Real News, Real Stories

Speaker 1: [Music] hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Jen Maxfield is an Emmy award-winning reporter and anchor who started at NBC New York in 2013 prior she worked for Eyewitness News ABC7 in New York City she is also an Adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University thank you for joining us Jen share with us who you are about your early career experiences and what in inspired you and gave you the courage to write and publish more after the break thank you so much for having me on your podcast I should start by saying that despite the fact that I've been a TV news reporter for the last 22 years my first career aspiration was to be a doctor just like my dad and I went to college as a Premed student but I had an internship with CNN at the United Nations I always wrote for the school paper and was interested in journalism and it was that one experience of working with Gary tuckman who's a correspondent for CNN and he let me do everything in this internship I used to write CNN Radio stories and go to news conferences and ask questions and I knew that that was the career for me so I switched gears and worked for CNN as an undergrad student and then after grad school I got my first job in Binghamton New York and that was my big break and I think a great story to tell people is when I was looking for my first job I had graduated from Columbia journalism school and I had a resume tape and I sent out the tape to 65 news directors all around the country asking them to give me my first job and I did not get a single call back from all of those tapes on the advice of a friend and Mentor I started going on a road trip in Upstate New York and I'd call the news directors and say I just so happened to be in town would you be able to meet with me and the news director and Bingham to New York did and he gave me the job and I'm still very grateful for that first break but it goes to show you that you really have to persevere especially on that first job because it's just so challenging to break through I love that initiative you didn't necessarily listen you just kept going thinking we're going to experience a no can hold us back from anything we're working towards accomplishing it's true and rejection in some ways is really a great motivator I had already experienced some of that in high school I was a good student student athlete and I applied to a bunch of colleges and I got rejected from almost all of them and so I already had experienced some of that part of what happened was that by experiencing the rejection I never got complacent I was never comfortable and I always was on my aame and wanted to do better I think because I was afraid that things would get taken away if I didn't and I bring that mindset to things where I try to never get too settled and I'm always pushing myself so while it's very uncomfortable in the moment to experience that rejection and it's really Soul crushing in some cases I do think that after you get over the initial shock it does serve as a great motivator that's so true and what a great lesson to learn so early in your career because I'm sure that that has stayed with you yeah Ely I still get rejected for things to this day somebody might decide not to do an interview with me or now that I wrote the book a bookstore might decide that they're not interested in having me for a book signing I think to myself if I'm not getting rejected from something then that means I'm not trying hard enough because if you're stretching yourself and trying to achieve something new and different if you're not getting rejected you're still in your comfort zone once you start getting rejected from things that shows that you're really pushing yourself so true what gave you the courage to write your book I always wanted to write a book and I do love to write one of the things I've realized in the process of talking to people about the book is that not everybody realizes that I write my own scripts at work so when you see me out reporting on a story Live From The Scene everything that I'm saying to you I've written myself and the piece that I put together on the news is something that I've written and I love that part of the job but a normal TV news script is 250 words it's about 90 seconds long my book is 70,000 words so that was the original Mountain that I had to climb to just be able to make that transition between writing something that's 90 seconds long versus writing something that's 250 pages long but just like everything else you do a little bit every day and first you have 200 words and you have 500 then you have a th and it starts building up my confidence grew as I saw that word count go up and I felt I can do this and that's not to say there weren't days when I was writing the book that I wasn't pulling my hair out thinking oh the words are never going to come out right or people aren't calling me back and I don't know if this story is going to work in this format but it did wind up working as a book what I'm touching on in this book are a lot of themes that people think about which is you see these stories they're at the center of the newscast they're trending on Twitter they're on the homepage of the news websites and then we move on to the next story but we never go back to tell you what happened to the people at the center of these news events that's so true you're right we see the headlines and then we don't know what happens next how did you choose the people in your stories there were some people that I was already in contact with perhaps through social media and so those people were pretty easy for me to seek out and had been following their family stories in the wake of the story that had gotten them in our newscast in the first place and I thought you know I'd really love to catch up with them but just because I moved on to a different assignment didn't mean that I stopped thinking about a lot of the families that I've covered on the news and sometimes it'll come to me when I'm in my car and I drive past the place where I met them sometimes I even dream about news stories and people who I've interviewed so I know that they're still in my sub un conscious part of the inspiration to write the book was just Natural Curiosity for me to figure out what wound up happening to these families but I suspect that if I was feeling that Curiosity many other people in the community were feeling that as well and that they're curious to know whatever happens to people once