In the last 17 months of being at Google, I’ve been focusing on learning the business of journalism while supporting the audio industry.
I’ve been a judge for the Audio Production Awards and the British Podcast Awards. I’ve been a mentor/judge for Spotify’s Sound Up Bootcamp. This year I’m also managing Google’s Podcast Creator’s Program in partnership with PRX/PRI.
The Google Podcasts creator program is designed to increase the diversity of voices in the industry globally and lower barriers to podcasting. Selected teams will receive seed funding and participate in an intensive training program.
There’s an awakening among journalists of color in public media: The racist and sexist incidents that many of us have privately endured aren’t anomalies. They’re systemic.
We’ve known this anecdotally for some time. We have whisper networks devoted to believing and supporting each other as we fight to make our voices heard in an industry where many of us feel unwanted.
In the past few weeks, I’ve felt overwhelmed by my anger. I am angry at the complicity of newsroom executives who talk about diversity in hiring while doing nothing about retention. I am incredulous at the business reasons for favoring one brilliant jerk’s career over the productivity of dozens of women.
The proof is in how little NPR’s dismal diversity numberschange year over year. At the local level, the proof is in the all-white newsrooms that cover minority majority regions. Undeniably, there is something rotten in the system.
Many of us have focused our efforts on the “pipeline problem” — a favorite excuse of hiring managers who are unwilling to expand their networks and challenge their biases. Our padrino — godfather — is Doug Mitchell, the founder of NPR’s Next Generation Radio. Since 2000, Next Generation has been pairing journalism students with professional journalists in workshops all over the country. I had been a mentor for Next Generation twice and was gearing up for round three when news stories broke about abuse at NPR, WNYC, WBUR and MPR.
In light of the reports, I reached out to Mitchell. I told him I was feeling ambivalent about continuing to mentor students of color for our industry. I asked him, “In training young people of color and women for public media, are we just teeing them up to be abused?” I hadn’t even met my mentee yet and I was already imagining getting a call from her in three years, hearing her tell me “something bad happened.”
In typical fashion, Mitchell responded to my question with a homework assignment. He told me the time had come to give our students an additional form of training. Since I would be one of the six women mentors at our project in January at the University of Houston, he asked me to lead a candid discussion with our students. I accepted the assignment without any idea of what I was going to say.
I knew that if I wanted to avoid discouraging our students from pursuing careers in media, I’d have to leave my anger at the door. I decided to emulate the tone of conflict reporting training, since maintaining your creativity in a hostile work environment can feel like a daily battle.
I opened my reporting notebook and started making phone calls.
I talked to Amy Gastelum, Lewis Wallace, Andrew Ramsammy and Luis Clemens. It was Wallace who taught me the phrase “preserve your magic” — borrowed from Nick Daily, who is a dean of black affairs at the Claremont University Consortium. I subconsciously changed “preserve” to “protect” after reading conflict reporting guides and I decided to keep it. Gastelum teaches journalism at the Indiana University Media School, where she candidly talks about these issues with her students. “I wish we didn’t have to do this” Gastelum said, “but they can handle it.”
Clemens was my advocate at NPR during my Kroc fellowship and has been my mentor ever since. The founding editor of NPR’s Code Switch, Clemens has been fighting for representation and inclusion in our industry throughout his career. He’s taught me many valuable lessons over the years. For this presentation, he told me to never forget the fact that “this is a really freaking cool job.” His words inspired me to ground the discussion in joy. Andrew Ramsammy consults public media organizations on diversity issues. Ramsammy encouraged me to add the final slide about mental health and asked me to tell our students to “be an active participant in your own success.”
If you haven’t had a chance to look at the slideshow at the top of this story, I encourage you to do so and then read the thoughts behind each one.
SLIDE 1: I organized our thoughts into a publicly available slidedeck that anyone can present. I hope it helps facilitators kick off thoughtful conversations that empower young journalists. If you use it in a professional capacity, please let me know how it went.
SLIDE 2: I started the presentation by asking everyone in the room to put their devices away and close their eyes. I led the group in a guided meditation. “Think about all the little things that make your voice special,” I said. “The flourishes that make you a unique storyteller, all the things that let me know, even before I see your byline that a story is YOUR story. The people in your community who build you up, the ways you code switch between different worlds, your sense of humor. Okay now take all the these things and fuse them together into a ball of energy right in front of your heart. Hold it. What does it look like? What does it feel like? Keep holding it. Acknowledge it, Thank it.”
SLIDE 3: “That ball of energy is your magic. We are all here because we see your magic. We believe in your magic and its ability to change the world.”
SLIDE 4: “Our relationship with you doesn’t end on Friday. We’re your new network for life. Our goal for you is to get you to a workplace where people value your magic. At this point in your career, the determinant in your success is having access to a good editor who believes in you. An entry-level job should pay you a living wage, you should have the space to have a life outside of the newsroom and be given the opportunity to grow your career.”
SLIDE 5: “Maria Hinojosa asks every young journalist she works with what their ‘Dream-O-Vision’ is. ‘I can’t help you if I don’t know what the Dream-O-Vision is,’ she tells them. Your first, second or third job is probably not going to be your dream job, but it’s a step on the Dream-O-Vision ladder. Maybe you decided to take a GA reporter position even though you dream about hosting Marketplace. It’s not your dream, but you are going to acquire skills that are going to take you one step closer. Maybe you’ll have to work an overnight shift every once in a while. When you start out your job won’t be perfect, but it should make sense in the story of who you want to be. Build up your personal board of advisors — a group of mentors that you routinely check in with. Work on cultivating a strong group of people who see your magic and will be a source of advice throughout your career.”
