Building organizational resilience to fight colonial systems in journalism
A few weeks ago, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter unleashed some new gold for us to soak up, and naturally that has consumed me since the very moment Cowboy Carter hit at 9:00 p.m. California time on March 28. What’s drawn me to Beyoncé with each and every drop since her 2013 self-titled album, Beyoncé, is her unrelenting drive to put out the best, most forward-thinking art she’s capable of at the moment, while also uplifting other groundbreakers along the way. It’s bigger than her at this point. She’s beyond validation; her only focus is innovation. She’s a passionate lover of music. A student. A shapeshifter. She’s a risk taker, and increasingly unafraid of the backlash that follows when one pushes made-up boundaries. She’s resilient.
Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé taking the nastiness thrown at her from all directions and repurposing it into fuel to tear down the walls that box creatives like her into a given category or genre. The TRiiBE is my Cowboy Carter in progress. In 2017, I co-founded a digital publication called The TRiiBE, with a focus on reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago. We carry the torch of our abolitionists ancestors such as Ida B. Wells who advocated for Black liberation through journalism, unafraid to highlight racism.
Black media often forms out of resistance because we, too, tried to exist within the institution, follow its rules and traditions in exchange for acceptance, yet we’re — still — forced to exist outside the margins. For example, we’ve been unapologetically covering and confronting the colonialist propaganda being used to justify the genocide taking place in Gaza since October 2023, while mainstream outlets like the New York Times have instructed their newsroom to avoid using such terms. Throughout history, we’ve seen the devastation that occurs when the world turns a blind eye to tens of thousands of people being killed in colonialistic endeavors. As a Black-owned media company centering liberation, we’re left with no choice but to carve our own lane, and we’re continuing to do so at The TRiiBE.
I’ve spent much of my time at Stanford as a JSK Journalism Fellow working on organizational resilience, a phrase my advisor Pam Maples used to define my work during one of our catch-up sessions. When I launched The TRiiBE with Morgan Elise Johnson and David Elutilo in 2017, we were responding to the mainstream media’s one-sided framing of Chicago, and particularly Black Chicagoans, as violent savages. With each urgent crisis impacting Chicago, The TRiiBE grew its staff and freelance community, and pivoted its editorial calendar to respond. In doing that editorial work, though, I didn’t have enough mental space left to build organizational systems to support our sustainability as a growing team.
My time at the JSK Journalism Fellowship has afforded me the opportunity to do an editorial wellness check. Shortly after I left for Stanford, I realized how much institutional knowledge I had in my mind, and practiced every day with my team, but I hadn’t written that knowledge down anywhere. Our editorial calendar was one that I maintained mostly through personally communicating with reporters, writers and photographers via email and texts, but I hadn’t taught our team how to communicate with one another to be accountable to each other and the editorial calendar. I was micromanaging, plain and simple. Although I had convinced myself that micromanaging was the kind of leadership our growing newsroom needed to accomplish our goals, I was not only burning myself out but also doing a disservice to my team by not teaching them how to be more self-sufficient in their work.
In the fall, I began working on a solution. I started by conducting need-finding interviews with our team members, one-on-one, asking them about times when our editorial calendar worked smoothly and what helped them meet deadlines. I took their responses and built out an interactive editorial system in Asana. The system is separated into two channels: Editorial Calendar and Art Requests, which interact with each other automatically. In the Editorial Calendar, a reporter can track their story from Pitch to Publish, and certain stages of the process automatically trigger a photo request in the Art Request channel, which our art director manages.
In December, I brought The TRiiBE Team to Stanford University for a work retreat as a way to unwind, bond, learn new skills and meet my fellowship peers. Our TRiiBE auntie, Benét J. Wilson, hosted a virtual workshop on mental health and journalism. Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub director Deborah Douglas hosted one around source building. My Stanford meditation professor Julia Tang led us through some breathwork. We traveled to YR Media in Oakland to learn more about their work in the community and gain insight from industry giant Kyra Kyles. And my fellow JSK fellow E’Jaaz A. Mason led us through a visual storytelling workshop, and his girlfriend Sophie Ormond welcomed our team with a paint and sip at our Airbnb.
Additionally, I introduced the new Asana system to the team. Our editorial efficiency has increased greatly since our team started using the Asana tool, and they’ve each told me how much the system has helped their workflow.
At JSK, I’ve learned how to carve out time to take a step back, look at The TRiiBE from a macro point-of-view, and ask questions to our team in order to learn about the challenges they face in their daily workflow and how we can build resiliency through systems to mitigate those challenges.
For decades, Black journalists have been so confined by the (made-up) rules upholding the institution, much like Beyoncé who, for years, has been told that she doesn’t belong in the country music genre despite her Houston, Texas roots, country accent and southern lineage. We can’t let these colonial systems strip us of our voice and talents. Like Beyoncé, we need to take risks, be unafraid of backlash and be resilient.
