Guest host and ESPN executive Marsha Cooke continues a conversation about black women in the media. Panelists share how they focus on building inclusive content for Black audiences including expanding coverage to undercovered topics and communities. The guests are Mary Annaïse Heglar, Co-creator and Co-host of the Hot Take podcast Lauren Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Capital B.
Marsha Cooke
Hi, folks. We're so glad you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you haven't yet, remember to follow this podcast on your podcast, your of choice, like Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have time, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We are here for you, with you and because of you. So keep letting us know what's on your mind. We'd also love you to join in financially supporting the show if you're able. You can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. Thanks for listening.
This is Our Body Politic. I'm guest host Marsha Cooke, sitting in for Farai Chideya. And we're bringing you a conversation straight from this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. We're talking about the black female creators who are building the future of media and what real leadership looks like. Let's listen.
Marsha Cooke
How we tell stories is shaped by our lived experiences. And more often than not. Black women's unique position in society allows us to amplify the voices of those often unheard. Black women are wait for it… The O.G. AfroFuturists.
Audience
Amen. Yes!
Marsha Cooke
I didn't have to say “can I get an amen from the congregation?” I was all ready for that line. Thank you. Thank you. Joining me to discuss black women's ability to build and lead communities are CEO, co-founder of Capital B. If you don't know about Capital B, you must immediately begin to read the extraordinary work that the co-founder and CEO Lauren Williams has built.
Lauren Williams
Thank you.
Marsha Cooke
And climate justice writer, co-creator, co-host of he Hot Take podcast and newsletter Mary Annaïse Heglar.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Thank you.
Marsha Cooke
It's great to have you both here today to talk about crucial truths that I never get tired of talking about. How black women are leading the media industry, amongst other things, into the future. But before we delve into this heady topic, I'm just going to ask a very simple question. What's bringing you joy right now?
Lauren Williams
You know, Capital B just celebrated its one year anniversary. And thank you. Thank you. You. And it brings me joy to have had this idea with my co-founder Akoto Ofori-Atta, to have taken a leap to raise the money to do it, to hire a team of 27 black employees to make it happen every single day. It brings me enormous joy, even as it's a difficult endeavor.
Marsha Cooke
When you think about the work that you're doing. What are you seeing in terms of the current state of media today, and how does that apply to the work that you're doing today? Because I feel like you're filling a vacuum. You both are filling a void that the larger media organizations are not doing and committing to.
Lauren Williams
What we saw was a vast, gaping hole in the way that the media covers black people, black stories, and the way that the media reaches black audiences with crucial, important information that black audiences need and deserve, and with very important implications for democracy and for public health and for trust in institutions. And this is why it was so important for us once we got the bug, once we got this idea into our heads to make it happen, because we were in such an important moment in time that we couldn't put the genie back into the bottle. We had to do it. And so we're still building, we're still growing. But what we're building towards is a pretty ambitious idea to open newsrooms around the country that are going to fill that hole, that are going to address that gaping need for black audiences and black communities around the country.
Marsha Cooke
Mary, I'm going to ask you now with the work that you're doing. What's got you most excited? And what's bringing you Joy?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Well, thank you so much for asking. I just this week announced a book deal with Pantheon Books. That's going to be a thank you. It's going to be an all black essay collection on climate change. I'm super, super excited about it because when I got this idea of this summer because I was like, I exist in New Orleans, I live in New Orleans, and I hear us talking about climate change all the time, but we're not necessarily calling it climate change. But every time we talk about Hurricane Iota or Hurricane Katrina or like potholes, and now we got night tornadoes and all of this other stuff, we are talking about climate change. We're just not using the words climate change. And every time I would introduce the term climate change folks would kind of be like, oh, I don't know if I know all the right words and like, get all of this sort of like, oh, I don't know if I'm qualified to talk about it in those terms, but I can talk about this hurricane, right? And so I got the idea to do this essay collection to one like show that this is a black issue. Black people absolutely care about this. And to take down this wall of like people feel like they have to have a certain level of expertise to be able to talk about it and also to show that we've been talking about this. Right. Like going back way back when you could say Harriet Tubman was an environmentalist and she very much was. You could say that she was a climate change worry because you can't get climate change without slavery. So every time that we fought against slavery, against Jim Crow, against prisons, we have been fighting against climate change. Whether we said that out loud or not, I think we knew that, like spiritually. So I'm really excited to work with all of these black thinkers and leaders and writers to talk about this issue as our own and to start this conversation in our community. I'm also very excited that I'll be working with Lisa Lucas on it, who's one of the not enough black women with a lot of power in the publishing industry. So I'm very excited about that.