SLIDE 6: “Paying your dues never means being the victim of abuse: verbal, emotional, sexual, whatever. If you find yourself being victimized, it’s never your fault. Tell your network ASAP and we’ll figure out a plan to get you out of there. If you follow trade news, you know that some very ugly secrets have been coming to light. People like us have been working toward a public media system that is inclusive and fair for everybody, but the truth is we’re not there yet. The rest of this presentation is going to be about how to keep your magic safe.”
SLIDE 7: “If you were reporting on a story, you would never go into a scene cold, right? You’d find out everything you could before actually going out on the field — why would you do anything different for your career? Do your research. Become a LinkedIn sleuth. Find people who used to work at the workplace you are looking at. If you see a bunch of people who did brief stints there — under a year — that’s a bad sign. If you see another person of color who worked there for a short period in the near past, reach out to them. Find out what happened.”
“During the interview process: Be polite, but also ask a lot of questions. If the manager wants to hire an actual journalist, they’ll be impressed. Here are some questions you might ask: What happened to the last person who held the position you are applying for, or if it’s a new position, why was this position created? What happens to people who take entry-level jobs at that workplace? Do they get promoted internally or do they leave? What kind of career development opportunities are going to be available to you? Has that development been available to others, and if so, can you talk to them about it? Don’t just take their word for it. Will you be able to go to conferences and apply to trainings and workshops? Will they help you pitch your work to outside editors? If they tell you you can pursue these opportunities on your own time, or that you’ll need to take vacation days for career development, that is a huge red flag. Keep your eyes peeled throughout the interview process. Are you going to be the ‘only one?’ What happened to the last ‘only one?’ Forget that you really need the job for a minute and take off your rose-colored glasses. The dynamics you see during the interview process will come back to haunt you if you take the job. Is the manager disorganized? How does the manager treat the receptionist? Does the manager make you feel comfortable? Write your impressions down at the end of the day and debrief with your mentors. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Here’s a little secret: You don’t have to take every job that you’re offered. Trust your gut. I know a young reporter that turned down the only entry-level reporter position in his city because the manager seemed like a jerk. Instead, he worked part-time as a substitute teacher and lived with his parents while he got his freelance career off the ground. His stories got the attention of a fellowship committee at CUNY — he ended up getting a full ride to the journalism graduate school.”
SLIDE 8: “Once you do find an opportunity that seems like a good fit, talk to your mentors about what an appropriate entry-level salary looks like for that market and make sure you get it. Don’t listen to your mom on this one — you should not just be grateful that they are offering you a position. Don’t be shy about negotiating your salary; it shows that you value yourself. Managers expect that you’ll negotiate a higher salary, many times they are not allowed to pay you more money until you ask. Before you accept the offer, get your job description in writing. This is the start of the documentation you’ll do throughout your tenure at that workplace. It’s a good thing to have in case you ever need to reference it. If in the future your manager wants you to do something that isn’t in the job description, you can negotiate a different title and/or salary. Ask your manager how you are going to be evaluated, with what frequency and on what metrics. This will define what success will look for you internally and will give you a solid foundation to make the case for a promotion and a raise. Get that in writing.”
SLIDE 9: “On the job, get as many things as you can in writing, over email. This is helpful if you have a manager that forgets things or changes their mind easily. As a journalist, you should be journaling every day for your forthcoming memoir, but at the very least you need to take contemporaneous notes when something weird happens. Write it down, using full names and dates. And when something makes you uncomfortable, talk to people you trust about it. In many cases it’s better to talk to people outside of your workplace about it. Lucky you — you have a big network of people who have your back.”
SLIDE 10: “You don’t have to be the office diversity warrior (if you don’t want to be). At this stage, put your career first. You need to acquire social capital in this industry before you can shake it up. So be thoughtful. As a person of color, sometimes you get labeled as a ‘problem’ for speaking out. You might start getting dinged for performance reasons that aren’t really a big deal. Depending on the workplace, going to HR isn’t always the best idea. Many times they are there to protect the employer, not you. But don’t be discouraged — there are small, meaningful ways you can start to make change. You can mentor interns. When someone says something biased you can ask ‘What do you mean by that?’ or ‘Why do you think that?’ When someone crosses the line, you can say ‘That wasn’t very kind’ or ‘That wasn’t very professional’ and walk away. There are ways of clearly state your boundaries and expectations without being perceived as ‘aggressive.’ Acknowledge that you are going to brush up against conflict. You can decide how you will react right now.”
SLIDE 11: “Most jobs are like lily pads, you’re not going to stay there forever. Most people stay in the same job for two years before moving on, either to another position at the same organization or to another workplace altogether. Figure out what you need to do to get to that next step. If you see a posting for a dream job you’re not qualified for yet, see if you can set up an informational interview with that manager. Ask what you need to accomplish before getting a job like that in the future. You might be surprised; that hiring manager could become a future mentor. Get outside feedback on your work. Freelancing stories allows you the opportunity to network and work with editors with different management styles. Apply to workshops and go to journalism conferences. Many cities have monthly ‘listening lounges’ where you can get constructive feedback about your work. You can also train your loved ones to listen to your work with a critical ear — ask them to tell you when they found their attention wavering, when they felt bored.”
SLIDE 12: “Be your own stage mom. Don’t isolate yourself. Document all the great things you do and talk to people about it. Make time to walk the floor of your workplace every week. Get to know what everybody does and make sure they know what you’re capable of. I had a colleague who emailed our GM every time he made a Storify. Do you know how easy it is to make a Storify? Make sure your professional website and your LinkedIn are up to date. Apply for journalism awards and fellowships. Email your work to your mentors every couple of months to get their feedback.”
