Larry Graham Transcript: May 5, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00):
The second session of the May, 2025 widening virtual training will offer some insight and advice for deciding when it’s time to dig in our heels or start applying elsewhere. Some cases, choosing to stay and sort of crack the code on challenging job scenario can yield significant benefits, but there are times when the choice to close a chapter and start fresh elsewhere could be the best decision you’ll ever make. Help us get a handle on that. We’ll hear from Larry Graham. He’s the founder and executive director of the Diversity Pledge Institute, an organization that helps media companies improve the recruitment and retention of diverse journalists. Larry spent the majority of his career leading sports journalists and newsrooms around the country, including espn.com, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Kansas City Star, to name a few. He also served as Deputy director of Local News Transformation at the American Press Institute, where he built the Table Stakes website. You can read Larry’s full bio on our website@nationalpress.org. Larry, thank you so much for joining the Widening the Pipeline family.
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (01:26):
Hey, thanks for having me again, Rachel.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:29):
So in our prep conversation, we came to the decision that this session would be pretty much summed up, should I stay or should I go? Really amplifying those moments in which we have to go sort of inward to decide whether we’re in a good situation or whether we need to move on. So I thought I would start by asking you to think of a time when you had to make that kind of a decision whether or not a job or a situation that you were in was going to benefit you or whether you would get more benefit by leaving. Can you walk us through that time in your career? In your
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (02:12):
Career? Yeah, and I think most of us face that repeatedly with each new role we take, and we’ve been there X amount of months or years, and you’re wondering, Hey, is this the time where I find something new? Or do I stick around and hope that maybe it’s things get better or hope that maybe I get this raise that I’ve been eyeing, whatever the case may be. And for me, especially early career, that inward reflection was financial. I quickly got fed up with the idea of a two or 3% raise each year. So historically, I’d give an employer a chance to give me a real raise, and then if they passed, then it was time for me to go made it that simple. So for me, it was more a financial decision and me deciding, Hey, I know my value, I know my worth, and I know I’m worth more than a 2% annual raise, so I’m out. But for others, it’s, especially now with all the digital nonprofits that are popping up, that decision becomes a lot more complicated because more people, more mission, vision, values, alignment in making their job decisions, but it still comes down to, Hey, is this a financial move for me, or is this a situation where I just need to get out of this toxicity?
Rachel Jones/NPF (04:01):
Well, that’s what I want you to, if you can recall something, I’m putting you on the spot here.
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (04:05):
Yeah.
Rachel Jones/NPF (04:05):
Was there a time when the relationship, the interpersonal day-to-day situation with an editor or a manager was really, really difficult? And speaking for myself, I can think of one scenario where I knew I was growing, I knew I was getting better as a journalist, but interpersonally, it was torture. So I just wondered if you could think of a situation where you had to sort of navigate that.
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (04:33):
Yeah, and so for me, it was a situation where I was an editor in the newsroom and I felt like I kind of could see the writing on the wall about where the organization was going and my new status within that organization. And so I ended up, I try to tell folks, always be closing. So always making sure that hopefully your name is front of mind with potential employers leaning into your network so that when you reach that moment of, Hey, do I need to stay or go leavings easy, as opposed to, Hey, you have to start a process, a hiring or recruitment process from scratch. That typically will take anywhere from six to 12 months since that’s about the average amount of time it takes for an organization to make a hire. And so if you’re always closing, if you’re always networking, making sure your name’s out there, hopefully when you reach that point where it’s time to leave, you can knock that out in three months.
(05:51):
For me, the things that, and I’ll say I chose poorly in this situation mainly because I was being paid really, really well, and I really enjoyed that lifestyle. And so again, earlier in my career, financial implications won out because yeah, I really just wanted to be rich and I wanted to be able to keep doing all these fun vacations I was doing and things like that. But when I did realize that moment was upon me, I was started quietly interviewing, I started having conversations with other potential hiring managers, and in the end when that decision, I would say it was taken out of my hands, but there’s still ways that you can and navigate that. So you can regain control of the situation through, let’s call it a severance negotiation, since most journalists, most people don’t even know you can negotiate your severance in the first place. So then it becomes a severance negotiation, and hopefully then you gain a little bit more control of the situation and your future as opposed to, Hey, you’re just stuck in a situation taking what someone gives you.
Rachel Jones/NPF (07:21):
One of the things that I’ve heard repeatedly over the past few years from fellows is a sort of sense of, my editor wants the best for me, or they’re a really good person, but they’re not hearing what I’m saying in terms of what I need and what I want, and my ideas are not being valued, et cetera. So what advice would you give to journalist who is trying to probably prioritize the editor’s feelings or their support over what they know about themselves and they know about their career trajectory and what they need?
