as a journalist, but it does mean that you need to be very acutely aware at all times where the money is being spent in media to help you pivot and adjust and latch on to things in your career.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:47:54):
Tamia, introduce yourself.
Tamia Fowlkes/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (00:47:57):
Hi Jemele. My name is Tamia Fowlkes, I’m a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and I have loved this conversation. It’s so exciting to get to meet you. But I was wondering how you, in your career, balanced, pursuing creative and independent projects and balancing that with your work? And then was wondering also when you decided that you needed an agent to be an additional advocate for you in that process?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:48:18):
So I got an agent because it was actually kind of by happenstance. There was an agent that I met when I was in Orlando at the Orlando Sentinel. He actually reached out to me, he read one of my columns. He was like, you’re going to be a star. He’s like, I’m telling you now you’re going to wind up at ESPN. He literally told me this and I was like, yeah, yeah, you funny, whatever. But he had a couple clients that I wanted to talk to for some work I was doing for the newspaper, and he and I developed a relationship outside that and he was like, listen, this is how I know you’re going to wind up at ES esp. And he’s like, I have a really good friend who’s an executive at ESPN and think, I think you guys should meet because I think there’s some synergy there.
(00:49:04):
I think you guys will hit it off and I think you could be there. And it’s true. He set up, one of his good friends was an executive at ESPN who oversaw ESPN, the magazine and also their original programming. And he and I met for dinner. And at the time there was a guy you guys might be familiar with named Skip Bayless who was transitioning out of writing and moving completely to television. He didn’t want to write anymore. And so they needed a general sports columnist for espn.com. And yeah, I hit it off with the executive who’s still a good friend of mine and got the interview, got the job, and so it kind of happened by accident. I got one. But then once I got to ESPN, everybody had an agent. I was like, oh, okay, I see how this works. And me and that agent I wound up, every agent knows that they’re hired to be fired, they just are.
(00:50:02):
And so I think in the TV game, it is pretty necessary just because one, the first agent I had, we wound up parting ways after my first contract because I felt like he was really good at getting me in ESPN. But when it came to broader relationships across ESPN, I didn’t think he had those as strong as strongly as I needed and industry relationships, right? Because it wasn’t, having an agent is partly about them negotiating your salary, but also about them putting you in a position to succeed elsewhere and to have those relationships so you can have other conversations. So I left him for a agent that was part of his own agency, that was part of a pretty big agency that a lot of people at ESPN were represented by. And that was great. That worked out. And then I left him because somebody gave me this advice, I cannot remember again who it was, I need to start writing down who gives me these great advice.
(00:51:06):
But they were like, when you’re deciding on an agent, you should look at their client list to see how many people are in your same lane. Because basically what happened is this agent also had represented Stephen A. Smith, and at the time they were looking for somebody to play opposite of Skip and be his full-time co-host on First Take. And I had done First Take a thousand times by then, and Skip had even told me he vouched me to get the job. There was some other people there considering I knew, I assumed that Stephen A was a person, but I didn’t know this necessarily. And it kind of be after Stephen A got the job, which was fine. It became clear that that agent was doing more to push him than me because we were in the same lane. Former newspaper person transitioned to tv, same lane.
(00:52:02):
And I didn’t like that. And I also felt like he wasn’t as aggressive in getting me my money because he had these long relationships with the executives. And knowing how things worked in the industry is like there are some agents at some agencies, if they have a client that makes them a lot of money, they will sacrifice you. Meaning like, oh, if you give me give such and such 10 million a year and then I’ll make sure when her deal comes up, it will only stay at this level. They do that. And I had a feeling this agent was doing that, and so I was like, oh, I got to fire him. And so I left them and went to CAA, which was great because CAA, they will definitely get you your bread. They do not play about that. So I just felt like when you’re talking about these really gigantic numbers and then you want to be put in line with other opportunities and things like that is why an agent to me was helpful. You had another question? I forgot what it
Tamia Fowlkes/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (00:53:03):
Was. Yeah, it was just how did you decide how to balance your independent project? I feel like a lot of young reporters run into situations now where we’re told simultaneously to be on social media and to build a brand, but it’s also monitor what you say and don’t share too much of your opinion. It’s hard to sometimes express yourself or find your voice in that. I’m wondering how you, that conversation. So
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:53:27):
Luckily for me, I’m not going to lie, A big leverage point was that by the time social media really became a thing, I already had enough leverage to where I can say what I wanted to say. So generally, I mean obviously I left ESPN for a reason. So clearly that doesn’t work all the time. And ESPN when Twitter started to really blow up, they didn’t have a social media policy at all, but you kind of knew without being told how to navigate that. But what you could see is that there’s a lot of benefit in you being able to build your own audience. So when you talk about where the industry is going, a lot of my friends have started really drilling down and developing their own audience. That means that if you leave Milwaukee will the people that read you still follow you. So you want that to be the case.