SLIDE 13: “Find communities that nourish your spirit outside of your workplace. Community can take many different shapes. You need to have people who see your magic outside of your professional capacity. Have a group of people that you can vent to. As journalists, we tend to really wrap up our identity with our work, and that’s not healthy. Whether you get 10 Peabodies or nobody ever knows your name, your self-worth needs to be exactly the same. This will help you navigate career changes. Believe in the strength of your community, that’s your safety net and your trust fund. When many of us moved away from home our families said ‘Baby, you can always come home.’ That’s how we journalist of color in public media work — we have each other’s backs.”
SLIDE 14: As a storyteller, there is nothing more important than your mental health: You can’t be creative if you’re not healthy. Focus on cultivating a rich internal life. It takes a lot of work to realize that we are small characters in other people’s lives; the way that people react to you often has very little to do with you. It is not selfish to take care of yourself. For some of us, being disciplined means knowing when to take time to stop working for the day. Self-care means different things for different people. Therapy. Church. Meditation. Medication. Figure out what you need to keep yourself healthy and productive.
* * *
“Protect Your Magic” was our first session of the workshop and it set a great tone for the rest of the week. We took time after the presentation to discuss the thoughts and feelings it provoked.
Next Gen mentor Crystal Chavez is a host and reporter at WMFE in Orlando. “I have rarely met a POC journalist who hasn’t experienced some type of discrimination in the newsroom, ranging from cultural incompetency to racism,” Chavez said. “It’s heartening that we are being proactive in getting students to think about how they would want to react should they encounter such a situation in the workplace.”
Houston Chronicle reporter Monica Rhor also served as a mentor on the project. “The presentation reminded me of the power we bring to our jobs, to the industry, to the stories we write because of who we are as journalists of color,” Rhor said. “It reminded me that protecting that magic is crucial to protecting my very important voice.”
The students felt empowered by our conversation. “I have often been called overly confident and too spicy when trying to be my own stage mom,” Alejandra Martinez said. “After the ‘protect your magic’ presentation I will say I am valuable and my magic is one of a kind.”
“I’ve had a terrible habit of measuring my value as a person based on my work,” Rafa Farihah said. “Now, I know to protect my magic and make sure to find a way to keep it alive.”
My mentee, Antréchelle Dorsey, felt so inspired by our conversation that she started a hashtag. She told me to expect my #ProtectYourMagic T-shirt in the mail.
* * *
About Next Gen
NPR’s Next Generation Radio is a digital-first journalism training project designed to find and develop college students and early career professionals for careers in public media. Founded in 2000, it began by going to national minority journalism conferences and doing radio projects there. Always innovative, the program has been posting content to the web since it started. Even 18 years ago, students understood the future and it was the internet. Also back then, stations didn’t want to put students on the air, so the program went online.
Now, in 2018, the program is sponsored by NPR, NPR member stations and U.S. colleges and universities. The program is more directly helping stations find their future employees from talent pools that are right under their noses.
“The Talk” during our Next Gen project adds to a guiding principle. If someone is selected to the program, they are now part of the family.
It means:
That when they write or call, those emails, texts or voicemails are returned, promptly.
That any and all career strategy discussion are had.
That any time they are in a workplace situation they do not know how to handle, they have a mentor ready to help them through it.
That we are ready to sponsor them.
That we have their backs. They were chosen for a reason.
By the numbers
In 2017, Next Gen selected 57 students and early career professionals for its 10 projects. Twenty-two of those participants landed or changed jobs or internships in public media. In 2016, 49 people were chosen for our eight projects; 11 landed jobs or internships in public media.
“Short-form podcast app 60dB will be shutting down next month and its team will be joining Google in an apparent acqui-hire.
“Today, we’re announcing we’ll be shutting down 60dB on Friday, November 10th, and we’ll be joining the team at Google,” a Medium post signed by the 60dB co-founders read. “As we considered next steps for 60dB, we came to the conclusion that to accomplish our goals we’d be better positioned if we joined someone with scale who shared our vision for what was possible with digital audio.” The note was first spotted by Business Insider.
Tiny Garage Labs, which created the app, launched its podcast platform for iOS, Android, Alexa and the web last year, allowing users to access personalized short-form audio pieces inside the app. The team said it worked with more than 80 media institutions to produce “hundreds of audio stories in the past year.”
What does that mean for me? I’ll be showing up to work at Google’s Covent Garden offices in London. I am so excited to see what this journey means for me creatively and professionally. Stay tuned!
60dB’s Brenda Salinas talks to Jeff Masters, he’s the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists go to get inside information about severe weather.
After Tropical Storm Allison devastated the Houston Medical Center in 2001, the area’s 21 hospitals banded together to make sure it never happens again.
How can blue cities fight back against red states? Molly Cohen, associate counsel with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. has four lines of defense.
Brenda Salinas met Joshua Browder, a Stanford computer science major who is automating legal aid and talked to Renee Knake, a legal ethicist, about what it means for the legal professor.
Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that after fending off challenges to their tax-exempt status, the biggest hospitals boosted revenue while cutting charity care.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne Lafrance tells us about the technology that makes it difficult to discern between videos of real people and avatars who can be programmed to say anything.
Journalist Nathan Kohrman argues that medical schools should do more to accommodate students with disabilities, and we talk to one such student, Molly Fausone.
The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger explains this mismatch strikes right at the heart of a lot of concerns about the Trump family’s business interests.
The Washington Post’s Emma Brown reports that with the state budget in crisis, nearly a fifth of Oklahoma school districts are holding school just four days a week.
Russian-American journalist Alyona Minkovski explains the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to express pride in her heritage and culture colliding with the media’s recent demonization of all things Russian.
In the months following the Indianapolis’ Star investigation, 80 gymnasts have come forward to allege USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar sexually assaulted them.
