Here to Help
Here to Help is a look at how people’s experience, strength, and hope inspire them to want to help others.
Here to Help
Ellen McGirt: Amplifying Diversity and the Impact of AI on Journalism
Get set for an enlightening conversation with the incredibly talented Ellen McGirt, editor-in-chief of Design Observer. From selling Avon products at a tender age of eleven to pioneering the race and inclusive leadership beat at Fortune, Ellen's journey is nothing short of inspiring. We draw from her well of wisdom as she shares her relentless efforts to amplify diverse voices in the design industry and her latest venture, the Equity Observer. We decode her extraordinary journey that beautifully blends perseverance, resilience, and a deep-rooted desire to drive change.
Transitioning from the art world to journalism is no easy feat, but Ellen McGirt has navigated her way with aplomb. Ellen's cross-country expedition to understand the multifaceted diversity of America has served as a cornerstone in her writing, and we dive into this transformative experience.
As a closing note, we engage in a thought-provoking discussion with Ellen on the impact of AI on journalism. From potential repercussions to the futuristic vision of technology-dominated workspaces, this conversation is an eye-opener.
Hello everyone, I am Chris Huyams, ceo of Indeed. My pronouns are he and him. Welcome to the next episode of here to Help. For accessibility, I will offer a quick visual description. I am a middle-aged man with dark-rimmed glasses and wearing a blue sweater. Behind me is a bookcase with a collection of books and LPs. Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us going all day and what powers. That mission is. People here to help is a look at how experience, strength and hope inspires people to want to help others.
Speaker 1:My guest today is Ellen McGurk. Ellen is editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a 20-year-old media company on a mission to expand the definition of design in the service of a better world. Ellen will bring new voices and reporting on equity, business and society and a new newsletter called Equity Observer. Previously at Fortune, ellen established the race and inclusive leadership beat in 2016 with long-form features and Race Ahead, a daily newsletter on race and inclusion in corporate life and beyond. The column received a New York Press Club Award for commentary, a National Headliner Award and the Stephen Heller Prize for commentary from the AIGA. While at Fortune, ellen helped launch and lead Fortune Connect, a global membership community of purpose-driven executives focused on making the world better through business.
Speaker 1:Previously, ellen wrote for money, time and fast company, where she wrote or contributed to more than 20 cover stories and created the digital series, the 32nd MBA. Her reporting has taken her inside the sea suites of Metta, nike, intel, xerox and Cisco, on the campaign trail with Barack Obama and across Africa with Bono to study breakthrough philanthropy. I was a regular reader of Ellen's Race Ahead newsletter and have had the very distinct pleasure of talking with Ellen on the other side of the microphone on a few occasions at the Culturati Summit on Fortune's Leadership Next podcast and earlier this year on the stage at South by Southwest. She is a brilliant journalist and interviewer, but her own story is remarkable. So for this final here to help episode of 2023, I am super excited to turn the tables and get to ask Ellen questions and share that perspective with you all. Ellen, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Chris, it's so wonderful to be here with you and the whole Indeed family. I'm a little nervous if it was anybody else but you. I don't like answering a lot of questions about myself, but I'm happy to be here and, just for accessibility, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a brown-skinned woman having a very good curly hair day, and behind me is also some books and posters that speak to my philosophy of inclusion and hard work.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to spend a little bit of time on what I think of as the Ellen McGurk origin story. It's kind of like a superhero origin story and there's a bunch of ways to get to this, but when we were talking last week, I asked one question and that sort of opened up the entire can of worms. So I'll just ask that same question Tell us about your first job.
Speaker 2:It is a good one and it is a good icebreaker question. My first real job was I was an 11-year-old Avon lady and that job explains everything about how I got started in life. It just could take me a couple minutes to get there. It was gonna be worth it, I promise.
Speaker 2:So I grew up in a chaotic home and a chaotic time in history the 1960s and 70s in New York City. It's a wildly diverse neighborhood that now that I really reflect on it, was kind of a miracle that it existed. It was the southernmost part of Harlem at the time. Now it's really the upper west side. But my neighbors included Holocaust survivors and Black Panthers and immigrant families from the Dominican Republic and every kind of person and family and configuration in between, and I loved living there.