(00:54:25):
So look at, say Don Lemon. Don Lemon had a huge following at CNN, but Don Lemon is now on YouTube. And the reason Don Lemon is on YouTube is because, and why he hasn’t, this doesn’t mean he’ll never work for another network, but there’s really no reason for him to, so he has like 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. You can monetize YouTube. It has the best monetization of literally any of the platforms. And so now he’s totally drilled in to social and even through your reporting, even while without giving your opinion, you could still build a brand and a following on social. And I advise you do that because other friends of mine are now on Substack. So while the business is contracting in some way, the need for information is not, and good or bad, people do want to know the personalities behind the people delivering the news. And so what I would say is that I think you need to look for ways to build your audience that is independent of the place that you work for. Because unfortunately, whether it be Milwaukee, whether it be any place, we’re all very vulnerable to being at the mercy of these places, which is why you have to do that. And I don’t know what Milwaukee’s rules are in terms of allowing you to do other things independently on own, but let’s just say maybe in an entirely different subject matter, you developed your own.
(00:56:00):
I mean, because again, that’s sort of where the business is moving, where people are taking their audiences with them. Like Joanne Reed, who’s a really good friend of mine, she has her own substack and she’s killing it on there. And finding ways to sort of side monetize those creative passions of yours, I think is, it is frankly a requirement in this environment.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:56:29):
We could talk all day. Jamel, I think we do have one more before we let you go. If you could hang out of a few extra minutes. Alicia, did you still want to ask a question?
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (00:56:39):
Oh, I did, but I thought we were up for time. I have a few minutes. Yes, get it in there. I’ll keep it tight. Okay. Hi there, I’m Elisha Brown. I’m a reproductive rights today newsletter author at States Newsroom. Thanks so much for speaking with us today, Jamel. I know you talked about this a little bit in your answers to my colleagues, but in late 2017, you face an onslaught of attacks and I’m sure threats for your tweets about President Trump and his ties of white supremacy. ESPN didn’t support you and suspended you for two weeks. So what lessons did you learn about knowing your worth from that incident that you took with you to your next FEWS of your career?
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (00:57:24):
And great question. Thank you for asking. The biggest thing I learned is that these relationships are conditional and conditional and transactional that you have at the places that you work. And while it was something I definitely knew before then I’d been at ESPN at that point 12 years, so had built a lot of relationships at ESPN. It’s the longest job I’ve ever had, and that allowed me to relax into forget, this is a transactional relationship. And I was reminded when the president had attacked me and ESPN had nothing to say and understand that the print journalism mentality that I grew up on was you never let City Hall attack your reporters. That was a thing. That’s how it used to go. You know what? It’s kind of like a family member. I can talk about Auntie, you can’t talk about Auntie. That was generally how it was. And when that didn’t happen, it was like, oh, oh, listen. Oh, okay, got it. This is business. And so it definitely taught me the downside of getting complacent.
(00:58:43):
It also helped me to understand as well about the vulnerability that you are in these spaces is that no matter how long you’ve been there or who the company is, is like you are always a step away from being up out of there and proceed accordingly. That doesn’t mean proceed with fear. What it does mean is that if you have more of a transactional approach to what you’re doing, you will maintain and always have at the forefront what you’re actually worth. I also learned that something else that’s valuable is better to leave early than late. And I knew when that happened, I was like, I’m leaving on my terms. And I knew that they wouldn’t fire me necessarily because frankly, that would’ve brought them a level of heat, a level of smoke they did not want just from the public and how bad that would look for them.
(00:59:50):
But I used that to my advantage to get off SportsCenter. I had my contract was kind of like an athlete that has a no trade clause. So I was contracted only to do SportsCenter and they couldn’t move me to another show. But at the same time, I wasn’t enjoying being on SportsCenter. It is a legacy job and I get it. A lot of people dream about being on Sports Center. It was not the job for me. It was probably the worst job I had at ESPN. We had a lot of creative infighting that was happening behind the scenes. And after the Trump thing happened, they were essentially trying to strip our show that anything that might be construed as black, they just were like, we are trying to make Sports Center great again. We used to joke about that all the time.