The Development Set’s Kristance Harlow writes across the United States, emergency dispatch services are consolidating, and in many cases, run privately. In rural areas, it could mean the difference between life and death.
Trump might not fully appreciate how his antagonistic tone towards Mexico is harming one of the single most important relationships that the U.S. has. But Mexico doesn’t seem like it’s going to take that without a fight — maybe even installing its own Trump equivalent.
The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips explains Trump might not be able to get his border wall funded by Congress, but his isolationist immigration agenda is more likely to get funded.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says border apprehensions are down by 30% year to year. So why is the Trump administration building a new detention center in Texas? 60db’s Brenda Salinas reports.
Michael Luca found that bad yelp reviews make it more likely that a restaurant will go out of business after a minimum wage hike, no matter if it’s $ or $$$$.
Quartz’ Special Project editor Lauren Brown gives us an introduction to Index, a site for short little stories about finance and economics you can swipe through on your phone.
Football player Zac Easter suffered from CTE — but he never played past high school. Reid Forgrave, as well as Zac himself, tells the story of Zac’s football-induced descent into darkness.
The hash tage #AirbnbWhileBlack highlights just how easily discrimination can reshape the sharing economy. But online marketplaces didn’t always work this way. And if they are well designed they don’t have to. The first generation of online marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon, and Priceline, made it hard for sellers to discriminate. Transactions were conducted with relative anonymity.
Young undocumented immigrants who obtained protected status through President Obama’s executive action face an uncertain future under a Trump administration.
Many men, in fact, see Trump as the candidate who can restore men’s status in society. According to several recent analyses, about half of men feel American culture has become too soft and feminine, and they feel men are suffering as a result.
Chris Christie was on the baseball team in high school. David Wildstein was the team statistician. He’s been a sidekick ever since — but soon he might take the Governor down.
60dB’s Brenda Salinas talks to Jeff Masters, he’s the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists go to get inside information about severe weather.
After Tropical Storm Allison devastated the Houston Medical Center in 2001, the area’s 21 hospitals banded together to make sure it never happens again.
How can blue cities fight back against red states? Molly Cohen, associate counsel with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. has four lines of defense.
Brenda Salinas met Joshua Browder, a Stanford computer science major who is automating legal aid and talked to Renee Knake, a legal ethicist, about what it means for the legal professor.
Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that after fending off challenges to their tax-exempt status, the biggest hospitals boosted revenue while cutting charity care.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne Lafrance tells us about the technology that makes it difficult to discern between videos of real people and avatars who can be programmed to say anything.
Journalist Nathan Kohrman argues that medical schools should do more to accommodate students with disabilities, and we talk to one such student, Molly Fausone.
The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger explains this mismatch strikes right at the heart of a lot of concerns about the Trump family’s business interests.
The Washington Post’s Emma Brown reports that with the state budget in crisis, nearly a fifth of Oklahoma school districts are holding school just four days a week.
The University of Chicago sent a welcome letter to all new students warning that the University won’t censor controversial speech or offer trigger warnings in class.
Chicago uses predictive algorithms to get ahead of likely crime — but instead of using these tools to deliver help victims they may have become a cyber drag net.
A new audio startup focuses on tailoring a playlist of short form stories that fit into a listener’s day
60dB, named for the volume at which a human speaks and founded by a former Planet Money reporter and two others with backgrounds at Netflix, is being teased as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories.”
Give the people what they want, when they want it, where they want it. It’s the mandate of streaming services like Spotify or Netflix, but the thinking around on-demand, personalized content has fully permeated the world of audio storytelling. (Seriously, search “Netflix of podcasting.” Every shiny new audio service has gotten the aspirational label, from Audible’s Channels to NPR One to Howl to Gimlet).
Now there’s one more new audio service on the horizon, co-founded by former NPR Planet Money reporter Steve Henn along withJohn Ciancutti and Steve McLendon, both with long histories at — wait for it — Netflix. 60dB, named for the volume at which a (calm) human speaks, is being teased as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories,” though the co-founders were more reticent about sharing too many details of its inner workings when I spoke to them prior to the announcement of the service Thursday morning (Ciancutti, Henn, and McLendon’s company is called Tiny Garage Labs).
60dB will start off as an iOS app, and then move into a broader universe of devices. A working version of the product exists and has been tested within a tiny group, but isn’t being released to the broader public just yet, though you can sign up to get notified when it is available. (I haven’t played with it either, and the team isn’t releasing screenshots or other materials at the moment).But in broad strokes: Users open the app, and it take signals from what subjects and types of stories and even people they’ve indicated they like, and 60dB will refine that feed of stories over time. The stories available on the platform will be easily searchable and contain familiar content aggregated from elsewhere, but also plenty of shortform content is new for the platform — emphasis on short.
There are “incredible stories people aren’t getting to hear,” Henn told me, whether because the length of many of the available podcasts “don’t fit into people’s lives,” or because it’s too difficult to discover shorter programming in single place.
I immediately thought of Acast’sattempts to emphasize diverse creators and niche interests, and of the constantly personalizing feed that NPR One offers. Henn and Ciancutti said that NPR One was a reasonable comparison: “But we wouldn’t be building this if we didn’t genuinely believe there wasn’t a good option already out there.” (I also immediately jumped to other conclusions, but 60dB isapparently not where NPR One lead Sara Sarasohn, who is leaving NPR, is headed)60dB also intends to offer data to the people creating for the platform, and not just barebones metrics. One of Henn’s last stories for Planet Money was about A/B testing, for which the team actually tested the effectiveness of the Planet Money episode lede on NPR One.