Speaker 2:But my mother was white and my father was black and he was serving World War II in the segregated army, came back home, couldn't vote all of those things that we know in history migrated up to New York as part of the Great Migration and ended up the few veterans benefits he could get included education. So we became a social worker and attorney and they work for the Children's Aid Society and I actually have some news about that I'm gonna tell you later and the shock of my mother, who was fourth-generation New Yorker from an Irish immigrant family. Marrying a black man was just too much for my grandmother in particular. So she had done two things is that she had decreed that nobody else in the family in my extended white family knew who I was, and so I didn't meet my cousins until I was in in my 30s. But she also took it upon herself to make sure that I could work as hard as I could to overcome the handicap of being black in mixed race, which was one of the few things that she and my father shared. He was very worried about me. He thought that my prospects would be limited, excuse me, I could be a nurse or maybe a teacher, but mostly keep my head down. They were on the same page about that. She didn't like my hair. She was worried that if I didn't learn to play golf and tennis I wouldn't meet good people. So that was sort of the message that I was getting at home. But the big problem was is that there was I grew up in a violent home my father I don't looking back, I'm not sure what made him blow up so often, but after a decade of really tough violence and near lethal violence from my mom, she and I escaped and we were sort of couch surfing for a long time. We were drift for over a year and she finally got a job and we finally found a little apartment that we could afford in Connecticut and on the.
Speaker 2:This is where I get into the Avon lady part. I was probably I was 11. In the laundry room there was a cork board and there was with a sign on it from a woman named Renee, who we knew because she was our Avon lady, that she was giving up. Her route sort of was like a paper route and I had to get up on the washing machine to pull it down and I brought it to my mom and I said I'm going to do this, like how hard could it possibly be? And it ended up being such a formative experience for so many reasons. One was that the apartment complex that we lived in in Brantford, Connecticut, was not the kind of place where people whose lives were going well ended up. So back then in the 70s if you I mean you needed your Avon lady like there wasn't easy access to good cosmetics and the grocery store didn't have them and the department stores were far away and your Avon lady had free samples and discounts and I took it on release.
Speaker 2:And I was a kid kid, Chris, Like I was small. I was in no way an influencer. I was still playing in the woods, you know, behind our house with my friends every day after school. But the they took me so seriously, I took all, I read all the material, I took all the courses that they, that they Avon, offered, and I just would call all the customers, I would tell them it was coming and I would pack up their orders and I borrowed a little red wagon and I would deliver it.
Speaker 2:But the if, as I mentioned, if you lived there, you were in trouble, Like there was a lot of things that were not going well for you, but you were, maybe you were also the kind of person who would use the N word and not think about it, or use Jew as a verb without thinking about it, Right? So these were also the mothers of the kids that made the black kids table in middle school necessary, Right? So this was a tough, chewy environment and even though I came from a tough home, I did not come from a tough community, so this was new for me. But those women showed up for me Like they knew what I was trying to do. They knew we didn't have enough money, we knew that we didn't have enough furniture, that we knew that you know, I couldn't get school supplies if I didn't have this. And they, they sat through my demonstrations and they referred me to other people and they accepted my advice and they accepted my, my discounts.
Speaker 2:And it was a early, strange and wonderful lesson in how people who are very different from each other and are sometimes on the wrong side of issues from each other can really get together to do something very simple and it's. I would have been lost without them at that time in my life. And so when I, now that I write about diversity and inclusion, I think about race and all the stuff that's happening in business. I do remember them and the the pathway back to grace, even when issues of race and language and identity are unfamiliar to you. So that's, that's my A-bond lady story.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. It does inform a lot of your world, for you and what you bring to your stories. So I'd love to there's this, then long and interesting middle part. I'd love to hear a little bit of the story of how you ended up in writing and the sort of that detour along the way that sort of pushed you in this direction.
Speaker 2:It was literally a detour too. It was a very long road trip. I had left school, I went to Brown. I was very lucky. It was an interesting experience and I had connected with some people who were in the gallery and museum business. Risd is there. It's a very sort of artsy town.
Speaker 2:I was making a very deliberate choice not to join the Reaganomics generation there. Most of my friends went into banking and finance, so I gravitated towards the arts and nonprofit work, which was a wonderful experience. But I did always want to be a writer and I didn't always want to just be writing wonderful labels for beautiful artwork. So I decided to take a risk. I had been selling art for quite a while and I ended up accepting a job offer because I'd put it out there that I wanted to do something else and I decided I wanted to write about or create some sort of media property around women and women in financial safety and financial health. So I accepted a job.
