Raised in a Mexican-American family in San Antonio, Texas, Francisco’s mother insisted that he pursue a college degree. The importance of higher education would become an essential theme later in Francisco’s journalism career. As a student who loved writing, Francisco led and founded student newspapers at the middle school, high school, and collegiate level, eventually leading to a position with the Los Angeles Times. Join us for this important conversation about ethics in the workplace, the cost of higher education, how your identity and experience can bring valued perspective to your work, the debate about objectivity in journalism, and attending community colleges or local universities vs big name, out-of-state schools. This episode is dense with important issues for students and fantastic advice for anyone navigating their education and career path.
Raised in a Mexican-American family in San Antonio, Texas, Francisco’s mother insisted that he pursue a college degree. The importance of higher education would become an essential theme later in Francisco’s journalism career. As a student who loved writing, Francisco led and founded student newspapers at the middle school, high school, and collegiate level, eventually leading to a position with the Los Angeles Times. Join us for this important conversation about ethics in the workplace, the cost of higher education, how your identity and experience can bring valued perspective to your work, the debate about objectivity in journalism, and attending community colleges or local universities vs big name, out-of-state schools. This episode is dense with important issues for students and fantastic advice for anyone navigating their education and career path.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Francisco. He is a director of diversity and inclusion for a nonprofit organization. He teaches professionals and helps people network and build community. After working for several years in newsrooms and in media, he has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Communication Arts, and he has a Master's degree in Investigative and Data Journalism. Francisco, thanks so much for joining us today.
Francisco:I'm happy to be here.
Carrie:Francisco, can you take us back to your high school days and tell us a little bit about what you were thinking as you were exploring your options for college and any thoughts that you had about your own career path?
Francisco:For me, going to college was a must. I was fortunate to have a mom who did not go to college, but really viewed it as super important to getting us out of poverty, to make sure I have more security. And she just had a real love of knowledge and curiosity for the world. My grandparents came from Mexico and it just took a while with generational wealth and building that. Yeah, so my parents had it better. But I think, for us, you had to really focus on making sure that you were thinking about a viable path to having a better quality of life, and that higher ed was a critical part of that.
Carrie:That's awesome that you had that support. For other students who are first generation students, whether they have the support or not, as they're thinking about college, did you have any specific experiences that you would like to share with that population or like advice you wanna give as far as how to start approaching that when you perhaps don't have the type of resources or support within your household?
Francisco:Yeah, definitely. I think, you have to first kind of recognize where you're at and, do you have a sense of what you would like to do when you grow up? And I think even adults in the middle of their careers later, think about those questions. Like, oh yeah, totally. So what you decide now, you do not have to decide the rest of your life. I was pretty fortunate that, I really love writing and I love politics and history. And so when I found my career path, mine kind of brought all those together and I thought, wow, I can get paid to write basically the first draft of history about what people are doing in positions of power, what interesting people are doing in our community to make it better. And so I think you have to identify what are your passions, and then how can you parlay that into a career path where there will be a lot of scholarship opportunities, fellowship opportunities, internship opportunities. Sometimes you don't know exactly where to start and you just have to start somewhere. Whatever hobby you love or whatever subject in school you really connect with that. That's a good place to start mapping out, what would I like to do? Always knowing that nothing is set in stone. You can always change your mind later, but, you're not gonna be able to move forward if you don't start taking a first step.
Carrie:Yeah. That's great advice. And I love how you said you can participate in writing the first version of history. I never thought about it that way. That's such an interesting perspective. I love that.
Francisco:We really rely on historians later on in librarians and folks to kind of fact check, I think what we first see on the ground, you know, put context. But it is really critical. Like if you read any book or if you read anything that's a larger text, you will definitely realize like, oh, that came from a newspaper clipping. Yeah. Nowadays, it's not really a clipping anymore because of the digital world, but that's how we have kind of known what was going on back then when we look back and try to figure out why is the world the way it is today. For me, writing was like the first step because I figured out my personality early on was kind of shy. Writing was something I could do more on to myself. I was always interested in what was going on in the world. So that kind of made me get outta my shell. And I, I think that's a great concern I have for students nowadays is, I'm worried that because of the digital revolution that sometimes you, we don't get out enough. And certainly with the impact of the pandemic, which was we were all trying to keep each other safe and the world's still kind of figuring itself after that. Really you just look to what are your skills? And then you want to take on some challenges. It's gonna get boring if everything's too easy. So for me, it was a huge challenge to get over my shyness, to do my job, but it really enriched my life to know like what was going on in my community. And I think people really come back to that in any career. It's like, do I feel like I'm making an impact? That's where I think a lot of professionals can find fulfillment.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. So how did you take that interest and that desire to work in that capacity and apply it to your college search and decide what you wanted to major in and where you wanted to go?
Francisco:So for me, I did not know exactly what I was doing, and I had to ask questions of adults around me and say, I want to be a journalist. I wanna be a writer. What should I do? I had a little bit of a prequel to my high school experience, which was the middle school I ran for student council, at the small campus downtown that doesn't exist anymore. It was a really small Catholic school. And going to Catholic school back in the nineties was like a lot of low income students went. There was fellowships, there were scholarships. At the time the public schools were really struggling and so my mother was determined to make sure I didn't go to one because she was worried about college readiness. Mm-hmm. It's gotten so much better, thankfully, but in that experience when I ran for student council, I was kind of trying to figure out what I could actually do. And someone at the school, like a principal's daughter I think I spoke to was like, oh, you can start a student newspaper. And I have one older sister and she had been on the student newspaper and I remember like, you know, you look up to your older siblings. So yeah. So I was like, oh, that would be really cool. And I mean, it was on like Microsoft Word and we laid it out on that and we printed it in the school office. And it was just like, Oh God. Kinda like a long sheet folded over and yeah. When I saw my classmates who were in fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, their faces would light up seeing their name in print and like getting to take home this thing and other students seeing like, oh, I was written about. It was like, Hey, we got a new lunch menu. Yeah. Like it was literally the most local news, on the ground grassroots you could think of.
Carrie:Isn't that what middle school is though? I mean, really?
Francisco:Seriously. Yes. I mean, I still look really forward to lunch in my late thirties, but, but particularly back then, I mean, it was like breaking news that we had enchiladas today. So I think there was some groundwork laid there that I was already interested in politics. As I ran for student council, I wanted to get involved and then, I just asked around like, what could I do? And you know adults eventually will kind of tell you like, here are your options. When I got to high school, there was no student paper again. So, we had a really great English teacher who helped me start a new newspaper. And sometimes I clash with the administration, so I definitely very much learned what it was to bother those in power and To a degree hold them accountable. But I mean it was like having to do with again, the cafeteria and like menu prices and Right. And then, you know, featuring our athletes and featuring our active, really smart students. And I was decently smart, but we had a couple of like true geniuses on campus cuz it was a higher income Catholic school and I was there again on fellowship. I knew in some ways I think that was a challenge because I came with a lower expectation that sometimes people had of me, but also I had more focused attention. They knew I was a scholarship kid. Yeah. And so there was a degree of, I think we know we need to help'em. I mean this goes into a whole backstory about it was an all boys school and I did not realize yet I was gay. It was weird because doing the student newspaper put me in rooms and made me have interactions with guys that probably we had no social connection or mutual interest. But I think it broadened my horizons and in hindsight, some of them reached out to me and were like, oh, I'm so sorry. It was a jerk back then in the early two thousands and Wow. Really? Yeah, I think about, oh, at that point, you know, they realize like I was a human and probably with everything they see in the news and in politics, you know, I probably didn't understand that back then. My career, because I picked something I love, I think has and is part of an my identity. I go back and look at like how it shaped those experiences, not just personally, not just professionally, like on paper, but personally and yeah. So I would encourage every student to again, just ask around and be like, what can I do? And that was probably the beginning that led to outside of campus experiences, like an internship at a news organization, which I did later. You kind of figured out as you go. The main thing is like you have to hustle and when you're young and you can put up with studying late and then working on college applications and essays, internship applications and working a second job. That's a time to do it because as you get older, it gets harder with responsibilities and your body not always c complying and your mind not always complying. I go back and I look at those opportunities and experiences and was like, thank God I had that energy and thank I, I used it when I had it.