Marsha Cooke
That's wonderful. You just dropped a whole bunch of like, knowledge right there, and I feel compelled to just kind of double back and ask you just to expand or expound a bit more on the relationship between climate goes all the way back to slavery, climate change, and then also the prison industrial complex. It sounds like that's what you were saying. Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the time when people talk about climate change, like they want to just jump straight to the solutions, right? And you're not going to get holistic solutions unless you actually understand the problem. And so we often talk about climate change with this just truncated analysis of where it came from, of, well, it comes from fossil fuels, okay, where the fossil fuels come from. They came from the Industrial Revolution, where the industrial revolution come from or what funded the industrial revolution, rather, cotton, sugar, water that come from plantations. We were talking about this a little bit earlier, that after the Civil War, the labor that slaves performed was either moved into automation, which was powered by fossil fuels or was moved into prisons and powered yet again by human beings, slavery by another name. So it's sort of this climate change is when white supremacy has infected the actual planet and our ecosystems. All of it comes back to white supremacy, right? Like you also don't get climate change without colonialism. You had to, like, go somewhere, toss somebody off the land, dig up oil that does not want to be dug up. I don't know if people recognize that oil wants to stay in the ground. And you have to figure out that you had to set it on fire and start all of these things. Right. So like, there's this mythology in climate spaces that people didn't know that oil extraction was wrong when they were doing it. They did. They had to so many people had to die to be able to do that sort of thing. And those were people who look like us in the other way, in which it's deeply entangled with the black experience, is that fossil fuels don't wait until they get into the atmosphere and warm the atmosphere to kill you. If you live near fossil fuel infrastructure, it'll kill you immediately. And not just through cancer. It can. It can just blow up, Right. Like it's very volatile. It's very flammable. We're not supposed to be doing this. I cannot stress that enough. And so is is a climate change is a deeply black issue in so many different ways in the past and present and in the future. So there can be no climate action, no climate justice. There is no defeating climate change without black liberation.
Marsha Cooke
Mary, you have said that traditional media kind of subsists in this conventional wisdom in their coverage. Can you tell me what you meant by that and what should journalists do when covering climate and other issues impacting communities, not just ours?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Oh, I met a lot of things by that, and I could talk forever. But the first one that that kind of pops to my mind is that there's this conventional wisdom that if you tell people how scary climate change is, they'll shut down and they'll never do anything about it. And that that irritates me, right, because I take my cues in the world and then climate space's from not the preceding environmental movement or the conservation movement, but from the civil rights movement. Nobody told anybody at the time that Jim Crow was like friendly. You know what I mean? Like, nobody hid the truth of what they were up against at that time. Like, if you look, people talk about Martin Luther King as this very hopeful person. He was actually just more determined than he was hopeful. So there's this mythology in climate spaces that you have to give people hope in order for them to get active. And as a black person, that doesn't make any sense to me. I don't like anybody watering something down to me when I can tell full well what I'm really up against. And so there's kind of this idea that, like, don't scare people, but that dumbs down the story and people can see straight through you. And it's confusing. And that was actually what took me such a long time to get into climate work myself, because every time I would get close to it, people were like, Oh, no, no, but we're still hopeful. We have the solution. I'm like, Okay, cool. Well, you got it then, right? You don't need me. I'm going to go work on something else. And there's also this sort of conventional wisdom that climate change is this big bad that's coming for everybody. And while there is some truth to that, right, like if you live on Earth, you need to be worried about climate change. But it does affect black people first and worse and is deeply entangled with our oppression throughout the centuries. So and it doesn't do anybody any good to obfuscate that.