Speaker 2:I was living in New York at the time with a person who used to buy art from me, who's based in San Diego, who had a brokerage firm small brokerage firm, a boutique firm, which is something I thought I was familiar with living in New York with all my friends in finance and my plan, my nominal plan, was I would work there for a couple of years and get fluent in the language of money and investing. I didn't want to go back to school and I would create something. The internet was pretty new and I didn't really have a clear plan after that, but I thought once I had a foundation, I could go from there. Well, I had to fast track my plan because the firm that I joined ended up being so different from what I expected. All my due diligence questions got me nowhere. They were, in fact, a firm that invested in junior mining stocks gold stocks, silver, nickel working through some of the smaller developers around the world and some of the smaller stock exchanges around the world. Some might call them pump and dump, but I think that is a pretty fair description of what it was that I suddenly found myself doing. I'll give you one fun fact for this sort of brown, this brown skin, new York City liberal, the then the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, one of our biggest clients. That was an amazing thing to discover and, as I'm doing all of this soul searching and figuring out that this is not that investing in fact is not that complicated the kind of thing that I wanted to have conversations with women about. I just went for it. I just started, I worked with some developers, I learned enough coding to be able to get something up there, and I created a five part series called Cassandra's Revenge Women Well Than the Ultimate Revenge which is really just getting yourself up to speed, listening to your inner voice and taking good care of yourself and your family. That was wonderful and it took off because things took off in the world. Back then, aol had created a site for women called Electra. They hired me immediately as a brand new writer about all of this one chapter, head of the class to write regular columns for them.
Speaker 2:And then September 11th happened and that was sort of the second big soul searching moment. I had lost a lot of friends in New York again so many friends in finance and I was just beginning my writer's journey and thinking my gosh, I have not been to most parts of the country. I don't really know who my fellow citizens are, I don't know how they live, I don't know what they care about and what they think. So as a writer, as a broken hearted writer only will do. I rented a car, I recruited a friend and then I drove 16,000 miles zigzagging across the country interviewing people about their lives, what they cared about. We did a gift chain along the way Just tell me something about you, give me something that represents you and I'll give it to the next person.
Speaker 2:I got a lot of confidence talking to people who were very, very different from me, which I thought I already knew how to do. But you spent three days snowed into. The poorest county in the United States was on the Pine Ridge Reservation. You really understand how big and wonderful and strange this country is and the myth that everybody has a voice and everybody has a path. So that was wonderful. But that's exactly how I got into mainstream journalism. I had rolled into New York with like $18,000 on my credit card, which is just an unmanageable number for me. No job. I was publishing a little bit as I went and I got a call from a friend who worked at Money Magazine and I literally just pulled up in front of Timing with my car just filled with boxes from all around America and just waited until it was my turn to go up and look reliable enough to get a job and I did, and that was June 2002. And that was when I entered really the grown-up media world.
Speaker 1:MUSIC. If you like this interview and want to hear more, hit, Subscribe, Catch up on any here to help episodes you might have missed, like my conversation with Sterling Harjo, and get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Ellen McGirt after this break MUSIC. I want to jump ahead to sort of how you, I guess maybe pulled together, you know your life experience and perspective into what it was that you were writing about. You got a DM in 2015 about an opportunity. Can you tell sort of like leading up to and what that story was and where that led you?
Speaker 2:So I was spent six years at Money and I overlapped at Fortune 2007 at the same time, within the bigger timing, and I again wanted to start writing about other things. I brought real diversity and diverse voices, diverse stories, diverse people, ideas into everything I did. But I had sort of had it with the magazine Grind and I was taking some time writing this book and I got a DM from then the editor-in-chief of Fortune, cliff Leaf, who has since gone on to do other things, a person I hadn't talked to in seven years, a person I love and trust. He had a different role at the time and the question was do you, hey, ellen, have you been Any chance you want to write a story about why there's no black men in the executive ranks in the Fortune 500? So I was so intrigued and I was very skeptical and, chris, as you know, that this was going to go well that I was going to become part of a machine, an editorial machine, that was nervous about race or was nervous about how corporate America thinks about race or how our advertisers think about race, and what is it's going to be that? It was going to be a bigger battle than I was prepared for.
Speaker 2:I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't, and we did produce a really interesting story. My conditions were that we could only do it if we were willing to examine the systems in place where we lose talented men from birth to C-suite. And that meant school, that meant food, that meant maternal health, that meant the healthcare system, that meant school to prison pipeline. We had to mention all of those things as nodes on a journey that most of declarations and new initiatives and board announcements and recruiting efforts are not prepared to address. And they said, yes, it was a sort of a surprising perspective. We couldn't just write about the outliers who've made it through. They don't have as many lessons for us as we might think and the story went very, very well. But again, I was very suspicious and I was happy I was proven wrong.
Speaker 1:From that story. It sort of changed, I think, what you thought maybe your focus might be and talk a little bit about how you ended up in the role at Fortune and with Race Ahead and in a time I mean. So you had this beat from correct 2016 to just the beginning of this year An extraordinary time in this country to be thinking and talking about in a very, very direct and public way what race in America looks like. How did that transition happen and talk a little bit about your experience on that beat.
Speaker 2:I am astonished. I would never have pitched it. I would never have pitched the story about Black men in executive ranks because I'd had bad experiences with timing in the past I had mentioned that Money Magazine the world's most boring and most useful and most wonderful personal finance magazine for a long time wouldn't put Black people on the covers because they had researched. And this was told to me, to my sweet little surprised face, that we had researched. That said that people don't think Black people are good with money, so we can't risk it on the newsstand. Newsstand sales are really important to us. This is sort of pre-Internet, but still these kinds of assumptions and researchers are baked into the systems and how we market what we do and how we present what we do. But out of nowhere. The story did so well and it was so emotional and it hit so many notes and it got a conversation going among Black professionals, particularly Black men, who felt for the first time and reported that they felt for the first time that people were seeing their issues and that they were for all the women's conferences and all the disconverses, all the disconverses. There was a conversation about the experience of Black men in corporate life that they hadn't heard before and Fortune seemed like a humane business magazine that were really focusing on human issues. It was very gratifying. And so suddenly PWC who I will always be grateful for, like called up, like called through the switchboard and said I see, this was a wonderful piece. We're interested in race and equity in the workplace. We'd like to underwrite a daily newsletter on race and I became, I think, the fifth or sixth newsletter that we started to produce and with I signed into the Wordpress engine and that's it. That was it there. I got there, I went. We had a nominal machine then to produce these newsletters much more robust. Now I just went where I went. I think I saw my joke is by the time they noticed what I was writing about, it was too late. I had a big audience. It was a profit center. We had other advertisers sign on in a moment of real advertiser courage. We're going to go right in.
Speaker 2:That said, my first interview was Valerie Jarrett. I thought Hillary Clinton was going to be president. I thought I had time to develop a philosophy and develop a beat and begin to create the kinds of connections that I needed to. It was just emergency from the get-go the rise of Donald Trump specific version of hate speech, the rise of white grievance, that I'm talking about. Police shootings.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about violence, the things that I wasn't ever prepared for. I don't know that anybody was really prepared for that. It just took me in a direction that was so deeply human. I'm looking forward to recreating some of that with some more people on board at Equity Observer. The thing that I will always be most grateful for are the people I discovered who needed this information, who needed to know how to be better at whatever they were trying to be, who felt seen for the first time, or who were helping me figure out how to talk about psychological safety in the workplace or figure out how to talk about how the politics of this is affecting you. There was just nothing that was off limits, even if it took me a minute to figure out how to say it correctly. I will never have thought that I could join a community already in progress in that way, and I'm enormously surprised and grateful.
Speaker 1:So you started earlier this year as the editor-in-chief at Design Observer. Talk a little about how you ended up there and what it is that you hope to bring. How do you want to transform this role and what does it can allow you to do as a journalist?
Speaker 2:You know, I had a small role at a big company and now I have a bigger role in a smaller company that has always been aligned with a bigger view that stakeholders are the way forward, that if you bring different people to the table we can solve some big problems and have some fun and enjoy the beauty of the world and express ourselves, which sort of marries my earlier experience in the gallery, in the museum business and also in nonprofits but I had about a couple of years ago I was a guest on their podcast, design of Business, business of Design. I was like Donnie and Murray, I was the business person and it was a wonderful experience. I got to know my now partner and as we were getting to know each other and getting to know our philosophies, a couple of things occurred to me. One is as much as I loved and appreciated a lot of my experience in corporate media, there was no amount of work or no amount of attention or awards or relationships that I could make or provide that would ever get me a serious opportunity to lead something, and that's just.
Speaker 2:It happens to so many of us and I decided that if I wanted to end my career in a position to have real impact, to work with the team, to lead a team, to develop the voices of other people and to be sort of a safe and useful place, then I was going to have to take a risk, and it was about a two-year conversation on a regular basis with Jessica Hellfant, who was one of the co-founders of Design Observer, when we decided that not only did we like each other, but that we could build something that honored what she'd been trying to do for so many years as a practitioner, as an artist and as a journalist, and started as a blogging platform between four friends and just as many people as wanted to get on and talk about what they were doing and how the world could be better.