Carrie:Yeah. And I just wanna point out, make sure we're bringing into focus a couple of things that you said. And one is about asking questions. Just keep asking questions and eventually you'll find answers, right? I think that's so important because, so many times people are held back because they're too scared to ask a question, or maybe they don't know who to ask and they feel like, oh, I don't know, so I'm just not gonna ask anybody. But asking questions, especially as a student, if you're asking the wrong person, hopefully they'll help you find another person or you just move to the next person. Or you can ask multiple people, cuz you'll probably get a variety of answers sometimes. But asking the questions, is such a huge piece of it. And the fact that you did that and that helped you so much early on, even with teachers helping you start a newspaper. That's huge. And then also starting something. Especially at the age that you were. We hear people all the time say, oh, I went to a school that didn't have a fill in the blank. So I didn't have that opportunity when I was growing up, or I didn't have that opportunity until later. And sometimes, I think Young students don't realize that you could create that opportunity that you don't see, right? Mm-hmm. And maybe that may not always work. There's some things that you know, administration and bureaucracy and rules may stop you from some things, but, There's a lot of times where you can take the initiative to start something and it may not be exactly the way that you see it in your head, but you could start a version of what you wanna do to give yourself the opportunity that you wanna have.
Francisco:Absolutely. I find good educators, which they're everywhere. People in the community, they want to help folks that are the next generation. That is an opportunity there if you start looking. They see themselves in the next generation. I remember when I was that hungry, I remember when I was that ambitious or that curious. And a lot of times they will wanna help you. I grew up in San Antonio, which, the San Antonio today is not the San Antonio of the late nineties and early two thousands. It has changed a lot in a lot of ways in 20 years. There are more opportunities here in a lot of ways. It was like, where do I go? And there was a community paper in town, that was run by a nonprofit in a different part of town. So we didn't have a car, so I'd ride the bus around. And so after school I would ride my bus over there. Like the city bus, not a school bus. It was again, got me outta my comfort zone cuz I grew up in one part of town, went to school in another, and then I was doing like this kind of volunteer work at this community newspaper in another part of town, that had similar demographics, with poverty and race, but it was just a generally different culture. And it was a lot more stereotyped as like crime-ridden. But they had this great student run newspaper and they were from all different campuses in the area. So I show up as this like Catholic school kid from the north side and they had to kind of adjust to what that meant, and then me to them. And that helped me grow. But again, I just asked around and someone was like, oh, there's this opportunity. And then my mom saw it in the newspaper too. So you know, you knew it was a legitimate operation, and you only get those things at a certain point. Like those are for teenagers. Those are for, yeah. Middle school students. I couldn't do that project today and so I'm glad I did it while I could. And there you network. And so you start to learn what networking is at this stage of life. Someone saw me there and was like, oh, there's this other publication where they hire young people to like work in their office. And so I was like, well, it's not writing, but hey, if I can answer phones, if I can go distribute newspapers, if I could like stuff'em with sales, like whatever I could do and maybe earn a little money.
Carrie:Well just observe too. Right?
Francisco:Just exactly. Just being in those spaces, you hear a lot and it will tell you like, whoa, I do not think I wanna work here. Or a place like this. Yeah. Or like, wow, I love this. And sure enough, within, I went down there between junior and senior year. I had done a bootcamp for journalists that this group called Dow Jones, which is very, well respected national group that does all kinds of boot camps for high school and college students. They had a program in town in summer. And again, it was just like word of mouth. And I found out. The more I did my high school newspaper and then I did this other project and in the west side. So then I go there cuz I asked them, can I be a paper boy? And they were like, do you write? And I was like, well, I have my high school writings. I have my middle school. I write now and then for this West side newspaper. The woman there who just recently passed away, she said, oh, okay, well, you can start in the arts department. And I was like, what? Like, no, you can. So at 17 I started my professional writing career at a paper here. I mean, this was distributed at grocery stores and civic events around town. It was amazing. I went there thinking it was just going to go in for a small opportunity and just be so grateful for that. And then this other one showed up that I didn't expect and I was ready. And I was only ready in the sense that like, I had my writing with me on the spot because I thought, well, I just wanna show that I'm serious, but I didn't anticipate they were gonna hire me. And that's kind of what can happen at that stage of life is that you just have to be to a degree ready. And prepared and adults and people in power will pay attention to that.
Carrie:Yeah, that's great. So as you were looking for college, I'm assuming you were looking for something that had a student newspaper. What other things were you looking for within your college experience to make sure that you took advantage of that time?
Francisco:So it was multi-prong. When you grow up without a lot of money, a lot of you feel this fear that the earth is gonna fall under your feet at any moment. I did a story years later about this and I'm happy to talk about it because it does really center on like, I don't think anyone else could have probably done the story at the time, at the LA Times. But I was averse to loans. And I had seen people in my community struggle with debt and my family. Everyone advised me like, college is important, but make sure, like I learned the term return on investment very young. Yeah. And so I didn't fully understand what that meant, but it basically was like, try to see how much of it you can get paid, through good grades. There were students in my class that were exceptionally gifted that they were gonna get a full ride. I knew I was not, but I knew that I had a good mix of really strong grades. I was in the top 10 in my class, which was also top 10% because we had like a hundred students in my class. It was small compared to a lot of high schools. I knew I may have some opportunities with like state universities in, in Texas because of the top 10 rule at the time. Yeah, my mother had saved a little bit. This is critical cuz these funds don't exist anymore. But there was this thing called the Texas Tomorrow Fund. You could put away a little bit of money and my mom's goal was only to have enough money to get me through an associate's degree at a community college, which we have actually a really great community college here in San Antonio that has a fantastic media and journalism program. So I thought, That is my default, and if I go beyond that, great because I will still be the first in my family to go to college.
Carrie:Yeah, and just to say, like you mentioned, the community college, there are so many fantastic programs in community colleges across the country. Community colleges can sometimes be looked down upon, but as far as your return on investment, like you just said, and the value in what you're getting and not just money that you can save on the tuition, but also potentially living at home or just not living in a dorm situation. And then you could transfer and go to a university if you want the four year degree. But, There is so much value in community colleges and they've grown so much over the years to really bring programs that serve the people in the community where they are, with a lot of the fields that are prominent in that area or transferability to like really intentionally help students to transfer to a university. So there is so much value there and I hope students are considering that whether it's their primary option or you know, kind of a secondary option, like you're saying. There's a lot of opportunity there.