“One of the things we realized when we can see this type of data is that people can tune out of a story skip or tune out very early, first few seconds, first minute or two of a longer podcast. If you’re going to lose a chunk of your audience, that’s the point at which you lose them,” Henn said. “So just knowing that allows you to think really carefully about what’s the best way to reduce this. That’s tremendously powerful. This is something I really want to share this with everyone else who might be doing this for a living. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. This is late in my career, and now I’m going ‘ah ha!’”
The team declined to say more when I asked about who was paying for Tiny Garage Labs’ work and what the revenue model going forward would be, but Ciancutti dropped a small hint at the direction the team might prefer to go.
“We are not telling our funding story right now. We’ve got plenty of thoughts on monetization, but no one point of view on that at this point,” he said. “But you can see there’s three co-founders, and two of us spent twelve years at Netflix. Looking at our backgrounds you could imagine some of the biases that we have.”
“Netflix was a powerful example of how you can build a company to change consumer behavior in an industry like television, but also create a business model that really has lead to a golden age for high quality television,” Henn added. “The way the industry works now supports more great stuff than ever before. And that’s not a given when a media institution makes the transition into the digital world. That’s what I left Planet Money to work on.”
When you’re sixteen or seventeen do you really think about what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with? Sometimes, sure. But not all the time. There’s science to show that teens don’t think like adults. Their brains aren’t fully developed. That means two things. First that they don’t have the same ability as an adult to consider the consequences of their actions, and second, that in time, when their brains do become fully developed, they can be rehabilitated.
“I definitely thought that, without a doubt, I’m like, I know that I didn’t kill anybody – I wouldn’t hurt anybody. So I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I know I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna go home.’ But it didn’t happen like that.”
-Ashley Ervin
For these and many reasons, the US Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that teens can’t be sentenced to death and they can’t be given an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole. But what does that mean? How long can a state send a teen to prison before they have a chance at parole?
If you break the law and are sent to prison as a teen, how long do we wait to give you another chance? This week on Life of the Law, reporter Brenda Salinas tells us Ashley Ervin’s story.
STORY:
17 year old Ashley Ervin didn’t shoot anybody…but she did drive home the boys who did.
Back in 2006, Ashley was a shy, honor student from a black-middle class neighborhood in Houston. She was hand-picked to attend a special high school that focused on science. Her teachers loved her. She wanted to go into medicine.
ERVIN: And, right now I think that if everything would’ve happened as planned, I would’ve been a nurse right now.
Sophomore year, Ashley started dating a boy from her school named Keithron. She liked that he was soft-spoken, like her. She was a teenager in love.
ERVIN: That was my first boyfriend, and I knew it was possible that it could’ve been plenty others after that, but at seventeen that was like, that was all I seen. So, I kind of, just, put my all into that, and it was like, that was just it for me.
Keithron had a friend, Dexter. Ashley sort of knew that guy was bad news. They’d grown up in the same apartment complex, and he was always in and out of trouble as a kid. Ashley has always been really close to her mom. So maybe it says something that she didn’t tell her mom when she was hanging out with Dexter.
Most of the time, the three of them did typical high school stuff. They’d watch movies, listen to music, just hang out. But they also had some riskier habits.
One night, the three of them were out driving around Houston in Ashley’s car. It was late May, Memorial Day weekend, 2006. Dexter was driving. Ashley was dozing in the backseat. It was well after midnight.
ERVIN: And, I wake up to a car door slamming.
She could tell that her boyfriend Keithron had just gotten back in the car. He was wearing a hoodie with the hood up. He told Dexter that the woman didn’t have any money. They drove off.
ERVIN: I could tell that something was going on that wasn’t right.
A little later, Dexter noticed that Ashley was awake. He asked her to drive. They swapped places. Ashley started driving towards Keithron’s house. It was nearly dawn.
ERVIN: And, I’m at a stop light, and, I guess, he, I don’t know, he seen something or something, and he tells me, you know, “Turn here, and let us off here.” So, I do it, and in that instant, that’s when it all happened.
At a carwash near the intersection, an older man was busy washing a truck. Dexter and Keithron hopped out. They had guns in their hands.
ERVIN: He tried to rob some – this man, and, I guess, during the course of it, something went wrong, and, the man was shot, and he was killed.
The man was retired shop teacher Brady Davis. He had woken up at the crack of dawn to go to his local carwash. He was catering a barbecue later, and he wanted to clean his pit and trailer. Dexter and Keithron approached him wearing black bandanas over their faces. They demanded that Brady hand over his wallet. Brady had taught young men who looked just like them. Maybe he thought if he could only talk to them… He was found lying behind his truck with a single gunshot wound. He was 61.
Meanwhile, Ashley had driven around the corner to go to her house. So she says she didn’t actually see Dexter fire the gun.
ERVIN: I heard a gunshot, but I didn’t know, exactly, you know, where it came from, or what was going on, or anything. I didn’t know what was going on.
Ashley says she told herself, “I hear gunshots in this neighborhood all the time.”
ERVIN: And as I’m going back up the street, they’re running to my car, so I stop of course, and they get in, and they don’t say anything to me, and I just drive them back home.
Ashley says when she drove away she didn’t know what was happening. Police and prosecutors say she knew exactly what was going on.
About a month later, at the end of June, two plainclothes police officers showed up at a local McDonald’s where Ashley worked part time as a cashier. They had been looking for Ashley’s boyfriend, Keithron. He was a suspect in another crime — a rape and double murder committed in mid-June, a few weeks after the Brady Davis murder. The police had found out that Ashley and Keithron were dating. So when they couldn’t find Keithron, they stopped by Ashley’s work to see if she could help them.
The officers asked if she would come with them. She agreed.
ERVIN: In my family, I was always told, like, if you have to answer questions, just tell the truth and nothing will happen, I mean. That’s how my family was. But, looking back now, a lot of people in my neighborhood they probably would have never…freely went with the police like I did.