Lauren Williams
I was going to say this is one of the reasons why when we launched Capital B, we wanted to make sure that we were launching with an environmental justice reporter specifically for our black audience because, while, tons of mainstream news organizations have huge climate reporting sections and invest a ton of money in covering climate, even do stories that might do the reporting about how climate might be affecting black communities. Worse, they're doing those stories for white audiences, and there's so little of this reporting that is for the very people that it's affecting the most. And that's the investment that we really wanted to make. You know, that was always at the forefront of. Of what our mission was going to be.
Marsha Cooke
Talk to us a little bit about what it is that you're doing that traditional news organizations are not. In addition to not covering black communities.
Lauren Williams
We're centering black people in the stories and we're centering black audiences in our mission. I think it's the combination of those two and the consistent combination of those two that we're doing that is different. I mean, we might be covering the same news story last year, the Dobbs decision, for instance, and we're all covering the same thing. But our story is going to be about how abortion access is a black issue, because it is because black women disproportionately get abortions. And so that's the story that we have. And literally no one else had it before we had it. No one else wrote that piece in that way before we did. And that's the difference. And that's the mission for us. We are always going to center our target audience in the story. And that we are always going to focus on audience because it's about the importance of reaching people with the information, because information is power. When people have information, particularly local news information, which is a huge part of our mission, they are more likely to take civic action. They are more likely to be squeaky wheels at things like school board meetings or. We're not just talking about civic action and presidential elections. We're talking about like hyper local civic action. These are things that, you know, really empower communities to take action. That's why we want to make sure that we are reaching people with a drumbeat of empowering information.
Marsha Cooke
How would you describe the work that you're doing building on the legacy of black news organizations, traditional black news organizations that have existed, but many I don't know how many in the audience know about the Chicago Defender and the Amsterdam News and those kinds of outlets. How is Capital B building on that legacy? Is it the centering of black stories and voices? Are there other aspects that you're thinking about as you're building this out? For instance, I believe you want to open a newsroom in Gary, Indiana.
Lauren Williams
Right? Yes. I mean, there is a long and storied history of black media in this country. And so many of the news organizations that have been around for decades and even centuries at this point are still around in cities that have sparked change in this country, like sparking the Great Migration and getting Truman to to integrate the troops in World War Two and really amazing things and continue to serve their community as well. And what we want to do is add heft to the information that is out there for black communities as local news has been diminished. It's hurt the entire industry, and that's included the legacy black press. And with a nonprofit model like ours that has a different sort of organizational model, where we have a national news organization that supports local newsrooms that we're opening around the country, you know, we think we have a sustainable model that is going to add more news to black communities that need it. And so we are absolutely inspired by building upon hopefully working with the black news organizations that have been doing this for so long in these communities.
Marsha Cooke
Mary, you just wrapped up a pretty wonderful podcast called Hot Take, which you co-hosted with Amy Westervelt first. Congratulations. That was a podcast. That was, what, three years?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Yeah. Yeah. About.
Marsha Cooke
Can you share a little bit about how that came to be your podcast? And also, where is it now?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Well, the last part is easier to answer, its retired. The podcast and the newsletter is retired, but it came to be because Amy and I became best friends. I reached out to her because I adored her other podcast Drilled, which is still going. You should all go listen to it. Amy is really big into climate accountability, just like I was saying about understanding the causes of climate change. You need to understand like the villains in the story, we both kind of felt like climate change had been this victim full story and villain list story for way too long, and so that the fossil fuel industry and their enablers had created this world where the victim and the villain were the same person and it was you. So like, what are you supposed to do that kind of tied your hands for? You basically are just like, stop hitting yourself. Right. And so I loved her approach to telling the story of climate change as a true crime story. And so we became really fast friends and pretty quickly started talking about doing a podcast together and was like, Oh, we could do climate change news. And I was like, That doesn't sound all that exciting. And then was like, Let's do climate change media criticism, because that was what we were texting about anyway. And we were like, Oh, that's going to be fun. I was like, okay, if I'm going to do this in addition to everything else, I need to be able to have fun. I need to be able to tell dad jokes. I need to be able to like, be goofy with it and to be unconventional. And so, yeah, it just kind of went from there. And yeah, we had a really good time.