Francisco:Yes. I just want to plus one that to the maximum extent because I saw this from a user experience perspective, like figuring out my path and then also later on I was a journalist covering higher ed and K through 12 schools and it just furthered my belief in the importance of community college and that Yeah. You nowadays, students are expected if you want to have a better return on an investment and have more job security to think about a going to a master's or even a PhD or some kind of specialty, where you're getting a certificate. So you may be in school through, for after high school for four to 10 years possibly. It does not matter as much where you went in some of these programs. It's that you just right, get those degrees as you go. You're gonna end up paying a lot for your master's maybe or more, but that's gonna give you higher income later, more likely. Just get your basics, your core out of the way at a community college. I've seen more and more students do this because they have seen my generation, I'm 38. Really struggle with student debt. And so that was, to your first question, the most important thing to be brutally honest was it really wasn't the quality of the program or where it had a student newspaper. That was kind of where I was trying to find a Venn diagram. But I knew I wanted to leave college, at least undergrad with the least amount of debt, cuz I wanted a pathway to a master's or even a PhD later on. And I had heard from people be careful about going to an Ivy League school. I ended up getting to UT Austin, so a state school where the tuition was lower, but I would've had to move. I got into a few other campuses, a few other colleges, but the other one that I was matching it against was St. Mary's University in my hometown. The other factor that I was considering is I had a elderly grandmother who lived with us, who was ill and my mom was the only caretaker. I just didn't feel okay leaving at the end of the day. And St. Mary's came through with a good package. Now, to complete the narrative here for the third time they did not have a student newspaper, so, oh no. When my application was in front of the Dean of students, which I don't know how it made it all the way over there, but it did. She called me in a month into me being on campus and said, will you run our college newspaper? Wow. So a freshman, I started a college newspaper and I joked in the interview when she asked me, and I turned it down once before because I was like, no, I'm not ready. I can barely find where the bathrooms were, so you can't expect me to know how to cover this campus well. The paper had been closed because a previous student staff had Ran a bunch of questionable content and, the university felt that it was inappropriate, so they closed it until they knew what to do with it. And then I ended up running it for four years and Wow. So that taught me a lot. And, that got me a job at a huge newspaper in Los Angeles right outta college. And because I took what seemed like a step back. People were like, you're making a mistake, not going to a journalism school for undergrad or one of the best schools or one of the name brand schools. And I said, I'm gonna try to get there eventually, but my grandma's sick. I don't know how much time I have with her. I love my community. I can't discuss this without acknowledging going to Hispanic serving institution. This really dawned on me years later when I went to get my master's in a very different part of the country in a very different demographic. Mm-hmm. And it was like, wow. I did not really think about racism a whole lot in my undergrad experience. And when I went for my master's, that was a huge part of what I had to navigate and what I saw and experienced.
Carrie:Wow. Well, I just wanna highlight what you were saying about your institution and not going to an Ivy League school or a school like UT Austin. I mean UT Austin, that's a great example. Would your application, or anyone else's, end up in front of a dean of students getting a phone call asking you to run a newspaper as a freshman? That never would happen at UT Austin, right?
Francisco:No, absolutely not like that. You know, when I called to ask questions about the status of my application and to check in as I was vetting the first question was very coldly like, what's your number? That was it. Like I was identified through a number. And to be fair, as an adult now, like as an older person who understands institutions and systems like that is how you had to run it probably efficiently. But to me, as someone who was new to this whole world, I needed a supportive environment that was more intimate, that I could gain my confidence. The smallness of St. Mary's, the familiarity with the demography of a city like San Antonio, the passion for mission driven work, I now am so grateful that I went there and. I was lucky I left with no debt because I applied Wow. For like 40 scholarships every year. And I usually got like at least half of them.
Carrie:That's incredible.
Francisco:I lived at the Kinko's, which is now FedEx office. I'm not kidding you, for like a couple of weeks every year. Like I was just there. This was before you did everything electronically. You know, I have to print out everything, clip it, glue, stick it onto a page. Oh yeah. And yep. That allowed me to move to a big, expensive city with a little bit of money and no debt. Anyone that goes into a field like mine, where it's mission oriented, it's not profit driven. You struggle with that.
Carrie:Yeah. And also such a huge lesson from your story is even though you were not at some high profile journalism school for your undergrad, your journalism experience that you gained on your resume, that you got to do the entire time that you're there, there's so much value in that, regardless of what the piece of paper says that you graduated with and regardless of the institution you got it from. Mm-hmm. Like your experience is what's on your resume and what takes you to the next step. And that has so much value in it as well. It's really something for students to consider. That's a big part of location of an institution that you're attending. You're gonna get a different type of experience in the cornfields of the Midwest. Nothing against that, that's where I'm from. But you know, versus being in a metropolitan city or being in an environment where there are local things that you can plug into, like that value is also something that's important to consider outside of the actual institution that you're enrolled in.
Francisco:Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Carrie:On that note, with not being at a journalism school and having your BA in the English and Communication Arts. It's often presented to students, that you need to get this degree that is named a certain thing or has a certain title on it because you're gonna turn that in for your ticket to get this particular job. You know what I mean? There's so much value in broadening your horizons and learning from other people and gaining all of these other types of skills and perspectives that you can totally utilize, you know, in so many different places. So can you talk a little bit about what you feel like outside of the student newspaper environment, are there some things that you gained from your degree that was not called journalism at the undergraduate level, that you feel like were really valuable to you moving forward?
Francisco:Yes. So as you mentioned earlier, I have a degree in English and Communication arts, and I got a minor in Latin American Studies, and that ends up being crucial later on. So for me, it was the closest that I could get to what my career path I thought would look like. I had people tell me at the time, do not get a journalism degree because it pigeonholes you. So get something that's ancillary to it. Oh. Or focused on a topic that you wanna write a lot about. I thought, okay, well, as a darker-skinned person, when I was in newsrooms, newsrooms are about 75% white. The newsrooms in San Antonio that I worked in were predominantly brown. But as I started doing professional internships in newsrooms, and going to professional conferences, and being around professionals, I was like, wow, I'm one of the only brown people in the space. But like a lot of folks in Texas that are Mexican American, I did not grow up speaking Spanish. And that's a whole backstory there with if you look into why. For me, I was like, well, I need to learn Spanish because I'm getting this question already in newsrooms, like, how proficient is your Spanish? And so I decided to get the Latin American Studies minor because it forced me to read literature in Spanish and to build that, and also to go beyond my experience as a English dominant, assimilated Mexican American in Texas, and to realize how diverse the Latino identity is through Latin America and the US and its roots in Spain and Europe in Portugal. So I learned like a lot through the degree that way. And then the core of it was like, you learn to be a better writer by reading good writing. And so reading, I had such a deep love of southern literature, like Finery O'Connor, and you know, Truman Capote. My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird. I was really fascinated by stories of women and people of color and later on, queer folks. There was like, an ability, even in a Catholic school, even a Catholic university, I had a lot of professors that believe in liberation theology and so they were opening my mind to what the diversity of religion, the diversity of race of gender. And how that shaped the American experience. And I thought as a journalist going out into the country, I now had a better sense of how white evangelicals look at the world. How recent immigrants from Cuba look at the world, how people that grew up in some of these spaces in Texas, view the Alamo in completely different ways. Mm-hmm. Wow. And so, it made me a better writer, the English degree. It gave me range cuz I thought if I can't get a newspaper job, I could go into the education world. Like I loved communicating, I loved helping people. So I thought I could be a teacher, I could work somewhere in the higher ed K through 12 system. I was so passionate about making sure that we have access to it. So what did all that swirl into later? Am my calling my greatest job prior to this one was being an education reporter and that merged all of that because our system serves such a diverse group of students and so many of them have similar experiences to me, but also there are so many that don't. So that degree kind of broadened my horizons cuz the more you read, and the more you read about people that are different than you. The more you realize what we have in common and how we need to recognize each other's differences in order to connect better on what we have in common. And that gave me great, great worldview for me going to LA at 21 and being away from home. Yeah. Having to kind of grow up. I think for me, my biggest piece of advice for folks that are looking at where to go For their undergrad is like pick somewhere where you'll feel holistically nurtured and interested, intrigued by what your classes are gonna be. It's such a time for personal growth. Like you have to really start to practice the tenets of adulting and being more responsible for yourself. It didn't really as matter as much as the degree. Because I knew probably later on I may have to get a specialized degree, and my master's experience was very different than my undergrad. I'm really glad I went to a smaller campus that allowed me all this safe space to grow.