At first, the officers didn’t think she had anything to do with either crime. But then she mentioned her car – a black Nissan Sentra identical to one at the second crime scene. They asked if they could search it. She said yes, and the police had her car towed to the station. Then, the officers said they needed to take her to the station for questioning.
ERVIN: Actually that whole time I didn’t think that I was in trouble at all. And actually they kept telling me that I wasn’t in trouble, so they made me feel like… I wasn’t.
When she got to the station, the officers told her she wasn’t in custody. They said she was free to leave any time she wanted. They gave her food. They let her use the bathroom. Then they asked her about the rape and double murder case. The case in which her boyfriend Keithron was a suspect.
What she said must have been a surprise. Because Ashley, it turned out, was a witness to those crimes, too.
According to the police report, here’s what Ashley said happened:
It was late one night in mid-June 2006. 23 year old Maria Aparece was sitting in her parked car with her 17 year old boyfriend, Huy Ngo. They were talking when Dexter, Keithron, and another man approached them with a shotgun and a pistol and forced the couple into the backseat. Then, they drove around Houston demanding the couple give them money, credit cards and PIN numbers. Ashley’s cousin followed them in Ashley’s car, with Ashley as the passenger. Both cars drove to a wooded area. There, Dexter raped Maria while Keithron held her boyfriend back. Then Dexter made the couple march 60 feet into the woods, naked. He shot them in the head, execution-style. Ashley heard the gunshots. Afterwards, she and the three attackers went back to her boyfriend Keithron’s apartment.
At the police station, Ashley put this all in writing. Then, the police officer asked her about the Brady Davis murder. The one that happened in late May at the carwash, before the Aparece and Ngo murders. The officer suspected that Keithron and Dexter might also be involved in that crime…and that Ashley might know something about it, too.
So Ashley made a second written statement. She told the police everything that she saw and heard. And contrary to what she told me — that she was dozing in the car, that she didn’t really know what was going on — she told the police she knew Keithron and Dexter were robbing people. She knew they had guns and that Dexter had fired his. She also told police she knew all this when she drove Keithron and Dexter home after the murder at the carwash.
After the first day of voluntarily talking to the police, Ashley went home. The next day, police went to her house and said they had more questions for her. She agreed to go with them. They gave her a ride to the station.
When she got there, the officers read her her Miranda rights. You have the right to remain silent. You can ask for an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.
She agreed to answer their questions without an attorney. They asked her to give the same statement she’d given the day before. This time, they recorded her. She incriminated herself, again. She said she was the getaway driver after the murder at the carwash. And this time, her statements could be used against her in court.
It’s important to say here that Ashley’s aunt, Autumn Hawkins, says that the statement Ashley made to police wasn’t the truth.
HAWKINS: No it’s not correct, they you know sometimes you can tell them one thing and then they come up with something totally different from what you said and I think after her being there for so long, she was just ready to go home, you know.
That night, police questioned Ashley for five hours before they let her go home. Her aunt Autumn suspects the police fed Ashley information about the murders, information that she previously didn’t have. Autumn thinks Ashley added that new information into her statements because she was tired and wanted to go home.
HAWKINS: You know with her being 17 the first time talking to police officers, they kind of coerced her, you know into what to say if you say this we’ll let you go home.
The police didn’t charge Ashley in the Aparece/Ngo murders. Though she was at the scene of the crime, there was no evidence that she’d helped commit the crime.
But the Brady Davis case was different. There, Ashley herself said that she’d driven the getaway car. So the police charged her: with capital murder.
ERVIN: That’s when they told me, well, you’re, I don’t remember the exact words, but that’s when they told me that I was being arrested, too.
They took her to the county jail. That’s where she sat for almost 2 years, waiting for a trial.
In Texas there’s something called the law of parties. The law says if you knowingly played a significant role in a crime, if you added to the momentum of it in any way, you can be charged for that crime. So if you witness a murder, you’re not necessarily on the hook. But if you’re the getaway driver in a murder, like Ashley was, you can be charged as if you had pulled the trigger.
So things didn’t look good for Ashley. If she was found guilty of capital murder, she’d get a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But right before the trial, the prosecution came to Ashley with a deal: plead guilty to a lesser offense, testify against Dexter and you’ll get 35 years. Prosecutor Lisa Andrews says she still doesn’t understand why Ashley didn’t take the plea.
ANDREWS: I mean, the evidence against her was overwhelming and the law was clear about what her punishment could be, and then she was offered an opportunity that she didn’t take.
Even Ashley’s lawyer encouraged her to take to plea. And she was going to do it.
ERVIN: And right at the last minute, when I was taken into court to plead guilty to this lesser offense, um, I turn around and I looked, and my family was there. And I see my mom, and she just looked at me and she just shook her head, like, like, “No, what are you doing, you didn’t do this, so, you can’t.” So, I didn’t. I didn’t sign for it.
Ashley’s aunt, Autumn, says she’s glad her niece didn’t take the plea.
HAWKINS: Because we felt, her mom felt that her taking the 30 years is actually agreeing and saying that I’m guilty of doing this, and later on down the line she couldn’t appeal that 30 years because she said she was guilty and she really didn’t want to do it but she thought of it as 30 years at least I might have a chance of coming home but her mom was telling her you know, no, she didn’t want her to accept that and plead guilty to something that she didn’t do
In February 2008, after close to 2 years behind bars, Ashley finally went to trial. Despite the odds, she felt confident.
ERVIN: Yeah, I definitely thought that, without a doubt, I’m like, I know that I didn’t kill anybody – I wouldn’t hurt anybody. So I’m like, “Oh yeah, I know I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna go home.” But it didn’t happen like that.
The jury made their decision pretty quickly.
