This interview has been edited for clarity.
I chose to minor in journalism at Stony Brook University to essentially boost up my resume for Law School. I was hoping to go to law school and I also picked up a minor in women and gender studies. So I was just doing journalism combined with gender studies ad political science which is what I was doing for my bachelors. It was a really cool combination. Then, while I was minoring in journalism, one of my classes had an assignment to write for an online blog.
At the time, I wasn’t really writing for anything outside of what I was doing for school. So I looked into places I could write for. That’s when I found brown girl. I was just so lucky that I ended up finding it on Facebook and I was so intrigued by it. It was really excited that something like that existed. I reached out to the founder Aditi Mehtha and told her right away that I was so interested and so intrigued and this is really cool that I’d never seen anything like this. And I really feel like I could see myself do it. That’s kind of how my journey started at Brown Girl
I know for a fact I need to venture out and bring whatever I’ve learned from the South Asian world and be that voice and that representation in a non-South Asian platform.
I think it’s definitely to stay on trend with the times. Even if Instagram decided to shut down Thursday, be ready for the next thing Friday morning. And that is definitely a challenge in the age that we’re in and that goes with news to not just social media. I know that they both go hand in hand right now. But, with news if you’re working on a big news story and xyz happens with Trump, you got to be ready to drop everything and do xyz. So, yeah really for me it’s trying to keep up with the times.
I’m actually in that big challenge phase right now. That challenge phase is essentially, I quit my fulltime job last September so I could pursue Brown Girl full time because no one pursued it full time before. This is the first time that someone has attempted to do it. I had two partners in the company. I essentially acquired their equities so I could transition to CEO and operate the company on a full time basis because my partners weren’t going to go full time. They wanted to continue running Brown Girl as a side hustle. But I see that there’s a lot of potential here and it could turn into a sustainable business. Right now we are on the path to becoming sustainable.
I do think that more news organizations are definitely headed on that path and I think many big media houses are creating nice hubs inside their portals so that minority voices could be written about. But at the same time, I think that it’s not taken as a number one priority. Maybe it’s a number two or three priority.
While I do believe and I know it is becoming more prevalent for higher-ups to hire more minority voices and for them to publish more minority voices, it’s just not at the top of their list. And we just need to continue doing our part to make it a priority for them. So, the only way we can do it is by forming our own voices so they end up coming to us.
Her Campus is a good example we recently partnered with them. They’re really excited because we get to offer the minority voices they may not have. We’ve worked with Huffington Post many times in the past because of that same reason. And just like that we’re building partnerships with other portals as well because we’re filling in that voice that they may not have in house.
The second way to do it is to really hone in on that journalism degree and go out there and write for non-south Asian media. I’ve been doing South Asian media even before Brown Girl. I was at Z-TV for four years. I did have a few years stint at a local American newspaper the Queens Tribune. But I haven’t done enough non-South Asian media. For me it’s always just been exciting and I’m always so happy to see so many my Brown Girl writers go on to become writers and editors like Yahoo, Huffington Post, Refinery and Bustle. My girls are on those teams. It’s pretty exciting.
In this very given moment people just want to document and write about their South Asian experiences, their culture and the hybrid of the two — having a hyphenated identity. I don’t necessarily think we’re pigeonholing ourselves. I think it's important that we do write and express everything in this moment so that the next generation can look at it and be like cool we did it we did it, we've accomplished it, we've kind of crossed those barrier we're no longer that minority. now we are fully embraced into mainstream media whether it's in entertainment politics so on and so forth. And then can we focus on everything else.
I feel like there is a large chunk of us who are just focused on the South Asian narrative and I'm ok with that because it's never happened before.
Ya for sure. I think the mere fact that so many young South Asians are so intrigued and interested and they want to be a part of Brown Girl's journey and they want to partner with us they want to collaborate with us they want to do business with us and they really consider it the platform to come to. I think that's very evident when so many non south asian news sources link to us as sources in their stories. That's happened across the board. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal to NPR. I think that's pretty cool.
The first piece of advice is to just hone in on your skills and that means read as much as content as you can. There's varying content right now and it's a little hard to get a grasp of. So there's the traditional AP style and writing and there's the new relatable writing. Really being about to hone in on both voices right now it is a challenge. When I first started in media I knew AP inside and out and my headlines and ledes were so prim and proper.
Now I feel like as a writer and an editor I have to train myself to be more fun and more relatable and my headlines have to be less newsy. So I think that is a challenge for anyone who is entering the field. Number two is, if you have the ability to learn video editing early on you definitely should. That's something I don't have and it's something that I want to do more of. If you have the ability to learn video production in school definitely do it. The third thing, is to just be open to all different forms of media and don't go to school thinking you're only going to do print or only online. Be open to podcasts and documentaries or any avenue that helps you document your story. Be open to all different forms of capturing a story.