Carrie:Yeah. Well, and so much of what you just said is so timely right now because I think we're seeing the consequences of people who didn't do that, right? Within their education or in their life, who didn't take the time to read and learn about people who are different from themselves. The other thing that I think is so important for students to think about that you've mentioned here is. Yes, college, part of that is career preparation. But another part of college can be this personal growth piece in whatever way you want it to be. I've had students over the years take a language because they remember their great-grandmother speaking Russian in, and now they wanna learn it. Whether it's part of their heritage or it's part of something that they always kind of wanted to do and they just haven't had the opportunity to do it yet. For some people it may be, they used to be a dancer and they wanna take dance classes while they're in college to bring that back into their life for photography or learning a language or doing a minor that's really close to their heart and their life experience that they wanna learn more in an academic setting or be exposed to more writings about that or be part of a community that they haven't been able to experience before. There's so many different ways to think about how you can incorporate that into your collegiate education, whether that's through like a student organization or whether that's through an official declaration of a minor or learning a language. But there's a lot of ways that I think it's important for students to sit back and think, okay, here's the career path I'm considering, but this other thing is also really important to me and my life, and it's a great time to be able to take advantage of that setting to learn and to grow in that way.
Francisco:Mm-hmm. Exactly. You're really allowed a lot of flexibility in your undergrad years to make mistakes, to experiment, to try something. And like it's low commitment. The stakes get higher as you get older for different reasons. I look back and I'm so grateful for those opportunities, and I think that the folks that I talked to that I think had a really great college experience, a big part of it is that they felt a sense of belonging on campus. So that is like the X factor, I think, in making a smart decision on where to go, because life is long, you know, for God willing for people. Again, what you're doing today, you don't necessarily have to do the rest of your life. All you know is what you know then, and so you have to go with that. If something doesn't go right, there's usually a pathway pretty quickly out to be like, oh, I joined this club and I realize I'm not really into this sport, or I'm not really into this topic, or, yeah, that space really wasn't for me as a woman or as a person of color. Like you don't have to have the same resignation to stick with something like you do when you're older and you have bills to pay in certain ways you know, you have to kind of like push through. The stuff outside of your class requirements, you have so much flexibility and that's just such a privilege to get that experience once in your life.
Carrie:Absolutely. Yeah. So you said you moved to LA at a very young age. You left home, you went halfway across the country. Can you talk about that opportunity and the decision that you made and what that was like for you? Some high school seniors make that decision if they wanna go that far away for college and then some have that decision to make when they were graduating from college about taking a job or going to a place that maybe they've always wanted to go or there's a particular opportunity they wanna pursue, but that's very different from everything that they're leaving behind. So can you talk about that experience and what that was like for you and what opportunities you had when you went there?
Francisco:Definitely. I was really scared at first to make such a move because I thought, I was comfortable home in some ways. I knew the area, I knew the terrain, I knew the politics. But when I was an undergrad, I studied abroad and I went to London for a few months and was like, wow, this is what it's like to live in a really big city. Like to have a degree of anonymity. And in a city like San Antonio, especially at the time, you know, we have really exploded in population, but even now, it still feels like a small town in its spirit, but logistically, like it's hard to even get together now. So when I went to visit LA I was like, wow, I mean, this is just like such another world, but there was still a lot of like touchstones. Like it was still in the US, there was still a huge Latino population of Mexican-American. You know, it was a warmer climate. It wasn't too cold or too hot. And so I thought, there's enough that's familiar, but there's enough that's foreign and that's exciting. I had just come out and I knew San Antonio at the time you know, it was part of the state that had just passed a ban on gay marriage. So I thought, okay, if I'm having to look at my life in the future, if I go to California, it's just a lot more accepting. Yeah. And it's where maybe my mom will move out too. Like the weather's mild or moderate. I'll just see where it goes. The job I got hired for was, it was like a kind of a two to three step program to a full-time job. So you go and do a fellowship for a little bit, and then they decide if they want to hire you on or not. And then do they wanna hire you on for two years on a contract or like indefinitely? So I went and did that and you know, worked out, I got hired indefinitely. That's when I really was like, wow, I made this decision. Like I remember going from temporary housing, to signing my first lease that was a year. I mean, that to me was probably the moment that I had to be like, wow, I'm a really an adult now and I have to make sure that I pay my bills. It was scary and I was so lucky to call my mom and she reassured me and was like, this is normal. You know, it is scary to do that. Yeah. You know, when she did it, it was with my father, when they had a apartment together and then bought a house. But, it's just part of this what to do next. Thankfully, Since I was part of a younger group of fellows, I made friends through them and then you started to build out your network and it was as exciting as it was scary. You have to be willing to take risk because otherwise you really miss out on a lot. I think I've learned what the phrase calculated risk is. So it wasn't like I moved out there without a job, you know, I had that guardrail at least to figure it out. And it was a fellowship, so if I didn't get hired on or I didn't like it, I could figure out where to go from then. I was kind of like one of those people that, you know, when you see someone get into a pool and it's like cold, but it's really hot outside and you can see them, like they don't just jump in, like they kind of wade in to the deepest part of the pool. That's my approach and everyone's different. My sister is like, she will just run through the yard and jump in the pool. And we both have been successful. It's like knowing yourself, but I was around folks where I came from that they were scared to even go look at the pool and yeah, I had to kind of figure out what was right for me. And that's what I think this generation, when I speak with folks that are Gen Z, they're so much more self-aware about their autonomy and their empowerment in a way that, ooh, I wasn't. I really feel like they're more equipped to realize, like, you need to be authentic to yourself. And I've learned that a lot from them and further embracing that. At the time I didn't fully know what I was doing, and I think that was okay because you cannot control everything. Even if you're a planner, like people that are listening to this already taking some kind of self-interest in being better and figuring out things. You don't have to know everything. And if something goes wrong, it probably has before and you survived it and you will again.
Carrie:Absolutely. So can you talk about the actual work that you were doing in LA and what you learned from that experience and what you gained from that to go to your next step?