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (08:04):
Well, the way I put it is we’ve all had a bad meal at some point in our lives, or a bad entree. Let’s say it’s that, let’s call it a beet sandwich. I hate beets. I can’t imagine a beets sandwich that just sounds gross. And so let’s put a bunch of beets in between two pieces of bread with some sauerkraut, some mayonnaises, and then someone serves that to you. All right, you’ve just gotten this sandwich. You took your first bite and it tastes as bad as it sounds. Why would you take another bite and then another bite, and then another bite after that? Do you finish that sandwich, that taste absolutely dreadful? I mean, I don’t know about y’all, but no, that’s a hard pass. I look at that sandwich in the first place, and I’m not going to touch it if I feel overly obligated. Sometimes I might nibble an in, Hey, this isn’t for me. But for some reason, in these types of situations where we’re feeling marginalized, we’re feeling downgraded, we go for a second bite, a third bite, we’ve eaten half that sandwich. Next thing you know, most of the sandwich is gone. That doesn’t make any sense to me. So in those situations where you’re not feeling heard, you really have just a couple of options to speak up, speak loudly, do it repeatedly.
(09:56):
I also recommend reaching out to your inner advisory council, but then it’s also to move on, put down the damn sandwich because life’s too short to just go through it eating a beet sandwich 90% of the day.
Rachel Jones/NPF (10:16):
I want you to tell us a little bit about the founding of the Diversity Pledge Institute, how you made the shift from being in a newsroom to creating this organization.
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (10:29):
So for me, and so I guess this is part of the entrepreneurial journey, entrepreneurial pitch that I’ll share, but for me, it was really more of no choice at all. And for one, I was not in the healthiest work environment where I consistently felt as though not felt, because that implies it was just an emotion where I was consistently told my opinion didn’t matter, that my voice didn’t matter. My experience is that were unlike anyone else’s involved. They didn’t matter. And so I decided to step away from that situation because again, beat sandwich. And so I started the Diversity Pledge Institute, and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is if you’re going to be a founder of anything to kind of figure out how you can go all in. And so for me, in creating this organization, it was either all or nothing, quit my job, what I just had my daughter two months earlier.
(11:56):
So I quit my job, lose my insurance, and I had two options was don’t pay the mortgage, take care of the family, or make sure this new thing that I was building succeeded. When faced with those options, it’s, it’s crazy how resilient you can become and how innovative you could become. And so DPI, now, everything we do kind of falls into two buckets of, we do executive search and recruiting for newsrooms, looking to identify diverse, qualified, vetted candidates when they have openings. But then the other portion is we provide journalists with support, teaching them things like how to manage up, how to navigate white spaces, how to negotiate those salaries and severances when they’re in these tricky situations. A friend of mine, she likes to say, we provide journalists with all the things journalism.
Rachel Jones/NPF (12:59):
Wow, that’s powerful. Can you think of a couple of examples of individuals you’ve worked with over the past few years and help them to make a pivot?
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (13:13):
Yeah, hopefully, I’m not putting anybody on throwing all their business out here in this space, but friend of mine, Gary Wick, who’s now the managing editor at Signal Akron, and he’s in his, it’s a upper management role. He’s transitioned to the digital nonprofit space. Another friend of mine, Daphne De Red at the Marshall Project, who’s an investigative reporter, and Katie Moore, who’s now at the Marshall Project. And so I use the word friend also because I say we do executive search and recruiting, but I’ve never really considered myself in that space and all the people that I end up helping and support, we do become friends. It has to be a relationship. It can’t be a transaction. I don’t see how you can truly, truly create community in journalism if it’s always a transactional relationship. I stress the importance to everybody that I’m trying to prioritize, prioritize community over profit. So even when we work with a lot of newsrooms, if I know someone that’s looking for a good role and I know a good editor to me, I’m more of a matchmaker. I try to put those two people in the room and hope that that ends up becoming something that leads to an employment and a prosperous working professional relationship ship.
Rachel Jones/NPF (15:10):
I was thinking earlier this morning, I know certainly when I started out in 1986, it was very common to hear managers say, we just can’t find black and brown people to do these jobs. We’d love to have a black investigative reporter, but we can’t find anybody. And I wonder, from your perch, are you still hearing that kind of sentiment?
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (15:36):
Yeah, but I would also say we’re in a moment where IDEI, commitments are in journalism especially, are kind of thrown by the wayside. All right? We’re in a moment where we get a better glimpse of how organizations actually feel about us as people of color. And that’s not based on what they’re saying, but based on what they’re not saying in this moment, we get a better idea based on the about pages, our team pages. If you go to some of these company websites and you don’t see anybody that looks like you, that’s, to me, that’s a mirror into the organization as a whole and something that should not be ignored. All right. And so yeah, there’s still groups though that are saying that some are taking steps to fix that, and then others are taking performative steps to look like they’re fixing it. But again, it is less about what a lot of organizations are saying and more about what their actions indicate who they are.
