The Persistence Guide to Becoming a Journalist (Even When Your Parents Aren’t Behind It)
Jennifer Crittendon, a former CFO, is host of the Dear Discreet Guide podcast. This is a lightly edited transcript of episode 124 where I was interviewed about being a journalist for 20 years and my venture today.
We talk about Tom Brokaw, the grind of TV reporting, & advice for public speaking.
Jennifer Crittenden, Host, Dear Discreet Guide: This is episode 124 of the dear discreet guide trouble at work podcast. This episode is titled 20 years as a TV anchor. This is the last of our 10 episodes about journalism and journalists. Hello everybody. Welcome to deer discrete guide, trouble at work where we talk about work working and how to make work better if it’s work-related. Where on it, who knew talking about work would be this much fun. I’m Jennifer Crittendon, a former CFO and host of the show. And thank you for joining our quest to improve our workplaces.
I’m so honored to have Joya Dass with us today. She worked for a long time as a television anchor and has now become the founder of LadyDrinks Networking for Women in this episode is part of our series about journalists and journalism.
Joya: Thank you for having me, Jennifer. It’s really wonderful to talk about what I love.
Jennifer: You were drawn to television from a young age and tell us how did that happen and how did it manifest itself?
Joya: My father is an Indian immigrant. He and my mother immigrated here in 1969 and as a ritual each night at six or six 30, he would turn on Tom Brokaw’s and watch the nightly news. And I think for him as an immigrant, it was something that was patently American for him to be informed in that way. And I think for me as a kid, it was my future. I would sit on the floor, I remember and I would gather like every eight by 10 piece of paper I could find in the house, which I don’t know how many there were when you’re like four and spread them around a coffee table. And you know, because I wanted to mimic how industrious and important Tom bro call looked. And I think that you know, the other sort of piece of my story is that I grew up in a traditional home where women didn’t have a voice.
And so my mother in her own way really nurtured that. I think she saw that propensity for writing in journalism and me as a really young kid. And so every day she would scour the newspaper for essay contest and poetry contest and spelling contest. So that she just kept nurturing that part of me. And by the time I was headed to college, I was crystal clear. I was always crystal clear. I was a precocious kid, but that I wanted to become a television anchor and this is what I wanted to do. And it was not something that neither parent could get behind emotionally or financially. So I paid for college and I paid for grad school and I paid for every move around the country to come New York and do exactly that.
Jennifer: It’s very interesting to think about you watching your father watching Tom Brokaw and what, you know, like what your little brain was thinking.
Joya: I remember everything about that apartment was green and I was little years low to the ground. So even the carpet remember being green.
Jennifer: So tell us some of the nuts and bolts about being a TV anchor, like what your day is like and challenges and why it might not be a good job for everyone.
Joya: I covered one beat for 20 years, which is the financial markets, which meant that I was either on the floor of the New York stock exchange or I was stationed at the NASDAQ market site. And so a typical day for me typically began anywhere between 2:30 AM and 3:45 AM a driver would come and pick me up. I had four alarms that would go off because their biggest fear is that you’re gonna oversleep. And so there’ll be two alarms just in my bedroom. The third alarm would be the driver calling and then my phone would go off. So anyway, it was, it was a really, I think that those kinds of schedules affect women’s bodies differently than they affect men because so much of our sleep is tied to our hormones. So while I loved that rush of, you know, getting in, getting hair and makeup done and getting in front of the camera and educating my audience, and I still love doing that today.
I think why that work isn’t for everyone is that those hours just really, really take a toll. Not only on your health, it takes a toll on your personal life and it takes a toll on your social life. And you know, a lot of people will be prone to say, Oh, well you’re off the air by 10 you’ve got the whole rest of your day. I think that’s fine. If you were raising small children, I was not, I was doing the schedule in my twenties and my thirties and I think that I was really pushing myself. I would stay out till 10 because I would sleep in the afternoon and then go out and I really did not want to miss a minute of life. And so I think that that makes it hard. And I don’t know that this work, while it looks very glamorous from the outside in, is not so glamorous when you’re looking at it from that lens on the inside out.
I very intentionally chose business news because if your cat climbed up in a tree I am not the girl you want to send to cover that story.
I really love the math and the technology and the just the very cut and dry nature of business news.
The market’s either up or the market’s down. You know, there’s, there’s no sort of gray area and you’ve got to have so much in your brain to provide context because a piece of news breaks, it’s not enough to say that Delta is merging with XYZ carrier. You also have to provide context, which you do after you’ve been covering the beat for a long time and say, well, how many other airlines has Delta merged with and what does this do for consumer pricing?