Francisco:Yes. I was hired for a program at the Los Angeles Times called Met Pro, which is stands for the Minority Editorial Training Program. And it was a program that had been around for a few years. Quite amount of time. I think there was a huge push in the eighties to do programs that would bring in more people of color into newsrooms. And over time that expanded to other identities. But even at the time I did it, there was a strong disparity in a city like LA, which is majority people of color. The newsroom did not look like that, so, I came in under that program and it was weird because it opened doors for me, but it also, I had to kind of reckon with like, am I just a diversity hire? With all the discussions about affirmative action still ongoing. And I had to kind of grapple with that. But all I knew is that I worked my butt off and that I would prove to people whatever reason I was there for, I was worth my salt yeah. And people don't always get hired after their six month fellowship or even transferred to another paper. There was other papers in the chain. So while you're there, the first six months, it's like Hunger Games. It's like a bootcamp. You are sent out at any moment to do things. And so I covered everything from people voting in that 2006 election to protest to like community events. I didn't know what I was gonna do the next day. I was called out of my little cubicle to go help a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on this, gosh, story last minute about these babies that had died in a NICU that was in a poor part of town and they were Spanish speaking parents. Yes. And so they needed Spanish. So boom, remember I told you about, I had a sense that that was gonna be a skill I needed. Yeah. And I get resentful when people are like, oh, well you got hired cuz you're a Mexican and like you speak Spanish. And it's like, I had to earn that. I had to earn that, and I had to prove that I'm not just there because I'm Mexican. So it was challenging at times. There was a lot of support in that newsroom, but there was also tension. And if anyone goes back and reads about that period in the Los Angeles Times newsroom, it was the most public example of a struggle between serving your community and corporate profit. The people that kind of ran the show were clashing with the people that ran the newsroom. I learned so much just being in that space and hearing how the industry worked at a level yeah that was competing with the New York Times in the Washington Post. And this was still when you really relied on the print edition before digital blew up. It was like a joy to see your story on the front page. And I was one of the only fellows that got a few front page stories. One of which was they flew me to Sacramento to do a story about this loan program that was trying to get Latinos to take out loans cuz it was really impacting higher education attainment in the state of California, which was therefore impacting the workforce. So I went out there and it was the first time I had ice on my windshield and I didn't know what the hell to do and I was like panicking. I had to kind of just survive because I didn't want anyone to know that I needed help. I learned a lot in that sense. And then also I got to write like incredible stories. Some of the last stories I did was when Paris Hilton was thrown into jail. Surprisingly no one expected that. So they sent me out there just to monitor that decision. And then, oh my gosh, were waiting for her to come out, and I get a text message from the court reporter inside saying they just took her into custody like she's going to jail. And so suddenly, I had the story that was probably gonna be buried in the paper that went on the front page and that was like the last day, I think, before they made the decision on hiring me. And they were like, oh, he could deal in breaking news, he can do longer form, we can send him to travel and they'll come back with a good story. And again, it is a team effort. I had great colleagues there that helped polish my copy that advised me on what to do. But I was still the one driving that car. So it was, a huge growth opportunity and to kind of button that up about survival. After I got hired on, after like a year and a half later, the recession hit and I got laid off and I had to find a new job. And thankfully I had built out a network. I had a strong portfolio of places I had written for. And I was able to land a job even during a recession a month later at a different publication in LA, because I didn't want to just come home with my tail between my legs, like I just gave up. I was determined to stay out there. I was paycheck to paycheck. But it taught me a lot about just resilience. And I think that you start learning those lessons through forging a path. Even if you come from more privilege, there's always going to be struggles somewhere. For me, I was really grateful that I had even the bad experiences, I think in hindsight, because it steeled me for what was to come later on in my adult life.
Carrie:Yeah. So on the note that you were just talking about, I wanna ask you, while you were observing that atmosphere at the LA Times, what you were talking about, kind of that, tension between serving the community and the corporate goals or their intentions. In observing that, did that make you Come to any internal decisions or was there something during that time where you were like, I wanna make sure in my career that I go this direction or that I'm part of an organization that does X, Y, or Z? Like did it make you resolute in some way with your career path, and where you wanted to be?
Francisco:Oh my God, yes. I was so fortunate. Through hustling in high school and college to give that opportunity to see very early on, the beauty and the pain that people that have such a passion for quality journalism go through working in a corporate media structure. As I'm older, I now recognize that a lot of people were caught in the middle. They were trying to do their best. It was easy to see a black and white binary about some things. For me it made me realize, it is not everything to do some of these jobs. Like it costs a lot of people relationships with their family, their health. I wanna balance life and I don't know how I do that with having to dedicate always so much time to just my job, but I really wanna show up for my job 110% too. So how do they do that and how do I do that? That's something that I did have to really think about.
Carrie:so you mentioned that you were laid off, when the economy was going through a really difficult time, and that's an experience that a lot of people have during their career trajectory, and obviously no one plans for that necessarily. Right. It's often unexpected. It can happen across such a wide variety of industries. So can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like for you and perhaps what you learned from that moving forward?
Francisco:Yes. I knew that in theory maybe that happens, but none of us really anticipated the widespread impact of that 2008 recession, which we are still feeling repercussions from today. And I think what it did is it challenged me to grapple in a very direct way with what felt like imposter syndrome. Why did I get laid off? What could have I done differently? I'd say now 15 years after that experience, there are times it still does kind of haunt me. But in the long run I realized that it's not so much what happens, it's what you do after. I was in survival mode and was like, okay, I need to put out job applications. I need to reach out to people in my network. I was at a point where I had been locked into a lease for a few more months and I wasn't gonna be able to get out of it. So I thought, what do I do? Like, how do I deal with this lease that's like$2,000? Because I was sharing a room with another journalist who then also left. So I was like, oh, I can probably handle this for a couple more months. Then I get laid off and I'm like, God, what do I do? What do I get a loan out to pay it off the to pay that out. Or do I try to go find money to borrow and then I move home? So in the moment you're kind of dealing with like the day to day. And then I, you know, it worked out. I got a job. There was oddly like a kind of severance package you could get that included an opportunity to apply for extra money from like a layoff fund for journalists. And so, I cobbled all that together. And I had to swallow my pride and my father, who I was not very close to at the time, I reached out to him and was like, I might need a little bit of help for the next couple of months till I can get on my feet. But then I ended up getting the job and it worked out. I just kept moving forward for a while, but it kind of haunted me, like, why did that happen? At the time, layoffs in that industry were like, there was kind of a sense of shame. They became so commonplace after that period of time that now it's like a badge of honor to say you survive after a layoff and you decided to not quit the field. But at the time, I felt like there was something wrong with me and, I kept trying to prove to myself and to everyone else through some of these jobs that I was worthy, that I was not gonna be deterred, and that I was gonna keep getting better. So it's so odd that years later, now I train people in how to do this work. When I, at a certain point felt like after that layoff, I was no longer worthy. Those are the times you really are tested. It's hard to do stuff when things are going well and get in every day and go through that cycle, but you really realize what are your priorities when you're hit with a crisis like that. Do I even stay in this field? Do I move home and change my life? Do I go into a different field of work? Yeah. It's not for everyone. There have been colleagues of mine that. One layoff and they're out of the field and I think it's about what's right for you. I just didn't want anyone to take away that from me. I wanted to decide if I wanted to leave the field on my terms. And that's where I'm still at years later.
Carrie:Yeah, and I think a lot of people experienced this during the pandemic too. Cuz there were so many layoffs. Even people who weren't laid offs, the nature of their work changed so much that I think a lot of people were really starting to question quality of life and work life balance and, what am I doing? Is this worth my time? Do I even wanna be doing this anymore? Which is not a bad thing to think through, right. Sometimes we're forced to think about those things in situations that are more stressful than, just kind of a relaxed thought process. But, I also am a believer in sometimes things happen to force us to reevaluate and make change cuz maybe we wouldn't consider that change as boldly otherwise.
Francisco:Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Carrie:So how did you go from that space to seeking out your master's degree in journalism? Was there something in particular that prompted you to move in that direction? Or how did you make that decision and what factors of your life were contributing to that?