Rachel Jones/NPF (16:58):
Lemme ask you about moving from a legacy newsroom to a nonprofit space, and obviously many of the people you mentioned are in leadership roles in the jobs that you’re placing them in. But for an early career journalist like widening fellows, are there some risks to doing that? What would the benefits be? Give us sort of a sense of what that might look like.
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (17:27):
Yeah, so DPI, we work with a lot, I would even say primarily nonprofits right now. That was not originally the case as I was figuring out a business model, but also how to ensure that I’m not sending good to bad places. I ended up having to observe where we were sending people and then pivot to make sure that I would feel comfortable joining some of these organizations that I’m helping place people in. And so when it comes to a shift possibly to a nonprofit space, for starters, I think they’re great. A lot of times with that mission and mission, vision, values, you get a good sense of who they are, who they’re providing coverage for, why they’re doing it, as well as, Hey, hopefully you are making sure that they’re financially stable. Traditionally, in my opinion, grant funded roles. I know a lot of people shy away from the idea of applying for a job with a grant funded position, but in this economy, a grant funded position that’s two years guaranteed, and they have the money for this position.
(19:08):
The grant is specifically for this position that’s job security in a very shaky job market if you ask me. And so I don’t see as much risk at joining a digital nonprofit newsroom as I think a lot of others might. And then it also puts you in a position where you’re not saying that you’ve been stuck in one space, it’s a different part of the same industry, but you’re not stuck in one space. You’re learning, Hey, what is a nonprofit? A lot of folks think that, hey, because it’s a nonprofit, they don’t make money. Alright, well, being a nonprofit is not a business model. It is a tax exemption. So they are still a business that ideally should be figuring out how to make money. And so I see less risk in a nonprofit, but like anything else, it depends on leadership. What is it? Financial acumen, business acumen, and the quality of the work and the communities they serve.
Rachel Jones/NPF (20:29):
One of the things I’m happiest about this year with this year’s widening class is that we have nine men. And so the issue of men of color at the tables in terms of legacy media or any organization is very important to me. And I want to ask you to offer some insight and guidance into, again, moving in these spaces, primarily white spaces, as a man, as a man of color, what advice would you give to our young fellows about prioritizing maybe their personal goals for leadership or whatever?
Larry Graham/Diversity Pledge Institute (21:14):
Yeah, it’s so hard to identify those goals. So earlier in your career, that part I definitely get, for me, it was more of, I remember an article came out where a columnist pointed out to a room full of kids that, hey, as a black male columnist at a daily newspaper, he felt, or the statistics showed that you have a better chance of making it in the NBA or NFL than being a black sports columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. And so by those numbers, he then broke down, Hey, number of black sports editors in the country, same story. And so for me, when I read that, I viewed that as a challenge, and that was kind of the start of my journey into becoming a newsroom leader, of becoming a sports editor and then moving into all of those different spaces. But getting to those spaces, that’s a real challenge.
(22:22):
And I know so often we’re talking to individual journalists and we stress, Hey, you want to go someplace where you can be your authentic self, be your whole self. But the reality of some of that is it usually matters less what as much as who’s in charge, it doesn’t matter who’s right in the situation, it matters who’s the boss. We forget that we’re employed. When we’re employed, we still answer to somebody and they can take that employment away from us at any moment. And a lot of times, especially when you’re a person of color, when they do take that job away, we don’t talk about it. We don’t share our stories. We have a whisper network that kind of works in letting us know, Hey, this is an absolutely toxic place to go. But most of us end up feeling isolated and alone when we’re in those situations. So for me, the message would be try to remember that being right is great, but I’ve had roles where I proved I was right a lot, but that didn’t matter since my boss, well, he was in charge and it didn’t matter that I was right. And I had someone else tell me that maybe a year or two ago, I was at a conference and he said, as long as you are smarter than your boss, you will always be fired.
(24:12):
That just hits. And I look back on some of the situations I was in where, hey, I’m bringing in new ideas. I’m actually transforming my team from a cost center in the newsroom to revenue generators. We were creating a team that was introducing things to marketing and advertising so that we weren’t just line on accounting spreadsheet that said newsroom not generating any revenue. And that still didn’t matter. It did matter that my boss once told me, I don’t know why it is, but I look at you and I just want to say no. Whenever you ask me something and I can’t figure that out. And I’m just like thinking in my head, that’s okay, I figured it out. I know what it is. You look at me and you just want to say no, but we’ll go with you. Can’t figure it out.