Jennifer: What were some of the most important stories that you covered in your view?
Joya: My first week at CNN nine 11 happened. From the age of 18, I gave up so much and sacrificed so much to come to New York. This job was the cherry topping on the ice cream. I remember that morning trying to get to work, I had to take a bus across town and subway downtown and I just couldn’t and I didn’t understand what was going on. But all that was going through my mind at the time was that I needed to get to work. Eventually I got to work and it was immediately paired up with a camera man and my job was to go down to st Vincent’s hospital and, and stand guard across across from the hospital. And I remember the doctors were all looking South.
We were all looking South waiting for the bodies to come in and they never did because they had gotten incinerated. So I think covering nine 11 and the days afterwards, and I remember my driver for for months afterwards is driving me down to the stock exchange and I saw the wreckage that no longer stands. Of course today it’s gotten cleaned up and very sanitized down there where, where the twin towers used to stand. But to see that every single day. Yeah. Wow. So I think that was a big one. Uncovering, you know, uncovering the recession that then set in in 2007 I think covering the booms in the bus in between. And then certainly you know, I still do TV one day a week and now covering the coronavirus are probably some of the big seminal moments. Oh, definitely. So you’re still reporting now? I do one day a week. I have a contract with a company that broadcast to Fox news in San Francisco and so what I do is I write the business week in review and then I go in and tape it on Friday mornings and it airs on Sunday. So no more getting up at two 30 in the morning.
Jennifer: Yeah. Much better schedule. But yeah, now that I think about it, your career definitely has, has spanned some, some really kind of tragic and dramatic moments. Those are very interesting. 20 years that you’ve covered.
I think one of the saddest things that has happened, because I’ve been on the trading floor since 1999 is to see the floor become a shadow of its former self computers have, are now starting to do the lion’s share of the work. So what used to be three trading floors is now condensed to one. It’s largely become a broadcast facility and an events facility. And you know, when I first started there, there were generations of brokers and traders and sons did it and their grandsons did it. And I feel like in some ways it’s sad to see that that is no longer, because computers do everything now.
Jennifer: Really. I didn’t know that. So the scene that we always see in the movies of people shouting on the, on the floor, that doesn’t go on anymore.
Joya: In the late nineties and two thousands when there was that many bodies on the floor. And if you’re standing by a post where there’s a lot of trading activity. So, for example, Boeing really took a hit earlier last week. I’m sure there was a lot of activity just around that particular post, but just sort of that hectic floor wide hysteria is, isn’t something that you see every day anymore.
Jennifer: Interesting. Interesting. So what do you think about journalism today?
Joya: When anybody asks me that, I say two things. One is that with the era of Fox news channel, getting ushered in, shouting and screaming and yelling is the new normal. And I feel like every other network now practices that with the exception of meet the press on Sunday mornings. So that’s been tough to see. And the second piece is that it’s become much more democratized. If you can demonstrate with all the consumer tools that you have at your fingertips, phone, camera, tripod, microphone. If you can develop a channel dedicated to a niche and you develop a following organically, the press will come to you. You know, if you can demonstrate that you’ve got that much gravitational pole. I feel like the paradigm has shifted. And I think that in some ways that’s kind of democratized who gets on TV.
Jennifer: Although it occurs to me that there’s a potential problem with it in that those people who can draw a large following aren’t necessarily the ones that we want to be listening to. I mean, sometimes the most provocative people on social media have large followings, but partly because they’re kind of playing to the lowest common denominator, if I can put it that way.
Joya: Sure. And a lot of, and a lot of what’s construed as journalism is really opinion pieces, right? So it doesn’t even need to be backed up, but know that like anytime you’re in a newsroom you know, there’s a cadre of people, producers, bookers, executive producers that are behind you that you never see as a viewer on television who are, you know, creating the agenda, creating the scripts. And so there’s a little more checks and balances unless it’s an opinion situation, in which case, you know, if you’re being called in to express your opinion, then that goes maybe unchecked,
But there’s so many places for you to now get your news. And as I understand it now, generation Z and the generation that’s coming up behind them is really interested in finding their own sources and their own authentic, authentic places that they’re going to get their information. So that can be anywhere from, you know, someone on a YouTube channel to an independent newspaper, but it’s certainly not going to just be the three networks, which is the steady diatom on which I was raised.
Jennifer: There are a lot of, or I see a lot of kind of entrepreneurship in the journalism space, so do think is kind of interesting and encouraging.
Joya: I still think there’s some great interviews out there. I think there’s some great journalists out there and, and you know that that generation will go away as well. But who knows, we might, you know, I’m sure there’ll be just yet another way that we get all of our information. It’ll be like Google glass or something.