Speaker 2:They allowed it and they encouraged it, but we could do something interesting and I did an assessment of everything I'd done in the last seven years. The people I was contacted with, the privilege that I had to have access to powerful people who were doing interesting things, the privilege I had to have access to people who should be more powerful, who were doing interesting things, and think can we stitch something together here? And it was a nice slow burn and it's not like in the movies where someone taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, kid, I'm going to make you a star, or throws you the keys to an organization like you really have to build it, and it's been a wonderful experience, and as an armchair editor-in-chief for many, many years, it has been both humbling and exhilarating. We're small but we're mighty, and I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:I want to close by just talking a little bit about what has been clearly, I think, the most interesting business story of the last year, which is AI. So I'm curious from your perspective, between the hype and what you're actually seeing right now, what do you worry about and what do you think the actual impact of generative AI and other forms of AI on journalism looks like and might look like?
Speaker 2:The big picture of you, of what I'm mostly concerned about and what I continue to be to start to concern about, is the underlying engine around how technology has been created, particularly in the last 20 years. This move fast and break things, which is without any regard for what the actual consequences might be and has never been fully addressed. I am a slow down and understand things person and this just feels like we're just all the things that have created enormous harms to vulnerable people social platforms with hate and disinformation, a couch surfing app that has upended the housing market, a taxi replacement app that put community safety and labor protections allegedly in the backseat of you know, pardon the pun. All of these same impulses are in place before the technology is viable and ready continues to alarm me. I'm a believer that art and craft and performance and journalism and the things that people make will continue to be valued. You have to continue to find an audience for them and I think that will make this, that human thing, more valuable.
Speaker 2:I agree with you that the bigger issue is always going to be when the broad unified theory, the hype mode of what AI can be and it can be everything to everyone, who are we going to miss in the mix. I feel like it's my human journalist job to continue to bring attention to the vulnerable workers who would always be replaced by, you know, check out scanners and call center tech and losing them to the degree to which those were entry level jobs and a gateway to something else and paying attention to that gateway. I'm very worried about it and for every application that's doing it going to do a great job in detecting hard to detect tumors, which is a wonderful thing. That would make an actual technician and actual expert their jobs easier I'm worried about the people who will never get access to that technology because the technology is, you know, the system is not designed for them.
Speaker 2:The technology won't recognize their skin or their tissue and to the same degree that we're using the same algorithmic genius to profile people in low income housing, to profile people in the criminal justice system, which is not a system. So it's moving very fast and it's become everyone's job to ask better questions about how it's going to be applied in your life or what's around you. You don't need to be an expert in the complexity of AI to ask better questions. I'm hoping that this will be a way that we can all pay better attention to how it's unfolding. But I'm less worried about me and I'm more worried about the vulnerable people who are being written out of the future of their jobs. We can't new collar people fast enough to overcome what the billionaire class wants to do.
Speaker 1:My final question always is the same, and that is despite everything going on in the world and, frankly, despite everything that we've been talking about, what is it that leaves you with hope for the future?
Speaker 2:Now that I've gotten some rest, I am remain enormously energized by the resilience and the energy of individuals to connect with each other around things that are good, and when they're connecting with each other around things that are not so good, I remain hopeful that they will be able to sort out what the underlying impulse is. But connection is good, connection is real, and I resist the call to make it generational, like the up and coming people don't see color, the up and coming young people don't see this. I don't think that's quite true. But I think that there are people of all ages, of all persuasions, of all shapes, from all parts of the world who are looking to connect with each other about the simple joys of doing everything better and bringing more people along, and I think we outnumber the small number of people who want to keep us apart.
Speaker 1:Well, that is a beautiful way to wrap things up, ellen. This is such a treat. I have so enjoyed every conversation that we've had, but this is a really rare thing to get you to open up the way that you have, and I really appreciate your willingness to do that, and I just want to thank you. Thank you for joining us today, but thank you for everything you do to help everyone who is open and willing to see the world in a different way. And happy New Year.
Speaker 2:Happy New Year.
Speaker 1:Here to help is a production of Indeed. Today's episode was produced by Aidan McLaughlin, yvan Fallon and David Hartstein, shelby Haddon and the Blue Suitcase Productions team in Austin, texas, with technical support from Jacob Bennett and Edward Blisniak. Our theme music was composed by Noah Galambos and Noah Nelson. Thanks for listening to here to Help. Don't forget to like, subscribe and download the podcast to stay up to date with the latest episodes. Until next time.