Francisco:I felt why I didn't go get my master's right after undergrad was I got this great opportunity in LA. I felt like I needed more professional experience and I thought, I wanna work in the industry before I go and get further education on how to specialize in a certain track in the industry. After a couple of jobs, I wound up back in my hometown covering education, realizing this was like my passion, and that I wanted to write about schools. I wanted to write about universities and colleges and access to education because I really believe it equalizes a lot. It helps improve communities. It makes us all better people. I realized how much data was involved in doing that reporting. And the folks that were doing really great stories were writing about what was going on in schools, with racial disparity, with income inequality had to mine these large data sets. So I thought, I do not know how to do this. I had a math phobia and a lot of journalists, a lot of people in the arts, a lot of folks in the humanities are like, oh, we got into it partly because we were bad at math and science. Yep, yep. So it becomes avoidance. Yes. It, it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I thought, well, I've had a couple of twists and turns I didn't expect, and I like a challenge. I wasn't able, for one reason or another to get onto a more specialized department at my news organization. And so I thought, well, the only way I can do that is if I have the skills and a certification from an institution that's respected in journalism to say I have those skills. And even better if it's from a white run one and that is part of how this world works and this interesting works that having that legitimacy. I looked again at cost and it came down to an Ivy League school on the east coast in a very expensive city, and a state school in Missouri. I went and visited both. I felt comfortable in both in some ways, and I felt uncomfortable in both in other ways. And so I thought, okay, well that's kind of a draw. But I looked at the University of Missouri was more willing to give me a better financial aid package. And so I got into the most competitive programs there at both universities. But I thought, you know what? I have lived on the west coast. I have lived in London, and I have lived in Texas. I would like to live in the Midwest once. Again, I'm not, maybe I'll stay there forever. Maybe I'll just have a turn there for a couple of years and one program was only a year. It was hard because I had to leave. I had built on my income, not a whole lot, but certainly I was gonna go to being a student full-time and I was gonna have to freelance and I was gonna have to work on campus. I looked at the bottom line, how much debt am I gonna leave with? Because you don't make a lot of money in journalism, for the most part, unless you work for corporate media. And a lot of times that's on the business side, that's not on the content producing side. Those that are writing stories. Some people say like, oh, that sells papers, or that gets clicks. A lot of us that do that content, we don't get any of that money. Same thing with artists, a lot of that money goes to the record label. Those of us creating the content, doing the labor, we're usually the most underpaid people. So I knew that already and I saw that at the LA Times, and I saw that at the places I worked and listened to a lot of smart people about whether or not to make this move. And I had people telling me it was really dumb to do because I was not gonna make up that income. And I really just believe if I can do investigative and data journalism, which are the better paying jobs in this field. And if I leave journalism, I have a master's degree, which is gonna help me make more money probably in the long run and have more security. Yeah. Then it's a win-win. And yeah, so I left at 30, but at that point I was settled in a routine in my life and it was really hard to do that. But I wanted to prove to myself and to others to a degree, I'm really serious about this. I'm in it to win it, and I'm going where the industry is going, which is that we need to be better at math. We need to embrace data. We need to do accountability journalism. People were already sensing in 2015 that the democracy was being challenged. There was more disinformation. The month I arrived at the University of Missouri's, when there were the protests on campus, that led to like a graduate student walkout. It gained national news. Trump had announced that he was running. And suddenly all of these identity issues were at the forefront where I spent a lot of my career being told, don't write about them. Don't get pigeonhold. They're going to think you're only write about gay issues or Latino issues. And I'm like, it's important to me to do that. And yeah, also, it's what my white editors want. They hire me in part because I come with that experience and I can't write about it just because I'm from there. I had to study it, I had to learn it, and even more so than I think my white colleagues, because my work is viewed under suspicion as a private agenda being from these communities. So my work has to be past even higher muster in that process. So I thought, well, this school is respected. It's a state school, I feel it's a lot more accessible. And while I was out there, I was able to report on communities that were very different than where I came from and had reported before. Through all of that era that was starting, you know, and it was trickling down from like, Trayvon Martin's murder and these other kind of cases that were out there. But I could tell the next wave of work is gonna be around social injustice and Yeah. Disparities with race and income. I come from these backgrounds. I had reported on them and I also studied enough of how politics had worked to realize the southern strategy, to realize what was being used to divide us. And that we were gonna go through that era for a while and we're still in the middle of that. It's like everything between my career experience and my life has helped me train, funny enough for later on would end being my job. But going to grad school, I didn't know what I was gonna do after that necessarily. And since then, the last three jobs I've taken have all been created for me because I have a unique skillset at different intersections that the industry didn't really have a place for. I felt alone and alienated at certain points in the past, but now it's like, oh, these are assets. All I did was just move forward and I figured it out because there was so much I couldn't control in the world. I really thought when I went to Mizzou in 2015 that I was going to leave and be a data journalist and kind of cover what I covered back in Texas, wherever, which was class sizes very much not identity based things. Yeah. And that completely changed on me. And so I had to pivot. And that's what you have to keep doing throughout your life.
Carrie:Obviously there was a lot going on in our world at the time. There were even specific things happening in areas of Missouri, right? What did you feel like you gained from your graduate degree in the classroom and from your peers or from professors? Cuz there's a lot of talk now about the value of higher education and a lot of people putting that in question, even master's degrees in graduate school. For people listening who are like, you know what, I can go work for a newspaper. I don't need to go to college, or I don't need to go to grad school. Can you talk a little bit about where you did find value in that degree and that experience and the education that you received at Mizzou?
Francisco:I know, I'm biased cause I'm such an advocate for a higher education. I think.
Carrie:Me, too. Calling out the bias.
Francisco:Yeah. Like for me, I think it's fact-based, you know, in the process of seeing like it's a better workforce, better quality of life, better pay, it elevates your community. When I've heard politicians say they love the poorly educated, it's not a compliment. It's because No, you know, the idea is like, it's scary for people to have knowledge and realize how the systems aren't really shaped necessarily to help them benefit. And grad school allow me to do a deep dive on studying systems and how the K through 12 system, the higher ed system, the federal government, state governments, How they are designed, to run a certain way. It helped me see beyond what my experience up to that point was with my life. In the classroom, being around students that were eight to 10 years younger than me, and in some cases people that were eight to 10 to 20 years older than me, which I think is one of the most underexplored avenues of content right now, which is like intergenerational storytelling and yeah. Culture. Mm-hmm. And I think that's why like shows like Only Murders in the Building or like Abbott Elementary, or Hacks are really good right now because they show intergenerational interactions. And so for me, I realized like, oh, I'm in the right in the middle of this pack on some things, trying to understand like what the world was, what the world is now, what the world will be. I learned from listening to music, like some of my favorite artists as they age, they work with younger folks, and sometimes they get teased for that or made fun of, some people say it's you're trying to be relevant, but others, it's like, oh, you're acknowledging that the world's changing and you have something to bring to the table. Yeah, and there's something you can learn from them. And so in these conversations I learned a lot about the technology they were using that they wouldn't put up with some of the stuff that I put up with 10 years ago when I was coming up. Certain things were no longer okay. Most of my classes were all women, and some of these media spaces. And so I was seeing like, wow, these are mostly cisgender, straight, white male newsrooms. That have been run that way for a hundred years. But this whole new crop of young, of folks that are getting trained are majority women. And oh wow. There's a sizable portion of them that are people of color. So we're gonna see more intersectionality, we're gonna see a lot more queerness because I saw a lot more sexual fluidity on campus with identity. And so I thought, wow, this is stuff that, like, I was not around an undergrad at all. And this is in a red state in the middle of Missouri, which again, like being from Texas, I know people look over those spaces, but in our classrooms we could talk about those feelings of fly over country. Of that the media is a lot of the narrative framing comes out of rooms that are situated on the coast that are in very liberal spaces that are. Mm-hmm. That, you know, even from a marginalized group, when you're in those spaces, you have more protections and you can feel, you forget what a lot of the other experiences are, and that's really important to be a national reporter. And that was where I was eyeing. My goal was that when I left here, I wanted to write for a national news organization. I had written for hyper-local, regional state, but I had never really ridden for a national one. Like Ed week and that was my dream was to go to like an ed week or a chalk beat, which was a nonprofit. I realized I needed to be somewhere where we weren't so worried about making money all the time Yeah. To stay afloat. And that was a value I learned over time and, you can't control again so much. So I'm always open to going and working for a corporate media organization in the future, but I think until that culture kind of corrects itself in some ways. There are times where I feel like I'm not the best fit because of how I want to do journalism. Those conversations were happening in these classrooms that, like when I was in my newsroom or my community, there was a time lag, like a delay. And it was still kind of an older culture. And I don't mean necessarily age, I just mean in like that the idea of objectivity and Not being able to call anything out for what it is. And now we are in an era of calling a lie, a lie. And that was not, yeah, my industry was scared to do that in 20 14, 15, 13, when I could see it. I was like, these folks running for office are just lying bold face. And we are scared to say that because we don't wanna look like we're biased. So going into the classroom empowered me to be like, this is what's going on in this space and. You find a lot of folks that also were grappling with that and we want to make change. So it was encouraging to see that.