Jennifer: Everything keeps evolving. Right. So with your experience, you’ve gained a lot of interesting skills that I think my listeners would be interested in. So let’s start with some advice for people who are nervous about being on camera.
Joya: Number one, take an improv class. This is something that I say to anybody who wants to be a better public speaker because what improv does is teaches you to think on your feet and when you’re thinking on your feet, you’re bringing energy to whatever you’re saying. And I think a lot of people, just 50% of being in front of the camera or being in front of an audience is the nerve. So if you can beat that, that’s so much of the battle.
I think number two is to just be that subject matter expert that you already know you are. If you can get so caught up in the topic that you’re presenting and just forget that there’s an audience there, you’re going that passion and that credibility will come through. You know, you don’t even need to worry about who’s on the other side digesting it.
I think the third thing is to practice practice in front of your friends, practice in front of your family practice in front of the mirror. The only way that I was able to get better at delivering business news, and mind you, it wasn’t even enough to just talk on camera. I also had to master the financial language that goes around delivering this type of news and just become very savvy and fluent with that. It was me doing reports every hour, twice an hour when I first started out at Bloomberg. After a while it just becomes a muscle memory. It becomes a reflex.
Jennifer: No, that sounds very wise as I’m watching everybody now. So we’re taping this during the Corona virus period and I’m watching all these people who are doing remote meetings, so they’re all on camera now and seeing themselves on camera. And I was thinking, you know, that’s a real positive for people to practice being on camera and seeing themselves on camera. Cause I find with my clients that’s often, it’s very daunting at the beginning. But as you say, the more you do it, the better you get at it and the more comfortable you become with it. Do you have any observations about that?
Joya: I think again it goes back to my number one point is that beating those nerves is 50% of the battle right after he, after you’ve sort of conquered that. For me today when I get in front of the camera, it’s about being funny. It’s about looking good, it’s about being engaging, making sure I have all my facts are straight, that I’ve got a cogent argument. Like all of that is is primary. Whereas before it was nerves about being in front of the camera. Right now there’s other priorities that have really taken center stage and that’s just because being in front of the cameras is second nature to me. So if you can kind of conquer that, then you can really focus on the topic at hand, which is being a credible and interesting speaker.
Jennifer: I belong to Toastmasters and I watch people sometimes really struggle with public speaking and they’ll say, you know, I’m so nervous. My mind has just gone blank and so you’re right. If you can overcome that initial set of nerves, then at least you can keep functioning
Joya: And also to keep like a bullet point list in front of you of the salient points that you needed to make. If your mind does freeze and we all get nerves, or even today, like you know, I’ll be in the middle of a thought and my mind might wander off, but if I’ve got those bullet points in front of me, then it can always bring it back. It jogs my memory and that’s all I needed to get onto my next point and I find that today as I’m sitting in meetings, it’s like the agenda that you bring to a meeting or it’s the points that you make when you’re talking and talking to a sponsor and you want them to underwrite an event. It’s having those salient points in front of you no matter what the context is so you don’t forget the most important things that you’ve already thought through before your brain goes into that freeze situation.
Jennifer: It’s so funny that you bring that up. When I was working in corporate America as a CFO, we would do some media training and it was really just so that we, when we went on a television show and we only had, you know, four minutes or whatever, we would remember these three things and it was incredible how often people when they were doing the preparations would forget those three things. Right. It was just funny how your mind can’t even cope with something that seems so simple from the outside and it’s actually kind of hard to do
Joya: And it’s just such a simple thing to put it on a post it note or put it in, you know, an on your phone and just have those three things that you know you want to leave the audience with.
Jennifer: There are some stories that you tell about people and it, you interviewed a lot, you interviewed a lot of CEOs, so tell us about what you learned and then if you have any stories for us about that.
Joya: Yeah, I think the hardest CEO’s are the ones that are either from another country. I’m thinking of, you know, a Greek CEO that I interviewed who was at the helm of a big shipping giant, you know, an interview is an exchange of information and if that exchange of information isn’t happening, then that’s painful for all the stakeholders involved. So I think over the years, you know, there’ve been, you know, increasingly more and more foreign companies that are listing on the American stock exchanges and rightfully so. But I think it’s very hard to be in conversations with a German CEO or a Greek CEO or a Chinese CEO who hasn’t been media trained and, and isn’t able to kind of hold space in a conversation. I re, I know you mentioned that there was a one person who just sort of abruptly ended the interview on the side of being a television anchor on mainstream TV for 15 years.