Marsha Cooke
That's wonderful. I like to think of that podcast as leading with empathy and humor. And as you said earlier, for those of us who still fear science, I wasn't frightened, I think I understand climate or the climate crisis a little bit more now because you've calmed me down. So thank you for that podcast. When you… when you think about the concerns today, what's the big thing that worries you when thinking about climate coverage in this country?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Consistency. Absolutely. We've seen this over and over again. Amy and I, as we were doing the podcast, big newsrooms would make these huge announcements, right. We're going to cover climate change. That's the story of our day. We saw a lot of it right before the pandemic. Everybody's announcing these new climate deaths. They're so proud of them. And then silence, like so many of them, their idea of creating a climate desk was to give their one white male reporter a newsletter. That's not a climate strategy. That is not a media strategy at all. And so it was just really frustrating to see them make these big splashy headlines about it and then just go away is the story that you need to stick with. And the other thing that bugged me on just pretty much the same level is that climate change is always like siloed out. So when we first started with the pandemic as a great example, the pandemic pushed climate change out of the headlines. Even though we had a whole continent on fire. At that point, Australia was like just straight up burning and all we could talk about was the pandemic. However, if you're talking about the pandemic, it was very rare that you saw a pandemic article that did not mention the economy. So it's considered ridiculous to report on almost any story without reporting on the economy is considered incomplete. But if you report on any story without talking about the planet it happens on. Then that's perfectly fine. Nobody flagged that as an omission. But we can do without an economy way quicker than we can do without an ecology. So we need to get our priorities in order.
Marsha Cooke
So I think this is a perfect moment because you're saying something that seemingly is obvious. What is it about us black women that we see things that others don't? We're magical. We're magical Black women.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
I don't know. I think is we have no choice but to see the things that other people don't see because we have so many natural predators that are also unnatural predators. So like when you have to be on guard like that because there are so many systems designed to get you. You have to be on guard. Right. And I think about what type of world we will be living in if black women have been listened to and heeded so much longer ago, Like imagine if people had listened to Octavia Butler. You know, like if you read Parable of the Sower or Parable of the Talents it reads like, I don't know, something happening outside your window right now. She saw it all coming and so many other black women saw it before her. And so it's like, I don't know. I think it was Clint Smith. It's like that ancient African-American proverb is “We tried to tell y'all.” Yeah.
Lauren Williams
I think that we take responsibility. I don't know if it's that we have the power of sight that others don't. I think th at we tend to see and then do. And I think there are a lot of historical cultural reasons why that might be, that I don't even want to get into why. It's pretty depressing. But I think that that's our role. And in in America, we take it on. It's it's tiring. I think it's a lot. And but but that's there's no magic to it. I think it's who we are and the space that we occupy.