the live trucks pull away can you briefly share one of the stories I actually was just speaking with Tama who is the subject of chapter 5 of my book and she's such a remarkable woman she was in an abusive relationship and she got a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend and she thought that was enough to keep her safe but it wasn't 6 weeks after she gave birth to their child together he broke into her mother's house and stabbed her 27 times and it was so awful and the only reason she survived that attempt back is because her 2-year-old daughter lay down on her mother to give her a hug and Tama survived because that two-year-old stopped the bleeding because of the way that she was giving her the hug so tama's Story of Survival is such a miracle in and of itself I was working back in March of 2012 and we got a call into The Newsroom a tip that a woman had been stabbed by her ex-boyfriend she was in intensive care in the hospital and that she wanted to go on the news about it so I was assigned the story and I went and spoke with Tama and I'll never forget being at the side of her hospital bed and seeing what he had done to her and hearing about everything she had done to try to stop it and it still wasn't enough and thankfully he was arrested and he's serving prison time but to go back now 10 years after that and reconnect with Tama and see you know her daughters now the girl who saved her life as a 2-year-old is now 12 the newborn baby's 10 they're thriving they're doing so well in school Tamika is a fantastic mother and she has been able to heal from most of her injuries to reconnect with her and to learn about everything that had happened since that day I was with her in the hospital there's so much more to all of these stories and the upshot of it for the reader so many of us go through different struggles and things that happened to us and we think how am I ever going to feel better after this and I think that whether it's t or any of the other people in my book we can all learn a lot from people who have suffered by no fault of their own but not just in hearing about what caused the initial incident to get them on the news but also what happens after that and how do they survive and even Thrive after having these things happen to them so true and everyone goes through some maybe not as traumatic but when you see the stories and good for you thank you so much for sharing them because it makes someone feel not as alone and I think that's also in some ways the motivation on why so many people wanted to speak with me again I didn't know when I started writing this book whether anybody would want to speak with me again we're reopening Old Wounds I wondered if they looked back on the whole situation and thought I wish I never went on the news I wish she never knocked on my front door I wish I never reached out for an interview I was a bit intimidated when I was first contacting people but the vast majority of people did want to speak with me again part of it is they have something to say and in a lot of cases what people want to say is I survive this and I want to help other people get through whatever it is they're going through and in some cases this is the mission of these people now in their lives to reach out to other people who were suffering and and try to help them too and for the safety of women for what she went through absolutely in tama's case the whole reason she even agreed to go on the news while she was in intensive care in the hospital she still talks about this to this day that she wanted to warn other people and she wanted to make sure that no woman went through what she went through she felt that it was incumbent on her to put the word out look here are the red flags that I ignored don't wind up like me so even in that low point when she was in the hospital she was thinking about other people and how to help other people which I think is so admirable we're grateful she was so brave yeah I I don't know if I could have done that in her situation which is more challenging knocking on a family's door to ask for an emotional interview or walking back to the live truck afterwards oh that's such a good question the hardest part of my job job is knocking on somebody's door who has suffered I write about in the book that this takes me far outside my comfort zone because I I do still feel like I am intruding on them and that I might be amplifying whatever bad thing has happened to them and maybe even making it worse but on the other hand through the years and having covered so many of these stories I also know that if we don't reach out to the family and we do go and interview some tangential person who barely knows anything about what's going on we're at risk for putting an inaccurate story on the air and some cases that can be even worse for the family if we do that my general attitude is I give the family the opportunity to speak with me but I also take no for an answer and if they say no then that's the end of the conversation I totally respect that but I love your question because you also are looking at the other side of it which is okay so the fames agreed to the interview and now we've done the interview and now it's time for me to leave and that is really hard too because in some cases we're at these stories so early that maybe the extended family hasn't arrived yet maybe the faith leader the minister or the rabbi maybe they haven't gotten to the house yet and sometimes those support networks are not in place yet I do sometimes feel a sense of guilt to be leaving because in some cases speaking with a reporter is cathartic and we do see that with some people that that they seem to not necessarily feel better but it gives them a way to talk and someone to talk to in those moments we're human beings first and we're journalists second but thank you for that question because I think it shows a lot of empathy to even be thinking along those lines it speaks to your character because you care and I would think that many of the families even later are grateful for someone who cares what did happen after that headline I hope so I know I'm not unique in this there are many journalists uh whether it's reporters or photographers who who really went into the business because we're interested in people we care about people we enjoy meeting people if anything having done the job for this many years I've actually grown in some ways more sensitive to other people becoming a mom I have three kids of my own that's also