Carrie:Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that in your industry? Cuz I'm sure that young students coming up, I don't know how much they're aware of How much objectivity was regarded in this industry for so long. Mm-hmm. And basically how objectivity was demanded. Right. And if people did show any kind of leniency or opinion, I mean, I guess it happens now on both sides where it's called out, but there is clearly a change that's gone on particularly with the political climate in our country over the last several years. So can you talk a little bit about, as a journalist and as somebody who's lived in these spaces during this time, and continuing to live in it, how you navigate that between the impact that you wanna make on communities and on other people and bringing your full self and your full experience and being able to utilize how important your perspective is? And are you seeing things that you're hopeful about in that regard, or do you feel like it's still something that's really difficult to get through?
Francisco:I am absolutely hopeful. I think we are in a moment of great deep debate on this topic, which is what you want to see in a community of inclusion. Like we all are trying to figure this out and it changes over time. But there is not a clear, easy answer. I think it's important for the general public that maybe have listened to this today to know that there is like the media and then there's journalists. The media is this big umbrella that includes everything from music to movies, to what's produced by corporations for an audience to satiate their needs. Journalism, newspapers like news coverage gets thrown into there. When you talk about the journalism field itself, that's under this larger umbrella of what media is in today's society. There is this ongoing debate about what its objectivity, how do we define it? It's very much a values driven system, when you get down to it in practice. So, for example, there were just a bunch of pieces run by national news organizations about objectivity. Esquire had Jake Tapper write something who's prominent CNN n journalist who said, there is no such thing as objectivity, really, like when you think about it. And then there was Marty Baron who ran the Washington Post, who had like the movie Spotlight came out of under his editing, covering the church abuse scandals. And he says we've gone away from what objectivity is. And then there's other folks like Russ Lowry, who are challenging objectivity, is a myth to a degree, and that there are ways to do good, fair, accurate journalism that presents the truth with acknowledging what that truth really is and calling out a lie. A lie calling racism. Racism. And so there's this ongoing debate and there's media critics that talk about it. So for me, how I view it is that it's about accuracy. If someone is using racist tropes in a political campaign, we have to say that that is the case. It is akin to someone saying, oh my God, it's raining outside and making a big deal in your house. Like everyone put on their raincoats, like it's a raining outside. Like you go outside, you're gonna need a raincoat. And you walk outside and it's sunny and it's like if someone tells you something, you have to go and see it for yourself. You have to check it out for yourself. The forces that are challenging this, it's just piled up on journalists. There's disinformation online used by bots and foreign interference. There are corporate, special interests that are putting out information to sway public opinion. And while that's always been happening, it has not happened in such a volume that journalists Yeah, are swept up in those currents and it's hard to get people to know what the truth is. I mean, we saw this with a lot of the vaccine rollout and disinformation that, you know, COVID wasn't real at the beginning. Right. It's in real time happening. So we have to say yes, COVID is real. Yes, it is airborne. Yes. Vaccines have curbed a lot of other epidemics in this world. But because everything has become political and those in power have seized on that, it is really challenged journalists to know well, if a Republican saying this and a Democrat saying something opposite, if I say what the truth is and it leans on one side or the other, then suddenly I'm gonna be called biased. And it's like we worry too much about that perception. You cannot control how someone's gonna perceive accurate factual information, right? Our job is to put out accurate, factual information, and then the public takes it from there. That is our only job. That is where I think we're having the discussion that there's a lot more common ground about what objectivity really is, but what really everyone's scared about is partisanship in media. That's what really, I think, is under dirtying it, and so. Who gets centered more, I think about CRT in schools and like CRT wasn't even a phrase used in K through 12 schools. Right? Like it is not even used at some colleges. I didn't know what CRT was till years later when it became like a code word for learning about the really unsavory parts of our country's history and having to reckon with them. And you go to other parts of this world like Germany, where they've done that. And that's how they have kept antisemitism down so that we don't end up what we ended up with with the Holocaust. And we can objectively say that as Americans looking at Germany. But right within our own country, we really struggle. To me, objectivity is a discussion about what's at stake. And if we do not put out factual quality information, then the democracy will only erode. And that's what's at stake. And so people can call you biased all they want. Humans are inherently biased. It's about are you putting out facts? And that is probably the greatest challenge of my generation in this field of work. Yeah,
Carrie:it's huge. Thank you for sharing that perspective. Whether people are listening to this because they're interested in this career or just living life and this part of the world right now. It's an important thing to think about and to acknowledge and to check ourselves with, really. So I appreciate that. So you've had a lot of different experiences between graduate school and today. So can you tell us about your career trajectory and the types of work that you've been doing over the years, and how these steps kind of worked together and led you to where you are now?
