This interview has been edited for clarity.
In high school I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living but I made a decision to take an elective. I had heard journalism was an easy elective and it was during the eighth period and the teacher would let you out early. I really never thought about being a journalist before but then I sort of got involved with the school newspaper which ended up taking up nights and weekends. That’s when I decided to major in journalism.
The work is fun and it doesn’t feel like work. That’s what I love about it. You never know what you’re going to end up doing. You get to meet people and you get talk to people you’d otherwise never talk to and you get to go places you’d never go. It’s not like a boring nine to five. That job would bore the hell out of me.
I’ve been there [L.A. Times] for a while it’ll be 20 years this December. A little bit over the last decade I’ve been covering politics so I’ve done the last two presidential campaigns, governors races, senate race, mayoral races.
I love travelling and I love going to places I’ve never been. Because of presidential campaigns, I’ve gotten to go to parts of the country that I never would’ve gone to other wise and meeting people I never would’ve met otherwise. When I covered my first presidential campaign I was super nervous, this was the 2017-2018, and my editor told me to think about it like an all-expense paid trip across the country. That’s what it was and it was really neat to think about it that way.
Sometimes, especially when I started out, walking up to a complete stranger, you know you have to have confidence to do that. That took a while to develop and it’s still sometimes hard. Especially when you are calling people during horrible tragedies Like when I helped cover the mass shooting in Vegas. So it’s not something I like, but I think I’ve gotten good at it and it’s something I value because people are willing to share their stories during the horrible moments. It does do a service to tell people about to who these people were and who their families were.
I’ve had a number of mentors who have been really impactful and helped define my career.
I’ve covered a number a different things, like the environment, development, congressional districts, school boards. They’ve all sort of helped cumulatively. I didn’t decide I wanted to cover politics, I just fell into it. All of these experiences along the way, before I covered politics, really helped me in terms of my political reporting.
I think there adverts to diversifying newsrooms. Which I think is good. Back in the day when newsrooms were pretty white and all males and you can’t represent the community you are covering if your newsrooms cover. It’s not like you have to be a person of color to cover a community of color. For example, Los Angeles is incredibly diverse. There’s a huge Latino population and there’s a huge population of so many different groups. So it’s useful to have a diverse workforce so you might hear stories that your counter parts may not worry about. Or we have a lot of Spanish speakers which is important so we can cover our Spanish speaking communities.
When we talk about diversity we talk about color we talk about gender but we don’t talk enough about economic diversity.
I think diversity is important. I think there have been different ways to try and diversify newsrooms and some of it has been successful and some of it hasn’t. You know just having one or two token people of color, that’s not particularly helpful. The program I came in through was actually a program to diversify newsrooms. It became pretty elite which is a good thing because it became a valuable program. But candidates who got in had done four or five internships or they came from upper middle class backgrounds and we all went to private four year universities. While we made the newsroom more diverse in terms of race but I don’t know that we made the newsroom more diverse in terms of economic background. That’s something we need to think about. Almost everyone who gets hired now have a four year college degree and lots of them have done tons of amazing internships. But we don’t have that many people who come from rural backgrounds or non-coastal places or conservative places. So, that’s an area I think newsrooms need to do a better job in.
It’s a challenge, because again, our program tried to have people from different backgrounds but they weren’t always successful as people who came from four year colleges with multiple internships. So, making it a point to look for candidate coming from various different backgrounds. And I think if you do hire them as interns or as staffers, providing the mentoring is important. You know not having a sink or swim environment, so they can compete.
I mean at our paper, a close friend of mine was just named the deputy managing editor and she’s and Asian-American woman. While our newspaper staff is diverse if you look at the leadership on the masthead, it typically is pretty white and pretty male. When you see people, like my friend Kimmy, elevated that is a good signal to people who work in the newsroom and to people in the community.