ERVIN: They deliberated, and I don’t – it wasn’t even that long that they deliberated, maybe a couple hours, and I was called back into the courtroom, my family was there, and, um, that’s when they read the verdict.
Guilty of capital murder. Even though she was 17 at the time of the murder, she was tried as an adult. The verdict came with an automatic sentence – life in jail without the possibility of parole. Ashley was in shock.
ERVIN: I just can’t believe any of it. Like, even though it’s been ten years, it still like, it still amazes me every day, like, every morning when I wake up I can’t believe that I’m in prison, and for life without parole? That’s what they gave me. It’s… I can’t grasp that.
Ashley was sent to state prison at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Hilltop Unit. It’s a minimum security prison for women in Gatesville, Texas, near Fort Hood. Every day since 2008, Ashley says she wakes up in her cement cubicle at 3:30 am. She works at the garment factory, where she sews Texas flags and prison uniforms. When she’s not working, she calls her family, writes letters and studies for the college courses she’s taking. In 2010, she appealed her sentence, but the appeal was rejected. It looked like Ashley would spend the rest of her life in prison.
But in the last decade, the US Supreme Court has made a series of major decisions that could change things for Ashley. Punishments that were once considered okay for juveniles were, one by one, ruled unconstitutional. Hadar Aviram teaches law at U.C. Hastings.
AVIRAM: I think, or in the, the first decision in this stream of decisions is Roper v. Simmons, it’s a decision in 2005, in which the Supreme Court says you can’t sentence a juvenile to death. It’s unconstitutional, they’re not as culpable as adults, so that’s the first rung in the ladder. Then we have Graham v. Florida, which is the decision in which the Supreme Court says you can’t sentence kids to life without parole for crimes that are not homicide. Then you have Miller v. Alabama, a decision from 2012, in which the Supreme Court says you can’t use a mandatory sentencing scheme that requires giving life without parole on juveniles, you have to have discretion.
In other words, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Miller case said that the sentence Ashley had received — automatic life without parole — was unconstitutional. But Miller only affected future sentences. The ruling didn’t apply to inmates who had already been sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. Inmates like Ashley and more than 2,000 others nationwide. Would they have to spend the rest of their lives in prison? This past January, the Supreme Court began to answer that question.
AVIRAM: And then you have Montgomery v. Louisiana, decided in 2016, just recently, saying that Miller applies retroactively.
So let me explain. Remember, in the Miller case the Supreme Court banned mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles — going forward. In the Montgomery case this year, the Court said that that ban also applied to people who had been sentenced to life without parole as juveniles in the past.
One of those people was Henry Montgomery. In 1963, at 17, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to mandatory life without parole. He’s now 69. Officials say he’s become a model inmate. He coaches the prison boxing team, is part of an art program and mentors younger inmates. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling, he’ll now be considered for parole.
Professor Aviram says that the new ruling could impact thousands of people in Henry Montgomery’s position.
AVIRAM: Which is to say, there are now people in their 50s and 60s, like Henry Montgomery, from Montgomery v. Louisiana, who were originally sentenced to life without parole when they were 16, 15, and the Supreme Court says you have to remedy that, that was an unconstitutional sentence, and you have to award these people special parole hearings that will take into account the age that they were when they committed the offense.
Different states responded to the Supreme Court ruling in different ways. Texas lawmakers decided that anyone automatically sentenced as a juvenile to life without parole would still have to serve 40 years. But after 40 years, they’d be eligible for parole. That means Ashley — and 26 other Texans in the same situation – will eventually get a chance for parole.
But just being considered for parole doesn’t guarantee freedom. In Texas, only about a third of the people sentenced for crimes in the same legal category as Ashley are eventually granted parole. Plus, Ashley will be in her fifties before she’s considered for parole. Whether she gets out depends on a number of factors: the severity of her crime, her record in prison, and to what extent she expresses remorse.
The board may also consider Ashley’s age at the time of the murder. In the past few years, lawyers and judges have begun to pay closer attention to the science of the teenage brain. Research shows that teenage brains work differently than adult brains.
JENSEN: Even into young adulthood, your brain is not done until your mid to late twenties.
Frances Jensen is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She says teenage brains get more of a rush from risky behaviors. And, teenagers are still developing their pre-frontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain responsible for decision-making.
JENSEN: So if you can imagine this brain that is, you know, it’s emotional area for risk-taking, impulse control, novelty seeking, emotional behavior, sexual desire, all of that, actually on at a higher rate in general than the adult brain; and it doesn’t have the frontal lobe to say, wait a minute, that’s a bad idea, let me rationalize this with you, you know, let’s think about cause and effect.
There’s a silver lining to the teenage brain’s immaturity: Jensen says that young brains are more flexible than adult brains. Which means under the right circumstances, people who commit crimes as teenagers can be effectively rehabilitated. But law professor Hadar Aviram says usually prison isn’t “the right circumstances.”
AVIRAM: We know that juveniles that end up doing long sentences in adult prisons end up disproportionately committing suicide, they’re disproportionately physically and sexually victimized. And that is something that is really disconcerting especially given the fact that as prisons are now they are not really a place that rehabilitates you, they’re a place that habituates you to a very problematic life from a very young age.
Ashley says, after eight years in prison, she doesn’t feel like she’s grown up at all.
ERVIN: Actually, um, I still feel like I’m seventeen. Like, um, I consult with my mom about basically everything before I do it, and that’s – I feel like I shouldn’t be like that because I am twenty-seven now, but I feel like I’m stuck at that age, because of all this happened to me, and I never got to experience a lot of stuff, and that’s really all I know. So, it’s kind of hard for me to sometimes say, “Ok, you’re a twenty-seven-year-old, you’re not seventeen anymore.” But I’m just kind of stuck there.