I was a face of a television show that aired on Saturday mornings and the target audience was first and second generation Indian immigrants living in America. I did the entire show in English. But what I was doing was encapsulating all of the films that were coming out of the Bollywood industry. And it’s a very prolific industry. So it wasn’t unusual for there to be maybe three or four films releasing in a week. But for a lot of Indians who first moved to this country, it was their connection to home. Sure. And my show was the only sort of horse in town. So people really liked that I delivered it with no accent. They liked that I delivered it. Like I would add, you know, any other anchor would on mainstream TV. I wrote everything I said. So, you know, it sounded like me. But part of that job was to interview some of the luminaries and actors that came out of India, especially when they were in New York promoting a film.
And there was a, an actor by the name of Amitabh Bachchan. He’s very famous, you know, has been in movies since the seventies and eighties. But he’s also at a point in his career where he’s got a lot of clout. He’s got a lot of respect and he’s a bit of a curmudgeon. So, you know, I was, I was sitting in the press Corps, I was the first one up to do a sit down interview with him. All the press Corps was sitting around me and I had my set of questions that my producer had given me and he was just going to go to a point and then he was just like, didn’t want to be in the interview anymore. So I remember asking the question, you know, what is your, I can’t even remember, but it’s something to the effect of, you know, w what are you most looking forward to? And he was like the end of this interview.
Jennifer: No. Yeah, a little bit of a smart Alec.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Joya: What do I care? You know what I mean? I was just like, alright, you know, yeah, no skin off of my back. But you know, I think that that makes the other party look worse than it makes me look. So it is what it is.
Jennifer: Unfortunately, that is often what happens with my clients. We do study what I call CEO bloopers, where people make mistakes while they’re being interviewed. You know, they have a poor reaction to something and, and it often makes them look bad. You know, they’re triggered by something. But unfortunately it’s, yeah, it is a, it is a blooper. Anything else about interviewing that you could pass along to people?
Joya: Sure. I always lead with my natural curiosity. Of course I have my preset questions, but I always try to make it as conversational as possible. You’re a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on a conversation that you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. So for me, it’s always leading with that, with that natural curiosity. Even today, today, you know, I held a, a large executive women’s network. I championed South Asian women who are in high profile careers and what I’ve effectively done is taken that dynamic of interviewing CEOs out from behind the television screen and moved it in front of a live audience to create these events and create teaching moments for the women who attend. And so today I still lead with that natural curiosity and I’m always, always, always reading the room. You know, when you’re losing the room, you know, in that tension in the room, it’s almost like, you know the glass that sits at the top of a water glass, you know when that is about to break, right? And then when people start shifting in their seats, I would wager that it’s much harder to interview somebody in front of a live audience versus a television camera. Television camera doesn’t react. People do, they get on their phone, they get up and walk out, they talk to each other. And so figuring out how to keep that live audience and rapture is something that I’m always monitoring out of the corner of my eye because I know when I’m starting to lose the room and where I need to wrap it up.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s so interesting. So in a way, when you’re in front of a live audience, you’re getting feedback when you’re doing poorly, but in front of the television camera you don’t, so you can kind of operate in a bubble. That’s really interesting.
Also like I believe in delivering on what you promised. Right? So I have had a CEO that I brought in front of my audience a few weeks ago and she is really, really enthusiastic. She’s a great talker, but I needed to make sure that what I had promised, which was how to leverage video for, for your business, was the salient points that I was getting across. And so anytime that she would veer from that, I would, I would toggle back to the topic promised. Right. And that was, and, and I think the key to that is that I always insist on pre-interviewing everybody before I ever put them in front of my audience. So I already know what the answer is and I already know if you’re veering from that salient point that I needed you to make, so I’m never going to get in front of an audience not having interviewed and not figuring out what the highlights are that I want to make that this audience gets to digest.
Jennifer: So your real commitment is to the audience. A hundred percent a hundred percent yeah, that makes sense.
Joya: And you know, when you’re running a company and a small or you know, especially a small business, delivering on value and delivering on an excellent event is something that I really pride myself on. And so it’s for me to find an excellent speaker. But if, if, if for whatever reason, they don’t stick to sort of the storyline that we established together and co-created, it’s my job as a moderator to make sure that we stay on track.
Jennifer: Yeah, it’s an interesting problem that I observe when people practice a lot is they start, they feel as they’re reluctant to repeat themselves. And so I find that people start speaking extemporaneously and, and kind of veering from the script. And I don’t know if there’s a way to help people stay on course, but yet it’s this funny thing that we do where it’s, where we don’t want to repeat ourselves.
Joya: Well, I always find that there’s, you know, people where they, where they short themselves as not picking a good moderator. You know, a good moderator will persist even, even though somebody is on their soap box and talking about something that may or may not be interesting to the audience. So I think that picking somebody who is very clear on the brand promise is, is how you keep that in check.