Marsha Cooke
So when we talk about that, we're tired. I think, Mary, you said, Yeah, we're tired. But the real problem becomes when we are then sick and tired. Mary, you wrote a really beautiful piece in New York magazine not too long ago where you you spoke eloquently about being vulnerable and also being burnt out. Can you give me give us a bit of a sense of. Why there was that burn out and why you felt compelled to write about it and be very public about it.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Well, I decided to be public about it because I knew I couldn't possibly have been alone. I think, you know, burnout has been this word that we've had out there in the zeitgeist that we've been talking about a lot more. I think that first big burnout essay dropped around 2019 right before we all went into quarantine. And then, you know, we've been talking about climate change more. I've been happy to see both of those conversations develop pretty quickly. The burnout conversation got complicated by, you know, well, this is what burnout looks like when you're a black woman. I wanted to be like, this is what burnout looks like when you're a black woman trying to stop a burning planet. And so it is like a very different type of conversation because it's like I you can't stop, right? Like, if we let everybody else build a new world without us, they'll build a new world that isn't for us. And so it's not like I can just walk away from climate work, even though it is burning me out. And the other reason it's so exhausting is because, unfortunately, the climate movement is still incredibly white. That's not to say that black folks are not a part of it. Obviously, we are a lot obviously a lot of us have been a part of it since the very, very beginning. But we have to do that while also balancing so many other priorities. At the same time, though, those priorities are not in conflict. So it's difficult to add all of those things together. And there's also, you know, since we've told everybody, you listen to black women, there's been this movement of like, let black women do all the work, right? Let black women lead. And what's a black woman shows up, It's like, all right, the cavalry's here. She's got it. This girl is on fire and strong black woman and magical negress and dah dah dah, and like, I hate all of that. It's like, soon as I start to do something, it's like, I can't wait to see this movie or, you know, get up and help, right? Like, this is your mess, clean it up. Right? So, like, I don't at the same time that you don't want to let people build the new world without you, you also don't want to take on all the work of doing it yourself, because then you wind up saving everybody else at your own expense. I wrote about it because when I had to, it was like as a writer, it was my last step in my healing process. And I also kind of wanted to write about it and also talk to other black women about it. That was one of the first. That is the first piece I've ever written that I interviewed people for, because, one, I wanted to know that I wasn't alone. And I also wanted to talk to them to be like, How are you avoiding this? Because I never want to feel this way again. What sort of boundaries are you creating to protect yourself and what can I learn from you? And so that was a big part of why I wrote it.
Marsha Cooke
Lauren, your work is absolutely and unequivocally challenging. I like to say that the work that you're both doing is going to save our democracy. No pressure. No pressure. Okay. But how do you set boundaries? You just said that it's tiring and exhausting, but you're trying to build newsrooms across the country, not just local newsrooms, but national newsrooms. What are the boundaries that you set to take care of yourself while acknowledging that the work needs to be done? And you've both just said you're here for it.
Lauren Williams
I'm not good at setting boundaries. I have a friend who's also a CEO in nonprofit news, and whenever I see her, she says, Now what are you doing for self-care? And it feels like an attack because my … I'm always like, uh. I think. I have to come up with a lie. With a lie or something on the spot because there's nothing very much. And like the startup founders hamster wheel right now, the pressure to figure out the self-care is in itself some sort of additional stress on me. And so, like, I know that I can't keep running at this clip, but I also know that this isn't something that's been put upon me. I have put this upon myself. I made the choice to leave my previous job. My co-founder and I came up with this idea. I chose this role. I chose the scope of this role. I run the thing. It feels very different than my burnout and stress felt when I was the editor in chief in my previous role when I was working for someone else. You know, the fatigue feels wildly different. The stress feels wildly different than it did when it was for someone else's purpose and not the purpose of a news organization that I co-founded and deeply, deeply believe in.
Marsha Cooke
Is there something about. The work of journalism, the work of writing, the work of reporting on climate, the climate crisis that is similar in some way. We talked about this a little bit earlier. You mentioned that that there is almost a collective trauma in some of the reporting that is necessary, that kind of is a throughline for both of you and for many other writers, journalists at this particular time, but I think it's been historic.
Lauren Williams
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, this is something that we we really had to think about when we were setting up this newsroom that we were hiring a bunch of black journalists. We knew that our staff would be predominantly black or assumed that our staff would be predominantly black, covering some pretty heavy issues: environmental justice, criminal justice, the intersection of racism and fill in the blank. And that we were going to really have to think hard about the burnout of our reporters who would be very consistently faced with covering issues that affected their own lives. And in particular, you know, we're hiring. We're really dedicated to hiring local for our local newsrooms. So not even like issues that kind of broadly affect their lives, but locally, like issues that are affecting their grandma and their actual hometowns. So much of what is understood as rural in America is understood as is white. And in the deep south there are like fully black rural counties that are completely kind of ignored. And in sort of the American media, and there's not a lot of sunlight there. And I think there's a lot of work that can be done. We're new, so we haven't quite gotten to that place yet. But, you know, it has to be a constant consideration for us of how to make sure our staff isn't going to be traumatized by the work that we're doing and maybe understanding that it can't be forever. And there needs to be a rotation out of beets and folks need to we have to put a person's whole self before the job. This is, as Marsha knows, not the way that journalism works or not the way it is historically worked. Like we we were supposed to be. People with no emotions, people with no feelings, people who were supposed to have come to this with some kind of blank slate, which is a whole other can of worms. But that's not how we're running our newsroom. That's not how we're thinking about the approach to the work. And we can, if we want to be, the kind of newsroom that is going to allow people to bring their whole self to the work.