With no guarantee that Ashley will ever get parole, she and her family are working on another strategy to get her out of prison: a second appeal.
HAWKINS: With her already have done 10, wow 40 years, that’s a long time, you know so I would hope and pray that we can get something way before then
Her family has hired a new lawyer. His name is David Rushing. Ashley’s aunt Autumn says Ashley’s mom sends him all the money she can.
HAWKINS: It’s hard for her to send try to money, keep money on the books and pay the lawyer, and keep the payments but the help of her and me and the family, we’re putting it together, trying to do it.
Ashley’s aunt says the goal is to convince a higher court that the statements Ashley gave to police should not have been used to prosecute her.
The thing is, Ashley’s first lawyer already filed a similar appeal. That appeal was refused. I wanted to find out how this second appeal might be different from the first. So I reached out to her new lawyer to ask him. He has 4 different phone numbers listed on the internet. I managed to talk to him on the phone once. He even left me a voicemail.
CUT OF VOICEMAIL
But when I tried to schedule an interview with him, he stopped responding. So I went to Houston to look for him. He has two offices listed online. One downtown and one in an upscale business area. I went to both. He doesn’t work at either office anymore.
So I went to his house – one of his houses – and left him a note. He still hasn’t gotten back to me.
Meanwhile, Ashley is out of the loop. She goes to the prison law library to try find out what’s happening.
ERVIN: Yeah, sometimes I go and I try to look up as much as I can things that apply to me, or that I think applies to me, and I may not necessarily understand all of it, all the legal terms and everything, but I still try to like go over it as much as I can and try to, you know, figure out some things, or if I have questions I try to get in contact with my family or have some legal assistance from somebody and I just try to go from there.
A few days after I met with Ashley in prison, I got a letter from her in the mail. She included a poem. She wrote it a few years into her sentence, but says she still feels the same way. It’s called “Lost.”
Her Aunt Autumn reads the poem.
HAWKINS:
Two different worlds, I don’t quite fit in.
Pain and hurt is how my story begins.
See, I thought I was in love and I fell deep, I fell hard.
I thought that love would fill my void.
Instead it left me with bitterness towards that person.
Lost and confused, this I know for certain.
Why must I suffer? Why must I feel pain?
Lost in a world where it seems like everything is a game.
Who can I talk to? Who can I trust?
I hold all my feelings in until it feels like I’ll bust.
Twenty thousand workers have been laid off this year in the oil and gas industry across the country as the price of oil has slumped. The cutbacks are especially hard for foreign workers here on what are known as H-1B visas. For them, getting laid off doesn’t just mean leaving the office, it means leaving the country.
Scottish-born Graeme Slaven loves living in Katy, Texas.
“We like the fact that it’s easy to make friends here, we like the fact that the education system is fantastic,” Slaven said. “We enjoy being able to live in a house that for the same price back in the U.K. would be about a third or a quarter of the size.”
Slaven had survived several rounds of layoffs at the oil and gas security company where he worked for seven years. When his bosses called him into their office a few weeks ago, he wasn’t surprised. “I wasn’t in shock then, I could read the situation,” he said.
The same thing had happened to a lot of the friends he met at his local golf club. In just a few months, he saw his entire expat community shrink.
“I actually got to the point where I couldn’t face going to any more going-away parties,” Slaven said. “They were happening with increasing regularity.”
Before getting a pink slip, Slaven was in line to get a green card. He owns a home, his sons play on local soccer teams. His youngest, Niall, who’s 9, has lived here since he was a toddler. “There are only, like, two people that I know in Scotland,” he said.
Slaven and his expat friends used to play golf at the Willow Fork Country Club.
“Every Friday during Lent we had fish and chips, and we had a big crowd that showed up for that,” club manager Richard Rowell said. “You know, if an Englishman tells you the fish and chips are pretty good, you have a thumbs up.”
The exodus of foreign oil workers has hit the club pretty hard in the last few months.
“Eighty to 100 families have relocated to their home country primarily because of job changes and changes in the economy,” Rowell said.
Graeme Slaven has a type of visa called an H-1B. Eighty-five thousand of them are allotted every year to professional workers through quotas to different countries.
Immigration attorney Ken Harder said once a foreign worker is laid off, they have few legal options.
“Much like Capt. Kirk might be beamed up by Scotty, in theory, when an H-1B worker is terminated from employment, he should vaporize and disappear,” Harder said.
Harder’s firm has seen the impact of low oil and gas prices directly.
“I would say since 8 a.m. on January 4th, the first business day this year, we’ve been furiously busy dealing with inquiries both from companies that need to downsize, as well as individuals who have been or are about to be downsized, so it’s been a real profound issue given the local economy here in Houston these last few months,” Harder said.
Slaven has a slim margin of hope. If he can find another employer willing to sponsor him, he can stay — but he knows that’s unlikely.
“The best-case scenario is a miracle,” Slaven said, “that somebody else is interested in employing me. The chances of that at this point in time are slim.”
A quick search on a job board turns up just a few companies willing to sponsor H-1B visas. Most of those companies are in IT, which is not a field Slaven has experience in.
Right now he’s trying to figure out a way to stay in the U.S. until the end of the school year, before he moves his family back to Scotland — a move he’s trying desperately to avoid.
Folgers made it fast. Nabob made it romantic. Starbucks made it hip. And today, artisanal coffee is making it expensive. But how do you convince someone to pay a lot more for their coffee? The answer is actually pretty simple: all you need to do is tell a story.
We sat down with Helen Schafer, owner of Tiny House Coffee Roasters, to find out more.
In this interview, you’ll…
Find out how a great story can help you charge more for your products
Discover an easy way to tell your story (without an advertising budget)
Learn about product positioning and why it’s your key to boosting sales
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