Jennifer: And so people are really struggling to, to deliver on, on for themselves even on what they expected to, to produce.
Joya: But I think that brings up a great point, which is that focus and extreme levels of focus is something that I think has been critical to my ability to interview. If you think about it, I’ve been on the floor of this exchange. There are hundreds of bodies around you. And so you’ve got to, you’ve got to maintain so much focus because your only connection back to the master control is a small ear piece where there’s a producer in your ear, a director who’s counting you down in your ear to commercial break. And you’ve got the human being in front of you. So at that moment, when you’re in that interview for two minutes or 30 seconds or whatever it might be for opening and closing bell just really staying focused on the task at hand has been a real asset. What incredible training. I think it came with practice though, you know, it was, it came with just doing it over and over and over again.
Jennifer: So tell us how you pivoted way now from, from doing so much as a TV anchor and now you’re working on networking events for, or tell us what
Joya: Today I helm a networking platform for South Asian executive women and founders. It’s called lady drinks and later drinks has its origins. Eight years ago, I had started a production company on the side because with a view to do longer pieces, because news is such a grind, you know, you’re just getting it out, getting it out, getting it out. And this was kind of at the 10 year Mark and I looked back at my career and didn’t feel like I had a body of work that I could say I was proud of. So I wanted to be able to create longer pieces and have the time to be able to go back and revise them and then make it beautiful. All that to say that when we, when my partner and I had launched that production company and she had said to me, Hey joy, why don’t we start hosting lady drinks events in New York.
She had great success in hosting these meetups for women in film and TV as a way for women to get jobs. And this was in Toronto by the way. And when she moved to New York and we started a little company, she’s like, why don’t we host these networking events to fill our, you know, our pipeline with projects. I said, okay, sure. But I didn’t expect, and it’s important to point out that she was English. What I didn’t expect is that there were some 300 300 Indian women showing up to these networking events because an entire generation of Indian woman had grown up watching me on TV at a time that no Indian women were on mainstream TV. And so they were all coming to share that they were doing something other than the Indian parent approved doctor, lawyer, engineer. And so it became apparent to me those first few events were in July of 2012 that not only was I overwhelmed, but I was in a place of responsibility.
It wasn’t going to be enough for me to just have women come together and have drinks. I had access to CEOs and authors and Titans of business and thought leaders, why not start to connect the dots? Why not, you know, we since had access, why not put these folks in front of this audience and create events? And so it’s been eight years at the seven. I ran it as a side hustle for seven years, but it was increasingly getting very difficult to get up at two 30 or three o’clock in the morning, do the news cycle, and then host events in the evening. I wasn’t present for the morning, I wasn’t present for the evening and truly elated drinks have become the bigger brand. You know, I had already sort of proved my stripes. I had earned my stripes on TV and now this had become the bigger brand.
It was clearly a pain point in the market. Nobody was doing this for South Asian women who wanted high profile careers. Truly what it comes down to is support systems. You know, I had largely forged my career without family behind me, so I had to create my own support system. So today, yes, I’m putting you in the room with all kinds of events, but what I’m really doing is curating the room and hopefully creating the platform for you to pick who’s going to become your support system for success or whatever. Which way that looks like. Yeah, that’s really cool that you’re doing that.
Jennifer: Well Joya, I know that I have to let you go, but I wondered if you wanted to share with the listeners how they could get in touch with you or follow your work or anything you’d like to share with them.
Joya: Sure. My website is ladydrinks.com. I am on social on Twitter. You can find me at joy dos, J. O. Y a. D a. S. S. You can find me on Facebook under that moniker as well and you can also find me on YouTube. I’m pretty much on every single social media platform under Julia dos. You’d be hard pressed to not get in touch with me. I see. Good. Well thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate your time and your wise words. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day and I hope that you’re safe and well in this environment.
Jennifer: That’s it, everybody. You’ve made it through another episode of dear discrete guide, trouble at work during the pandemic. We’ll be changing our format in honor of those who are quarantined or working on the front lines. We’ll put out shorter shows on a daily or near daily basis early in the morning to start your day on a positive and interesting note, we’ll be considering work-related issues relevant while covert 19 is impacting the world. If you have a question or a comment or a message for our listeners, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you. You can reach us through the website, discreet guide.com D I. S C R, E. E. T, where you can also find other resources about working better together. Thank you for joining my quest to improve our workplaces, our work lives, and our lives in general and thanks for listening. We look forward to returning to our old format when the world has returned to a more normal state. In the meantime, please hang in there, stay safe, and know that I care about you.