Marsha Cooke
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Marsha Cooke, sitting in for Farai Chideya. If you're just joining us, we are coming to you from the 2023 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. I've been talking to co-founder and CEO of Capital B, Lauren Williams, and co-creator and co-host of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter, Mary Annaïse Heglar. Let's listen.
Mary, I think that there is a moment with the piece that you wrote and then then I think there was a subsequent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review that you penned or you were interviewed for that touched upon the I the t word. It's the trauma of seeing our planet implode. How do you better care for yourself now?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
So working on that – developing new strategies every day. One of the things I like to say is that Noah's my love language. So one of the things that I got from the interviews I did for that New York magazine piece is when I was talking to Jacqueline Patterson, who is an amazing environmental justice advocate and leader, and she said that she was hesitant to say whether or not she had burns out because she was like, I always had the energy to do the work because I got to wake up every day and be in the service of black people. And I really took that to heart. And I remembered that when I took time off from pretty much everything over the summer to try to get over my burnout. There was a period where I said no to everything that wasn't led by black people. And I learned that, like there are going to be periods where I'm sorry that the way that the white climate movement operates is often extremely extractive and it will extract your whole soul if you let it. I thought I had a handle on that before, and then it was like, you're going to have to be a whole lot more careful about that in the future. So I went through this period of just really strategically reclaiming my time and recalibrating my boundaries for myself. Am I always the best at enforcing them? No, I think I'm getting a little bit better. And also just having circles of black women in climate work around me. It's a kind of hold me accountable to my own boundaries. And we kind of like help protect each other in that way. One of the things I also learned in the process of writing that essay is that so many, like a lot of the women in the story, were friends of mine, and we were like, Oh my gosh, I haven't talked to you in so long. I thought you were so busy. I didn't want to bother you. And I was like, Oh my God, I thought the same thing about you. And we were like, Yeah, but I'm not too busy for you. And so we kind of had that moment of like, recalibrating those relationships. So, yeah, I'm just learning what I have capacity for and what I don't and not feeling any type of way about not having capacity for something.
Marsha Cooke
When we think about the future…not necessarily that we can see the future, call it out, but have a sense. There has to be somewhere in there a wish for the future, especially as we think about media. What is your great wish for the future of media from where you both sit today? You can be hopeful or you can be Debbie Downer. It's okay.
Lauren Williams
I was gonna say, it would be weird to have a downer wish, but I guess if you really hated the media, it wouldn't be. But my wish is that for the news media to survive, but in a much, much improved form, I wish that it would survive in a way that serves the people of this country and connects them with true information that helps them to navigate their lives and preserves democracy and the planet.
Marsha Cooke
Mary?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Huh…I was hoping to have a better answer by the time I got on the stage. But the best one I can think of is… my wish is that it would be funded. And that's a complicated answer because I'm not super sold on capitalism. So we get rid of that and maybe we don't really need to be funded so much. So I hope that is funded and that is funded equitably.
Marsha Cooke
So I am going to end with a quote and then ask if there are questions, which I'm really hopeful that there will be, because we've got two superior women here.
Lauren Williams
Three!
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Very true.