Francisco:Yes. When I look back at it again, I was figuring it out as I went along. The three positions that I've had since graduate school were all created for me because I had this like unique mix of the graduate school experience with what I got my degree in and then my career experience before that. And then honestly everything's built off my life experience before that as a student and as you know, just a kid. All that experience, expertise, skills, life experience, all that kind of melded together. I ended up working at a couple of national news organizations covering education, which was like my passion. But, I reached a point in my mid thirties with what was going on in the world. I took inventory of that. I was on the east coast in Washington, DC so I achieved my goal of like living in four major parts of the country at some point. And I thought I was homesick and. I physically got really sick. And so a health crisis will also, at any point in your life, make you reconsider your priorities. And this was, yeah, a year, two years before Covid. I kind of understood why that impacted so many people to reconsider their career path and what they do. I say embrace it. You sometimes run from things and they catch up with you. Sometimes you're avoiding things and they catch up with you. Other times you're completely unaware. And in my case, I was more unaware. And then I was like, God, it's so cold out here. I'm kind of alone. I was single. It was just, you know, in the middle of my thirties I realized I just wanted to make a change and I loved the work I did. But eventually I found a way to get home. And then I was mulling like, have I run my course? I've been chasing this for almost 20 years. My mind and my body have changed and mental health became more publicly important to talk about. And I thought, you know, I think it's affecting my physical health and so I need to make a change. Weirdly enough, way back when I was at Mizzou, I worked a job on campus at this nonprofit called Investigative Reporters and Editors. And they're like an association that helps journalists as an ancillary support arm in their lives. You do what you can and then your newsroom does what it can. But a lot of us joined professional associations to go to conferences, to build our skills, to network, to be in community. Yeah. That was always a running theme in my life. Like I got jobs through those conferences. I was on the board of some of the organizations over the years. So I kind of had this backstory with a nonprofit industry association. There was an opening and they remembered me from being a grad student and they were like, you were a good worker. We think you are ready to teach, to train the next generation and to help folks through the woods on this. And so I thought, okay, great. I would be teaching data journalism and it would allow me to stay home and then I would just travel for work cuz it's a remote job. And this was all 2019 before the pandemic. And so I was like, cool. I have a remote job and where I'm at, like I have good healthcare, I love my coworkers. I get to still travel and see the country teaching. You know, they would send me like to a newsroom in Boise or to a newsroom in California. This is like a marriage of all worlds, a job that I never had on my radar at 15, 17, 25. Right? Yeah. And that's why I'm saying like, the more you get out there, the more you start realizing later on what other opportunities are out there. Things that you don't even know you want may not exist right now, and they will in 10 years. So yeah, my story is very much I just got out there and I hustled and I figured it out, and they stayed open to opportunity, but I never let go of my passion. The people that I know are happiest is when they switch out one passion for another. Another thing becomes their main priority or a top priority. And I realize more and more my personal life became a priority and what I was looking for there. But also I didn't wanna let go of the professional side of myself and that dream and everything I had worked so hard for. So how do you blend that? And interestingly enough, this conversation, I had so many enlightening conversations with women about this because women are expected to navigate those worlds in ways that men aren't. Yeah. Again, through my inclusion work and working in diversity and inclusion kind of programs that these associations through the years. Because inherently I was always asked to do the diversity work as a person of color, as a gay person. Hmm. I get this job and then the pandemic hits and George Floyd is murdered. Suddenly now I'm as the only person of color on staff at the time, and the only out person, like after years and years of the Me Too movement and all these major incidents against people of color and queer folks and women. Like the mass shootings and the change in politics and how we have political discourse and how polarized and how ugly it's become. Yeah. There becomes a need for someone that can kind of talk about these issues and help newsrooms navigate framing ethics and, oh my God, this is what I have been figuring out on the job myself and working with my teams over the years to figure out. This new position is created called, you know, DEI director, and right now that's under fire. Like Texas just passed a law that bans these at universities, and so you just can't take for granted a lot of things. You have to kind of stay in the, know. If you're not keeping up with the news, other people are making a lot of decisions for you. That's what's important to vote. And how do you become an informed voter by good quality information. It's the responsibility of the fourth estate of journalism to provide that. I am a conduit in this long pipeline of human activity to uphold a better society. And where I went from writing stories and editing stories. Now I'm in a place of helping those writing stories and those editing stories to kind of rethink what we do. It's been a really enriching job that like makes perfect sense for where I'm at now. And I'll be honest, I don't know where I go after this either. One thing leads to another and I think you can't get so rigid about your path. Some people are very fortunate and like they set a path and they reach their destination exactly at every stop. They knew it was gonna be along the way. I did hit all my goals, but they did not look like how it was gonna look. They did not happen at the age I thought they were gonna happen in some ways. And there's still more goals that I have that I'm like, this is a general one, but as I've gotten older and more mature, I realize you can only plan so much and it really depends on your resources. I have more resources now because my degrees upped my income. They upped my skillset. In a capitalist society, you're always balancing that out, like chasing your passions with having a nice quality of life. Yeah. And that's really why I think higher education opens doors, in addition to the personal benefit of, I think honestly making you a better person cuz it really challenges you. My mind has been really opened and I'm really in a state of anger always in that we have so much more in common than we can recognize because people stay in power a lot of times by dividing us. And that doesn't mean you don't talk about the uncomfortable things in life, but we spent too much time equating each other's pain and struggle. It is what it is. We go through phases in society. And so I think right now, my hope is that with good information, voters will continue to make better decisions for themselves. That's where, we can't do it alone. And my hope is that, For everyone listening to this that you realize like you taking all these steps, you really have a lot of power to make your community better in your space. It starts in whatever space is directly around you, and then you can move on from there.
Carrie:Absolutely. And I love how you were talking about how this position is such a great combination of all of these different factors and all of these different pieces of you and your experience and your life. And it's been so interesting with this podcast to hear how many people get to this point in life where they are able to combine all of these pieces of themselves that they never envisioned working together before, or they never envisioned that a position or a job or work existed where they could bring all of those pieces together and utilize all of them. So I just love that you're another example of that and helping students to see that. There are so many different experiences that you can bring together into something that you may not know exists or actually doesn't exist yet, but you wanna keep your eyes and your ears open for that and not be so laser focused on something or have such tunnel vision that you miss it or that you don't actually hear an opportunity when it presents itself, where you can utilize all of these different pieces of yourself and bring all of your experience together in this way that you didn't imagine.
Francisco:Yeah, I have been inspired by other people's stories that I have told that have shared that with me, and it's so weird to see it kind of play out in your own life. It is very liberating in some ways to know like, I don't know everything that's gonna happen next, but I work through every day and I keep an eye out for the signs of oh, I really connect with this and I like to go do it and every industry is very diverse in the jobs you do. So if you have a central like passion for a space like the arts or education or sports, whatever it is, like there are so many different types of jobs in those spaces. And so you don't have to fully give up everything. A lot of things are transitions to other spaces. Well, what else is going on in your life? What the market has available. Within those spaces, these opportunities show up and you can't predict them. Like on a good day, that's very exciting because that's really living. You're not like a robot. Yeah. It's so if you embrace it gets a lot less scary. And once you go through a couple of crises, you're like, I got this. Yeah. I have wherewithal. Every human has the capacity I truly believe, to find their own happiness if you keep working toward it.
Carrie:After everything that you've described to us and what you've gone through on your career and education path, do you have any big picture life advice for students, whether it's specific to your career path or just general life advice that you feel like has helped you along your journey?
Francisco:I think you just need to start somewhere. Every step you take, again, you're not standing still because that is the greatest fear. Something won't happen. Something will start to happen as long as you start moving. In the process you have to remember to not be so hard on yourself because we are thankfully now in a state of public discourse where we are being told to love ourselves, to be kind to ourselves and to exercise that with others. I don't think you should discount that. People expect more authenticity now. They value when someone is candid and honest and direct. We don't have enough of that. Embrace challenge because that's where you really grow. Even if it's painful, our bodies go through growing pains as youth and into adulthood, into folks that I've interviewed into their eighties and nineties that I've asked them that question. And they've said, you know, I wish I would've had more fun along the way. I wish I would've spent more time doing the things I love with the people I love, and making sure to not discount that in the process of finding your professional fulfillment. I think in a society like ours where you have to have a job and it's important for an identity to have some kind of focus that our jobs and our careers can bring us that. But we don't always put the same emphasis on the holistic view. And so you go through eras and you may be in one where you are focused on your career and you're really happy with that. And there may be others where it's your personal, and then you may go through a phase where it's a little bit of both. The most important thing, honestly, as cheesy as it sounds to some folks, is the kindness factor. You cannot be so hard on yourself because you are missing out on the joy of the journey. And that's now what I realized that maybe I was kind of doing, but I appreciate it way more. And I think the pandemic taught me that every day is a gift, even if that day's mundane, because the next day could be life changing. That's where I hope people really sit with thinking about what they want in life because careers are a conduit, they will bring a lot of that other happiness. But everyone that I've asked about that question later in life has told me that really it came to what their work allowed them to do outside of their job. In some ways, to find that ultimate larger fulfillment. One thing can lead to another and just be open to what that can be.
Carrie:Absolutely. That is fantastic advice. Francisco, thank you so much for joining us today. I feel like we talked about so much, not just about education and career, but just about life and things that people need to think about in our society and things they need to take into consideration when making decisions along their path. So I really appreciate your transparency and sharing your story with us today.
Francisco:Thanks so much. I really appreciate you reaching out and I feel it's always an honor to be vulnerable with another human because I think that's how we get to know each other better.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.