(01:00:44):
So yeah, that going through all of that, I was like, this job is not fun. It was like the first time in 12 years, I actually did not going to work. So I said, okay, they probably don’t want me on and I don’t want to be on SportsCenter. So I went to them and I asked to be off the show and they were just like, well, what do you want to do? And I told them I wanted to a go back to writing. I wanted to work for The Undefeated, which is now landscape. I wanted to be back in more of a journalistic environment and also wanted to get out of Bristol. I was a good Lord. I did not want to be in Bristol, Connecticut anymore. So I wanted to get out of Bristol. I wanted to write and I wanted to just kind of do float around doing different shows with producer groups that I personally liked as opposed to dealing with the sports center people.
(01:01:31):
And their first reaction was like, well, we don’t usually pay people what we’re paying you to do that people getting paid what you get paid have to be on TV every day. And I was like, but I was like, but I was honest with the person who was in charge at the time, and I was just like, oh, I know that, but I know and y’all won’t say it. Y’all don’t want me on Sports Center because I bring in too much attention, the kind of attention don’t really want to deal with. And he was like, I’ll get back to you in a couple days bet. And he was like, yeah, if you’re willing to amend your contract to waive the fact that you only are contracted to do SportsCenter, you can leave. And I was like, great. Absolutely. And so knowing that I was able to move to Washington, dc thank God I was a major city again, oh my God. I was like, Ooh, and black people, I get to see black people all the time even better.
(01:02:28):
So being able to move, but I also knew that if they were willing to do that, then my days, even though at that point I had three years left on my contract, I could have sat in there and just collected a check, but I was like, I’m going to go while I still have leverage. And while not just leverage at ESPN, but leveraging the marketplace. And there was a lot of people calling and wanting to wondering about my future, that kind of stuff. And so I was like, all right, so I’m going to use again, the same principle. It’s like, y’all actually don’t want me at this network, but y’all fire me and you don’t want, the fact is you’re tired of right wing magazines and news outlets and Fox News banging the drum about me every day. Y’all tired of it. ESPN is being put in a politically weird place that they have never been just based off my presence.
(01:03:23):
So I used that to my advantage and my agent went to him and well actually, I told them first before my agent started negotiating, I was like, I think our relationship has come to an end. I was like, I think it’s probably in the best interest of both of us that I leave. And they agreed. And now usually what happens is that one with three years left to go on your contract, that’s a lot of time. But I was going to leave with my money. And typically if you don’t leave with the leverage, they would try to get a buyout, get you to agree to a buyout for pennies on the dollar, not me. And especially not when I felt like I held the leverage. So I got 90% of what I was owed left on those three years.
(01:04:09):
So, so I just kind of used what they wanted against them essentially. And after that, I was able to transition and do, as I joke, I traded one job for 50 jobs, so 50 jobs now I traded that all in, but I also got autonomy. I got married a year later. And so it was like all these things that I wasn’t able to do fully build a life, I was finally able to do that. I mean, I live in LA the first time in my career I actually pit where I wanted to live. So me and my husband, we were just dating then and we were in a long distance relationship. We were like, Hey, we knew at some point we wanted to live in the same city and live together. So we literally picked LA because it was the best for us both professionally and personally. And that is something that never would’ve happened had I rolled out them three years at ESPN.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:05:06):
Wow, what a powerful story. You have put us all on Game Jamal, and once again, it’s always a pleasure and I’m always so proud to say that I know you and knew you win and to watch your career trajectory has been wonderful. So thank you so much for joining the widening the Pipeline family today, and we’ll have you back again as soon as you have free time on your schedule.
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (01:05:37):
Well, anytime and it is you all that are on this call is like, I can’t tell you how invaluable it is to know someone like Rachel who was constantly putting me up on game throughout my career. So I hope that you all take advantage because as someone who has had to pivot and transition as you have Rachel and really understands the ins and outs in this business, this is an invaluable resource for you all to have. So I hope you all take advantage of it and anytime it’s always a yes when it comes to you, Rachel,
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:06:17):
Take care. We’ll be in touch with you.
Jemele Hill/Author & Entrepreneur (01:06:19):
Okay, take care. Bye-bye.