Marsha Cooke
Gosh. Thanks. In an article written by Farai Chideya entitled “How We Save Our Body Politic: Reflections from a Black Female Journalist on America at the Precipice,” written in 2020. I call what I went through the “Black Cassandra Complex.” Black women often see the future because we have to hone our pattern recognition skills to survive, and we have to imagine a better future to carry on. But when we sound the alarm, no one listens to us. In fact, we get penalized for speaking uncomfortable truths. As one friend of mine who is a black female tech investor, said, I wish it didn't cost us to tell the truth. I now open the floor to questions. And question number one. Thank you so much.
Audience Question
The conversation around climate change is often debated in juxtaposition to job creation. So how do you reconcile the often argument that when we focus resources on solving the climate change problems, it often leads to the elimination of jobs? Yeah, a lot of the arguments that I hear from people who turn a blind eye to climate change is because they feel like it cost their constituents jobs.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Yeah, I think there are other jobs to be created. There's jobs to be created in the dismantling of the fossil fuel industry and a fossil fuel infrastructure, which is incredibly dangerous. So that's a job for someone to do. And then if we are going to continue to have energy. Someone needs to install the solar panels, build the solar panels, build the electric cars, build the wind turbines. The fossil fuel industry is able to pay the wages that it's able to pay because then the argument becomes, well, those jobs aren't as well paid as the fossil fuel jobs. Fossil fuel jobs are paid well because the fossil fuel industry is subsidized. So take away their subsidies and give it to clean energy. I think that pretty much sells itself like the fossil fuel industry is an artificial employer. It's not an actual employer. I hope that helps.
Audience Question
Hi. Hi, everyone, to thank you for your time day and talking about your experiences and this question. More probably for Lauren. I know you just started your business in the last year. What is your goal before the end of this year? And then what is it your five year goal or wish?
Lauren Williams
Our big, big plan for this year is to open our second local newsroom in Gary, Indiana. So that's the big plan that we're working towards. And we're hiring an editor and building towards that in five years. You know, we want to expand our local news network around the country into three additional markets, as well as expand our national newsroom and do more ambitious investigative and data journalism and cover more beats and expand the beats that we currently cover just to be able to do more and reach more people. I could talk for much longer about all the things that we've got in store.
Audience Question
What advice would you give current black journalists to push for our stories to be told with our authentic lens, while working at a white institution?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Oh, Lord. Lauren, I think that’s why you started Capital B.
Lauren Williams
That is a really hard question to answer because so much of it depends on the institution, right? Because there are some institutions and some editors that, you know, are much more open than other institutions and other editors. There's some places that are super bureaucratic and hard to change, and there are other places that are open to change. I think the first thing I would say is to understand your your newsroom. And that's not to say don't try. I would say start by trying. Start by pushing for that change and pitching and doing the work to the extent that you can to try to to do the work that you believe in. But I would also say, don't kill yourself trying to do that. And I think there's a certain point where you're going to see if you're working at the kind of place that's going to value you and that kind of work. And once you figure that out, and if the answer is no, I think you should start shopping that resume.
Marsha Cooke
I'll just say. Look for co-conspirators. See if there are people in that newsroom at your end who have the same fire to tell those stories. And there is strength in numbers, right? So don't try and do everything on your own.
Audience Question
So my question is and you talk about it a little bit through the lens of white supremacy, but how much are both of you thinking about capitalism as you shape a news organization and as you do the work that you're doing?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Yeah. So in the last episode, I think it was the last episode of our podcast, someone asked basically, can we solve climate change without getting rid of capitalism? And where does that put us since there are other viable alternatives to capitalism? And one, I don't necessarily think that there are no viable alternatives. I think indigenous societies have that plenty of other models that have lasted for millennia. But I think that there's plenty of room to move the needle toward a more sustainable planet within capitalism now actually solving it. If capitalism can solve climate change, it needs to do it like somebody needs to show me how that works. I'm going to move that burden of proof off of me and onto the system that so many people want to uphold. So I personally would be happy to part ways with it. I wonder if the way out of the climate crisis is degrowth and maybe we just don't need to be in such big societies anymore. You know, as somebody who's on Twitter pretty often, I'm actually kind of tired of hearing where everybody in the world thinks all the time don't seem like the human brain was meant for that.
