Newhouse alumni discuss experiences with race in media

As part of Newhouse’s two-day Race and the Media Symposium, dozens of students and faculty members gathered in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium Wednesday morning to hear five Newhouse alumni speak about how they’re navigating careers in the media industry as people of color.

Brooke Lewis

Brooke Lewis, a reporter at The Houston Chronicle, discussed how as an intern she covered the story of Joseph Dowell, a former inmate at Harris County Jail. He was beginning to transform his life upon after his release, she said, when his body was found in 2017 in flooding wreckage caused by Hurricane Harvey.

“I watched this man’s life transform, and then I watched it get taken in an instant,” Lewis said. “I realized then how powerful journalism is. We have the opportunity to tell someone’s life story and make people get to know their pain and their joy.”

Lewis said only a little over two percent of black women are working journalists, and that being a black journalist comes with many difficulties. She also said that women of color represent a little less than eight percent of employees in U.S. print newsrooms.

“For me, it can feel lonely…isolating at times,” she said. “But I realize I can’t let those feelings overtake me. It can be easy to be bitter, or even frustrated at the lack of diversity in the newsroom, but I realized instead of being bitter, the tiny changes of progress can start with me.”

Lewis also discussed a story she wrote about the discovery of 95 African American remains in Sugar Land, Texas. She reported on how the convict-leasing system was another form of slavery and often thought of how some of her own ancestors might be buried in Sugar Land.

“I realized that they had paved their way for me to get to the place I am,” Lewis said. “I had a privilege that they didn’t get to have, and that is to be able to tell peoples’ stories. I realized that this career path is actually bigger than me.”

“If you don’t forget that your voice matters, if you don’t let the frustration overtake you, if you rely on your support system — then you’ll make it in this industry. You will.”

Elliot Williams

Elliot Williams is an assistant editor at the Washingtonian Magazine and said he was one of only two black interns at the magazine when he began in 2017. When he was hired full-time, he was one of two black editorial staffers in the magazine’s 50-year history.

“I looked up in editorial meetings and saw almost no one that looked like me,” he said.

“The magazine hired black librarians, marketing and event staffers, but when it came to putting words into the pages of the magazine, I was in uncharted territory,” Williams said.

He described how the magazine’s relationships with Washington D.C.’s 47 percent of black residents is complicated. He noted that the magazine has a long way to go before it can represent all Washingtonians, not just the elite.

When he moved to D.C., Williams lived in a historically black neighborhood and said when he told his black neighbors where he worked, the mood in their exchange instantly changed.

“I know who that magazine is for, and I know it’s not for me,” one neighbor told him.

Williams said this dialogue kept him up at night; he didn’t move to D.C. to become the “Jackie Robinson of journalism,” he said, he simply wanted to write about a really interesting city and get clips.

He described FOMU – the fear of messing up. He described being afraid that he would speak too honestly and “be cast as a brash, unyielding black man” or that he would not be honest enough and be forgotten; he would write too many stories about black Washingtonians and be boxed in as “that black writer;” he would step on too many toes.

“All of these fears built up in my system, and for months my work didn’t reflect my full potential,” he said. “I made sure the stories I pitched were safe. Eventually, I decided I was spending too much time being worried about what others thought of me and not enough time doing what I came to D.C. to do in the first place, which was to write.”

The day after this realization, he walked into his editor’s office and pitched the first story he was proud of — a story about his position as a young black newcomer in a historically black neighborhood and how that allowed him see things from a fresh new vantage point.

He continued on to write about black musicians, athletes, business owners, restauranteurs and more.

“Each one, if only or the person I wrote about, showed a side of Washington that had rarely been shown to them in the pages of Washingtonian,” Williams said. “The whole time I was worried about messing up, I didn’t realize that by being different I brought something new — a fresh perspective to a place that really needed it.”

“Do not let your fears reduce you to something smaller than you can become,” he said.

Jourdan Bennett-Begaye

Jourdan Bennett-Begaye is a reporter and producer at Indian Country Today and began her talk apologizing that she was a little “shaken up” because of an incident that had happened the day before.

Bennett-Begaye said while she was walking near Marshall Street to buy some t-shirts, someone walked by her and referred to her as “Pocahontas.”

“I was a little bit shaken up, and I couldn’t believe that it is 2019 and slurs like that are being called,” she said. “It’s very ironic being at a race and media symposium.”

She went on to talk about how she’s been in her position at Indian Country Today for about seven months, and she gets the chance to wake up every day and write about native people.

“It’s an absolute dream,” she said.

After graduating from Newhouse in 2016, Bennett-Begaye taught high school students journalism, theatre production and drama. She credits her love of storytelling to her being a good teacher in those fields. During her teaching tenure, she realized that she wanted to become a reporter, and moved to Seattle shortly after that.

She recalled a time when she was in a newsroom with only older, white male editors, and prepared 13 story pitches including multimedia elements and timelines about the Dakota Access Pipeline. The first two editors said no to the story, and the third offered only a maybe. She kept pushing the story, even though the editors told her it wasn’t for their readers.

Bennett-Begaye emailed her editors and told them she was going to be gone for a certain number of days, and went to North Dakota to report on the Standing Rock protests. Eventually, when she came back with videos of the protests, the editors let her continue with the story.

“It took that experience to finally trust myself, and I stood taller as an indigenous person and as a Navajo woman because I knew that I wasn’t going to be part of mainstream views or work for a mainstream outlet,” she said.

Bennett-Begaye added that Native American women only represent 0.2 percent of journalists in newsrooms across the United States.

“We want to be respected and interviewed about our stories, and we want to show up in the news as human beings and not as 1900s caricatures that only show up in history books in schools across this country,” she said.

She said she chose to work at Indian Country Today for many reasons, but the most important was because as a native run media outlet, everyone understands how important culture, kinship, family and ceremony are. Bennett-Begaye said growing up, she was ashamed of who she was, but her grandmother helped her be proud of her heritage and that their stories are important and worth telling.

“I want to help native people tell their stories the right way,” she said. “If you see any media outlets not telling the stories you think should be told, then you should go out and seek those outlets.”