This interview has been edited for clarity.
It means finding audiences for the Times magazine. We work predominantly with our print product. But we also have a very robust presence online. So my job was to sort of balance the in between. It's asking questions like: How is that going to look online? It's going to be easy to read? Is there going to be a push notification? What are the tweets going to look like?
So basically I sort of play a role in the everyday online work of the The Times Magazine in every stage possible, but primarily with the end goal to make content discoverable for The Times Magazine readers who are already familiar with it or for new people to discover what the Times magazine is.
I became interested in magazines and journalism at a very late stage in my life. The Internet played a huge role for me to access and discover it. It opened up this whole new world of writing and discovery for me. So now my job is to think of someone who might have an interest and but doesn't necessarily have a direct pipeline.
How do I make sure that it that a piece of writing that my publication has produced, how do I get it in practice and what are the tools available at my hand in order to make that happen? How can I use institutional resources to make sure someone who's interested in this is able to actually find it? So I guess I'm always thinking that if one person is interested in something that means at least 10 more people are because we're not as unique as we think we are. So that's basically how I approach my job.
That plays into my day-to-day in every way possible. I pay attention to the phrasing of things and making sure we’re not just writing for an American audience.
Your standard casual American suburban reader should not always be the default person that you are writing for.
It is not our job. We sort of, we are not explainers we are, it's not the job of a magazine or a writer to underline every singular truth so that it is easily digestible. Sometimes the matters we write about are of great complexity that you have to just have to assume that your readers are smart enough to at least have some degree of intellectual engagement.
Pretty badly, I would say. I've worked in a place where diversity was almost considered a bad word. Like we were sold really hard into the myths of meritocracy. If you are here, it's because this place considers you worthy enough to be here. But I have never felt othered as I did working in a place like that. And I don't think I took it really well.
But I think the daily minor indignities that people don't even notice sort of take a tole on you. So by the end of it, I was completely burned out in a way that I did not have any explanation for. I've always taken to heavy workloads and being a 24/7 newsperson really well.
Later, I realized it's because of the sheer invisibility of the work that I'm doing.
In order to prove competence in something, there are other parts of yourself that you have to repress. I have been guilty of this. So when people say something very casually racist and I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to file that away in some corner of my mind, and not react to it right now. So I've got things like that. I'm trying to not be like that, but I think it's a process of unlearning that everyone has to go through.
I don't think I'm optimistic. I see all these aggressive pushes for diversity being made but I also ended up thinking that sometimes it's for companies and for people to say "Oh we are doing it.". I will be optimistic when I see it as actual results, when I see people of color, when I see black women being promoted and leading departments.
Have a good support system of people whose instincts and whose judgment you trust and who you know care about you. Because I think the most important thing in my life at this point has been that like, I have people that I can turn to, not just professionally.
It's an unfair game. The game is rigged from even before we enter it. So when you get to a point where you have accumulated certain wins for yourself, make sure you use that to elevate someone else. And this sounds very sort patronizing, but really I would not be here if not for the extreme generosity of people who have taken chances on me.