Lauren Williams
I'm not actively thinking about capitalism. We live in a society that we live in. Capital B is a nonprofit, so it is not in itself a capitalistic enterprise. But, you know, we're funded by philanthropic dollars, so funded by a lot of capitalists. I don't think we could exist without capitalism in that sense. And to the extent that we are covering black people across the country and issues affecting black people and covering and understanding that black people and black opinion is not monolithic, we aren't promoting one ideology or another. That's my short answer. I'm not I'm not really thinking about capitalism as I'm thinking about the mission of Capital B.
Audience Question
Thanks for coming. So I'm a screenwriter, and we've seen in recent years more black stories from black creatives Get Out, Atlanta, Abbott Elementary that are obviously fictional bad heavy themes, black existence in America of African-American existence. As you're reporting real news guys feel about those films and TV shows, making the themes a part of it and trying to, I guess, reach an audience. Or I could talk about open discussion about it. And what do you guys think is the intersection or the relationship to what you are doing? Real world reporting, trying to educate people.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
I love those shows and so many others like them, like Insecure and South Side, which sadly just got canceled, broke my heart. I actually think that some of the most interesting climate stories I've seen have been on on those types of shows. Abbott Elementary just had… it was just one line about climate change, but it was one of the best lines of dialog I've ever seen about climate change on TV, where it was like, you know, the students were like, How am I supposed to act on climate change? We're still in school. You know, it's like just one line. But it was actually pretty brilliant. I May Destroy You, the HBO show by Michaela Coel is one of the best climate episodes I have ever seen on television and talked about it through the very unmonolithic blackness of that moment was really, really beautiful to see. So I think they both kind of inform one another. Like one is like showing you what the black experience of climate change is, and the other is telling you. And this kind of just like nonfiction versus fiction, I think like one of my favorite writers, E.L. Doctorow, said that historians tell you what happened, novelists tell you what it felt like. And that's kind of the difference between these two things, too. And both are very important.
Marsha Cooke
I think the world is rich with non-scripted and scripted material. And I work in documentaries and there's enormous power in documentary filmmaking, but there's also incredible reach within scripted. So for the stories that are taken from the daily lives of ordinary people across the nation, then it's subsequently turned into scripted. And I work in sports, and I think it's like I have an opportunity to be stealth like, and take the story of a football player or a franchise and weave in stories that talk to social justice, politics, the economy. But when it becomes scripted to a much larger audience, then we have the ability to, dare I say, change hearts and minds. We all love those scripted shows and they're very powerful. And I deeply believe that if they take a topic that is needed to be understood on a much larger scale. Holy cow. That's great. Go forth and conquer. Write those scripts.
Audience Question
Thank you all so very much for everything you do. My question is on climate justice, and it's the notion of how much it's been so whitewashed. And so those of us that are trying to get a more broader perspective on environmental justice. What are your suggestions for those of us that are at the table trying to broaden the conversation around climate to environmental justice?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
I think just don't leave the table and don't let anybody argue you out of what you know to be true. Are convinced you not that you don't see what you see. I think what often happens at those tables is it can kind of start to turn into like, we'll come back for that or we'll make sure equity is included in the implementation. That's a red flag right there. Equity is not an afterthought, is not something that you do on the back end. It needs to be at the center of it from the very, very beginning. And so insist on that and don't stop insisting on it.
Marsha Cooke
And I'll say that's a perfect time to say thank you. But what I loved about that question and then your response, it's kind of at the heart of the discussion today, which is we see things, we say things and often are greeted with disbelief. Don't stop. I could break into song here, but I won't. You can never miss a good lyric. But thank you all so very much. This is a wonderful conversation and I really appreciate each and every one of you coming to join us today. Thank you.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Thank you so much.
Marsha Cooke
That was co-founder and CEO of Capital B, Lauren Williams, and climate justice writer, co-creator and co-host of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter Mary Annaïse Heglar.
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch Farai Chideya and Nina SPENCELEY are our executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Anoa Changa is our producer. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
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