made me really sensitive to how people are feeling in these situations how was the process of becoming an author for you what did you learn and what did you like the most about it I learned a lot from friends of mine who had already written books and I would encourage anyone who's even thinking about writing a book which I know a lot of us are to reach out and find a mentor or or a friend or somebody else who's done it because they can really be your cheerleader and in those moments where you feel like the words aren't coming out I think that they were essential for me and not looking at it as as such a huge thing like I used to think how does anybody write a book how can you write so many pages and and sustain the same idea and I just think nobody sits down and writes an entire book you write a little bit at a time and somehow at the end you have the break up the task into smaller more manageable pieces that that's a better way to do it and to be honest I wasn't even sure until I was probably half done with this book that it would even work that people would want to read it because it I know that now it looks very organized oh okay there's 10 stories and I went back to each of them and it might appear that I just had the list of 10 and I went right down the list and that's how the book was written but in fact I started with about two or three stories I knew that I could write those and then in real time the book was developing so I might be writing one chapter and then researching the next and in some ways it was better that way because if I had picked all 10 stories to start I'm not sure that the book would have had the same flow and as much of a variety of stories as it does in the end thank you for sharing how it developed over time and how you manage the structure of the book what is your approach to management for leading teams and what do you think is the most crucial element of leadership in order to grow I've got a couple different examples of leadership because I work for NBC in New York as a reporter and then I'm also an Adjunct professor at Columbia journalism so I'll take these two separately for my two different jobs but as far as leadership for examp example while reporting a story I always work as part of a team I'm not reporting any of these stories myself and my most important teammate is the photographer who I'm working with and I always view the two of us as a team we work as a team so when I finish an interview I will turn to the photographer I'm working with and say do you have any questions because even though that's not their essential job it empowers the person I'm working with to know that they're part of the story too if I have a shot that I think we should get at a news story I might say to the photographer would you mind getting some video of this and I see the two of us as always being equals that is part of leadership is not just viewing yourself as the person at the center of everything but really empowering everybody around you to be able to share their ideas because I've always felt that the collaborative approach which is always the best one and every Newsroom is a collaboration so that Segways into what I tell my students at Colombia because we're in a classroom with 15 students and I'm the adjunct professor there and I tell the students from day one it's in the first thing I send to them that we are a team if you finish your assignment or you finish your editing I don't expect you to sit there and be on your phone I expect you to go and help your teammates because if you know how to do something and you teach it to somebody else that you actually understand it better in that way because you've now taught it to somebody else so I think that in many ways whether it's out on a news story or in the classroom the best leaders empower the people around them and they solicit ideas from other people and that way the product at the end is really the sum of all the parts that's such good advice because even writing a book you do that alone but in the end you don't really because there has to be a team for publishing it's still a collaborative effort of course I've so enjoyed working with the publisher and my publicist and the editor and learning about the book industry but I try to approach things the dean of Columbia uh College Jim Valentini uses the term beginners mind and beginners mind is such a great place to start where basically you go into a situation trying not to have a preconceived idea of how it should be having that attitude of openness you want to solicit other people's ideas but if you can go into something as a flexible thinker and say okay this is what I'm thinking but I'm interested to hear about your strategy and I'm willing to take a second look at at what I think magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip that you can leave with us today about how you make sure to find and live your joy I got into this business because I love people I love meeting new people I love learning from people I'm interested in speaking with people who might have a different job or live in a different place or come from a different background I have always thrived on meeting people and learning from them and so what still gives me Joy about my job 22 years after I started it in Binghamton New York is just the fun that I have I write in my book I've interviewed 10,000 people over the last 22 years some of the stories are really tough I write about some of those in the book but I view it as a gift and an opportunity to be able to meet people and spend a career traveling around the state that I love New Jersey and meet and speak with so many people and and have them trust me with their stories because at the end of the day that really is what it requires these are their stories and I'm telling them and that does require a degree of Trust on their part which I hope I've earned I'm still trying every day to earn it thank you for joining us today thank you for having the courage to share these incredible stories please tell us how and where we can find you and we all can't wait to read your book well it's been such a pleasure and thank you for thinking of me my website gen Maxfield is on July 12th we expect that it'll be in bookstores all over the country and I'm doing signings across the country we're adding more every day you can also find me on Instagram at gen Maxfield news thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor Rich stalino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave