INTERVIEW – Nikole Hannah-Jones
Interviewee: Nikole Hannah-Jones Interviewer: Hannah McClellan Date: January 13, 2020
Location: New York City, New York Length: 52:43
START OF INTERVIEW
Hannah McClellan: This is Hannah McClellan introducing Nikole Hannah-Jones on January 13, 2020 at The New York Times in New York City. This interview is to focus on Nikole's journalistic career, particularly in regards to her coverage of race and her recent work and creation of The 1619 Project.
So to start off, like I said, I'm just going to start with some biographical questions. So if you could just start by sharing when and where you were born, and kind of what your childhood was like.
Nikole Hannah-Jones: I was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1976. I grew up in an interracial household – my mother is white, my father is Black – and I grew up on the Black side of town and I grew up mostly around my Black side of the family. Though I saw my grandparents – my white grandparents on my mom's side – a lot, but we didn't live around them. I had a very typical working-class childhood, I think. We went on family vacations, wherever we could drive to, and, yeah – that's kind of a general question, I'm not sure what you want me to say about my
childhood.
NHJ: My father's name is Milton Hannah, he passed away in 2007. My mother's name is Cheryl Hannah... and what she's like? What do you mean?
HM: Anything that you're willing to share – this is just a section to see how your early experiences have shaped you, to the point that you're willing to share.
NHJ: Okay. My mother is a very generous, kind person and very socially liberal. She raised us Catholic. We grew up in a social justice type Catholic church, in a social justice household. So from a young age, I think I definitely got my sense of morality and desire to fight for the "little man" from my mom. My father lived a pretty hard life and could be a very hard man, but believed in his own way he was preparing us for the world we were going into.
HM: Great, thanks for sharing. Kind of shifting to focus on your journalistic career – obviously you're a very well-known and respected journalist to many in the field. Could you kind of share where your interest in storytelling and journalism started?
NHJ: I get this question a lot, and I cannot remember when I became interested in journalism, largely because I can't remember a time I wasn't interested in journalism. I read newspapers with my dad from a really young age – my dad, he was not a super educated man but he was a voracious reader. He always subscribed to two newspapers. We always got our local paper and the state paper, and I'm sure there was a time I didn't read the newspaper but I don't remember a time not reading the newspaper. It was something my dad and I did together. I wrote and got published my first letter to the editor around fifth or sixth grade. I was subscribing to Times Magazine as a middle school student, so to me I've always been really interested in both the written word and also media and who gets to shape our narratives.
I think when I started thinking about journalism as a career would've been high school, when I joined my high school newspaper – I think that would've been 11th grade or 12th grade –
and wrote about Black kids like me. I went to a majority white high school. I was bussed – as were most of the Black kids – from the Black side of town into the white side of town to go to high school. At the time I joined my high school paper, I was either the only or one of two Black people on the staff of the paper. I started writing about kids like me, who were Black kids bussed into a school that we didn't feel we belonged in. I won my first journalism award from the Iowa High School Press Association for a column, or kind of reported feature, I did on what it was like to be a Black kid coming from a side of town where you face a lot of stereotypes about
criminality, violence, that sort of thing. I won an award for that, and I think really understood the importance of shaping your own narrative when you come from a marginalized community, and started to think I either wanted to pursue journalism or history as a degree.
HM: What was the name of the student newspaper?
NHJ: I think it was called The Spectator. Keep in mind I haven't been in high school in 25 years. But I think it was called The Spectator.
HM: I could be misremembering this, but the writing that you did, the columns, was there a specific name for the columns?
NHJ: So I had a column and I also wrote features. My column was called, "From the African Perspective." But I think what I won for was a feature and not a column, but I can't say for sure – my memory isn't exactly clear on it. But I did have a column.
HM: When and where did you attend college, and what did pursuing journalism look like throughout college?
NHJ: For undergraduate I went to the University of Notre Dame, I was there from 1994 to 1998. Notre Dame was actually the only school I applied to and Notre Dame did not have a journalism program at that time – they do now. So I majored in history and African American
studies. I can't say that I actually really pursued journalism in college – I didn't write for my college newspaper, didn't really do anything to pursue journalism. I studied history, and when I graduated, I took about a year and I just worked – tried to figure out if I wanted to keep going in history or become a journalist. I ultimately decided I wanted to be a journalist, so I applied to graduate school and went to the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2003 and got my masters in journalism and mass comm. from there.
HM: What, if any, did you learn about inclusivity and diversity in the news while you were in the master’s program at UNC?
NHJ: I learned that neither the master’s program nor most of the newsrooms that I was going into were very diverse. And varying degrees of inclusivity. So in my master’s program, I was one of one other Black student. I understand it's about the same now. And I think there were maybe four to five Black students in the graduate program, including the PhD and master’s program. When I went into newsrooms, it was often very similar – there was a handful. Now, I will say, when I first when in newsrooms, which would've been interning about 2002 and then professionally in 2003, it was kind of at the tail end of what I had been a larger movement to diversify newsrooms. It was pretty short lived. The Net at that time was really considered – and Knight Ridder – leaders in making real, tangible efforts to diversify newsrooms, but when I came in the news business was starting to contract, and with that contraction, any belief that this was an imperative seemed to go away. Which, I guess in some ways tells you it was always a matter of convenience, though I do think at that time, there were many journalists in leadership
positions who thought it was important. But I think not as important as other pressing needs came to be. And of course, you can look at data on this now and see that we have either stood still or declined in some areas. I think inclusivity was always much worse. Newsrooms were able
to recruit talent of color – and when I talk about diversity I'm almost always talking about race, other people might have other definition but I'm talking specifically about race – where they could bring people in, but the environment made it hard to maintain. They weren't very good at integrating journalists of color, and particularly journalists of color who did not have a desire to assimilate to white norms.
HM: What news organizations did you work for after graduating?
NHJ: My very first job was for The Chapel Hill News, which was a twice-weekly
newspaper at the time, owned by the News and Observer, which was the large metro daily. I only worked there about three months and then I got hired to cover the Durham Public Schools in the Durham bureau of the News and Observer – which of course, the Durham bureau no longer exists. I worked there about three years-- a little more than three years-- and then I went to The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, where I worked about six years. From there I went to ProPublica in New York City where I worked about three years, and then I've been at The New York Times since 2015.
HM: Can you talk about your journey of discovering what your ideal beat is, and the stories you covered at the beginning of your career?
NHJ: I always wanted to write about race. That was really the only reason I ever wanted to be a journalist, was to write about race and racial inequality. But I also was not naive enough to think that you get to cover a beat like that right out of school. When I first started in
journalism, most newspapers did have a "race reporter," but within a few years of me being in journalism, most of those jobs were eliminated, and now they've kind of come back again. But my very first job was writing about Durham Public Schools. And any new journalist, you take whatever job is the first job you can get, and fortunately for me, unfortunately for America – it
doesn't matter what beat you have, if you want to write about race you can. Because racial inequality really permeates every beat and every aspect of American life. So I wrote about a very segregated, unequal school district, and I wrote about a bunch of things but I was also able to spend quite a bit of time writing about racial inequality and school segregation.
Did I answer that question? Okay.
HM: Yeah. Knowing this is kind of a softball question, but what are some of the major differences that you saw as you moved between news organizations?
NHJ: So there's a lot of differences and I would say even in my own career, I didn't become what I would consider a race reporter until I went to ProPublica. So my first newspaper, The News and Observer, I feel was actually a very good training ground. They had a reputation for hiring younger journalists and giving us a lot of mentorship and a lot of autonomy to produce the types of stories we wanted to produce. I had a great editor, his name was James Shiffer, he wasn't that much older than me but really coached me a lot, did side-by-side editing with me – which is really important for young reporters – but also just trusted my ideas, which matters a lot. Not just for your own happiness, but building your confidence. When you're first starting out, you want to know that you have good ideas and I wanted to write a lot about racial inequality, and he was very encouraging of that. So I think I learned a lot.
My second job was at a much bigger newspaper at that time, The Oregonian was the largest paper in the Pacific Northwest, but very, very different style. I was hired in part to write about race but as I think is often typical of newsrooms, even those that consider themselves to be progressive, they're progressive on many, many things but race is not one of them. So I did not feel-- I certainly did not have the freedom to write about race and racial inequality the way that I wanted to. Though the good aspect of that was I was given-- people at that time went to The
Oregonian because it was considered a narrative writing newspaper. If you wanted to learn how to do narrative journalism specifically, this was a place that you went. They had a writing coach, his name is Jack Hart, and I got a lot of training from him. There was an enterprise team and our job was just to go out and find enterprise stories and then work directly with the writing coach. I will always be really grateful for that experience, it’s just unfortunate most of the narratives I was writing weren't about the things that I got into journalism to do. So it was definitely
supportive in terms of learning the mechanics of the trade, it was not a supportive environment in terms of being a Black woman who wanted to write about racial inequality. And then very quickly – I was at The Oregonian from 2006 to late 2011, and that's really when the bottom fell out of the newspaper industry. So there was constant turmoil, layoffs, reorganization – they were really trying to figure out what was going to be the thing that was going to save the newsrooms. In general it was a difficult time in journalism.
What was the rest of that question? Sorry.
HM: Just kind of the differences between places that you've worked.
NHJ: So ProPublica, of course, was completely different from any other newsroom. It was online, it was only investigative. Every journalist got to work on long-term, long-form projects. When I went to ProPublica it was just five years old, it was not the household name that it is now, which worked to your benefit in terms of when you were trying to do an investigation, people weren't afraid of you. But also, people didn't necessarily want to return your calls because they didn't know who you were. So that was the first time that I just, as my job, got to just spend really long periods of time digging into something, working on something, and I really felt I was being invested in as an investigative reporter. I think it's also where I really started to prove that racial inequality can be an investigative beat. That the same practices and techniques that
journalists were using to expose other injustices could be used in writing about racial inequality. And I certainly wasn't the first person to do that, but it was not conventionally believed that you could write just about race as an investigative beat.
Then, The New York Times is The New York Times. I've only ever worked at the magazine here, so this job is the much freedom I've ever had to just do any type of journalism that I want to do. I think what's been amazing about working at The Times is both writing for a magazine-- which it's my first time I've ever been a magazine writer-- but also if I want to write for the newspaper, I can. There's a story that's a news story that I want to dip into or if I want to do analysis like I did on bussing for the Sunday Review, or I just want to do long-form magazine style projects, I can really do that. I just feel incredibly blessed every day to have that freedom to write across different aspects of the paper.
HM: I guess kind of compared to the position that you feel you're in now as a journalist, early on in your career, how much of a voice did you feel that you had when it came to both coverage of race but then also how race was treated and just inclusivity in the workroom?
NHJ: I always had a voice, but I think what's different is the degree to which my voice is heard and listened to now. I think one of the reasons I sometimes had difficulty in newsrooms was I've never been a person who doesn't speak up about things and I've always thought that racial diversity and newsrooms that reflect the communities that they're supposed to be covering has been critical from the moment I stepped in at any newsroom. I've always tried to serve on committees, advocate, have meetings – it's always been something that I pushed. But of course, as in anything, the more seniority you get, the more of track record you have, the more you become a force that can't simply be ignored. So, I think that's the biggest difference. I have a much bigger megaphone and that makes it more difficult to ignore. But I've always, for good or
for ill – and sometimes it hurt my career – been someone who has spoken up very passionately, both about our coverage, what I thought I should be covering and also our hiring and retention practices. I'm just not a person in general, lip service is completely meaningless to me – I don't care what people say they believe in. What your actions show, and I think that's where I've always pushed, is everyone has the right rhetoric, everyone knows the right things to say – Lord knows every place says they value diversity – but, I always believe your values are reflected in your hiring decisions and your budget. If your budget and your hiring decisions are not changing