5 takeaways:
➀ Leaving an imperfect newsroom isn’t always the best answer for journalists of color, NPR Managing Editor Terence Samuel told NPF’s Widening the Pipeline fellows. “My better advice is figuring out how to stay when you think this is your newsroom and people are trying to make it feel like it’s not. And that’s where you need your people. Because the truth is, jumping from place to place is often not the solution. If you can find the people who can help you grow, the people who can support you and the people who basically understand your dreams and ambitions, keep them close and use them well.”
➁ Search for ‘your people’ in the newsroom. Somewhere, in some newsroom, they exist, Samuel said “And you will have found the people who can teach you how to teach them, teach you how to lead, teach you how to serve at the end of the day whatever community it is that you’re interested in serving. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is just figuring out who it is that you are, what it is that is driving you to do this, what it is that makes you not just happy but whole if you’re doing it right.”
➂ Be prepared for change – and lack thereof. As a young court reporter for the Roanoke Times, Samuel got a jolt one day in the Bedford County, Virginia, courthouse. “I’m about to go into the men’s room, I don’t know how I missed it. On the door you could see scraped out ‘Colored.’ And I stopped and I go, ‘Oh my God, that’s why there are two bathrooms here.’ I’d never noticed. And you suddenly realized that things change, sometimes they change fast. Sometimes they don’t change at all….And obviously what’s been missing from the long history of journalism is that not every community got that same treatment, and we have to work hard to fix it.”
➃ Find opportunity in unwanted assignments. By the time Samuel made it to the Philadelphia Inquirer, all he wanted to do was tell great stories. His editors made him cover parades. “Puerto Rican Day Parade, Italian American Day Parade, St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I mean, every Sunday I was in some damn parade.” Then it hit him. “Here’s the thing about Sunday. There’s not a lot of news. If I take these parade stories seriously, they’re all on the front page. Monday morning, I’m a star…. It really was a chance for me to show people that I could write.”
➄ Truth gets you through. Samuel recounted covering a Ku Klux Klan rally in Bedford County Virginia. He’d spoken to a Klan member the day before to get background information. On the day of the event, he strode up to the group’s leader with his hand outstretched, a young Black man in a baseball cap and shorts, as the entire crowd braced for a crisis. It didn’t happen, said Samuel. “My story was about the failed Klan rally in Bedford County. They said they were going to be 200, they said they came here because there was a history of this kind of activity. I mean, the reason they were coming here is because they think you people are racist. So just know that everybody knows that. That there were more people protesting than actual Klan people, that they dragged out all this law enforcement that cost taxpayers a bunch of overtime and money, and it was, I don’t know, six inches and I was done.” And here’s what Samuel learned: “The thing that always gets you through is the truth. And the way that is key is, it’s true that they were pathetic, but the fact that they were pathetic was not a truth that was important to my particular story.”
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.
