Tell me about your journey into journalism. How did you get to where you are today?

Currently, I'm a deputy editor at HuffPost. I started in 2015 in the middle of the Trump campaign as a politics intern at the Huffington Post in D.C.

Before that, I had zero experience in journalism. I didn't go to journalism school or anything like that. But a friend of mine encouraged me to pursue journalism.

I guess you could say I was pretty prolific online, just through social media, as someone who was one of the true digital natives, an older millennial. I had an understanding of how social media worked and used it throughout high school and college. And so, my friend encouraged me to do something in that realm.

And I was like, what does that mean? Because at the time, the idea that you could create a career from social media was still relatively new. We were still trying to figure out what an influencer was or the best ways newsrooms could use digital media to amplify their work, for example.

And so I applied for a bunch of different internships and fellowships. Huffington Post gave me a shot, which is why I'm such a huge proponent of internships. They allow you to find talent you might not necessarily be able to find, or talent that isn't necessarily the typical White guy at an Ivy League school.

So why were you interested in journalism in the first place?

I was always drawn to the power of storytelling. When I was in college, there was an incident on my campus at Michigan State University. A racial slur was written on a student's door, and it said, no [N-words] allowed.

I was part of the Black Student Alliance, a campus organization that helps uplift Black students and supports them throughout their time at the university. And we used social media to amplify what happened. This was before Black Lives Matter, in 2011.

We created the hashtag called MSU Black Unity Movement, and through that hashtag, we received so much attention that national media outlets reached out to us. The local news came and interviewed the president of the Black Student Alliance at the time.

That was one of my first forays into the power of social media and how storytelling can change, or amplify, what we wanted people to know, without having to wait on traditional gatekeepers to tell us what the story is. We went directly to social media.

What advice would you give to someone starting out in a newsroom?

What's most important for people to know is that everybody has an idea of what stories to tell, and that might look different for all of us, right? I would say: experiment with different platforms and story ideas.

There are stories out there that you can tell that I can't tell. And vice versa. I would lean into that.

While I was an intern, I wrote many stories I felt were missing from our newsroom. I was able to connect with audiences who might not have come to HuffPost if they hadn't seen I was a Black man telling these stories. I was attracting a different sort of audience, and I've been able to grow that.

If I could go back to my early days in journalism, I would have experimented more with different platforms. I would have been an early adopter of platforms like TikTok and other video platforms. I'm primarily text-based on different platforms because I just prefer it. But I wish I were more open to experimenting with different platforms, especially video platforms.

There is a lot of opportunity for young journalists to experiment, see what happens, and just try different things. You can experiment with different platforms.

How does your background, heritage and family feed into the journalism that you do and the journalism that you want to do?

That's a major aspect of what has influenced my career because journalism, for a long time, has been catered to a very specific audience, right? I'm just speaking about America here.

For a long time, stories were told only one way, and many of the people coming into these top newsrooms were White, upper-middle-class to wealthy, from Ivy League schools, and that was the pipeline.

For example, you would graduate from Harvard or Columbia, and you would go straight to The Washington Post, and that's what it was. But you miss a lot of the flavor of the American story when stories are only told by one specific group. And that's not necessarily a race thing. That's also a socioeconomic thing.

Journalism, for a long time, was considered one of those white-collar professions. So being a Black person from the Midwest, from Michigan, from Detroit, having attended a state school - all of those things color how I view the world and the stories that I want to tell. Because there are enough stories about the upper crust of local America. We have enough of those stories. And there are enough people to cover them.

But what we will always lack are stories that are happening in the American South. Or what's happening in these news deserts across the country.

I try do what I can and I'm only one person, but I try to uplift journalists and the stories coming from these smaller areas.

For example, The Marshall Project just did a really interesting story about how no one knows how many people are dying in Mississippi's jails because the authorities down there believe that the paperwork is just too cumbersome. Stories like that, you might not see them in our most prominent newsrooms.

What is it like to be a Black male journalist?

Pretty lonely. I would say I've actually never had a mentor or anything like that, just because we're so few and far between.

There aren't very many Black people in journalism. And then Black men specifically, it's even less so. It can also be challenging when people expect you to be able to speak for all Black men. We're not a monolith. We are just as diverse as any other group.

It can be difficult because when you are in a position like mine, there is obviously some responsibility that comes with that as far as making sure the full flavor of our stories is told.

When people look to you and say, ‘Well, he's a Black man, so maybe he understands what Black men in Texas, California, or Massachusetts are going through.' America is really a country made up of smaller countries. Every state is basically a small country. So it can be challenging when people look at you like you are supposed to have the answer for all Black men, which is not the case.

Why do you think there are so few Black male journalists?

It's a field where it's very network-based. We don't always have the same access to the same networks that our White counterparts do.

It's not as direct as it was, maybe, in the era of Jim Crow or 50 or 100 years ago. It's a little softer now. It's like, ‘Maybe you should pursue something else. Or maybe this isn't for you.’

When you don't see yourself in the role or other Black men are not pursuing it, you might think, 'Well, I don't know if I should pursue journalism.'

What does it mean to be impartial and unbiased in this political age?

Objectivity and impartiality have always been sort of loaded terms because when people say things like that, it's like, are we talking about being impartial about the Ku Klux Klan? Should we give them the same sort of press time that we would give a victim of a lynching?

For a long time, objectivity has been a stand-in for, ‘Here's what White people think about the world and how they view it.'

When you look at the history of the Black press, for example, Ida B. Wells - a pioneering journalist who shed light on lynching across the Deep South - it would be silly to think of asking her, 'Maybe we should hear the other side.’

Sharing the facts of the case, obviously, it's fair, and people should focus on telling the full story. But when people romanticize impartiality and objectivity, that can lead us down some dark paths.

People are inherently biased; we all have biases. We can try to work on that and tell the whole story about what's happening in America. But yeah, impartiality, it's a loaded term.

Why do you think it is important for us to stay in journalism, take up space and keep going?

Our stories are not just a box to check. Our stories are not just, ‘Here's this thing to do because we care about DEI.’

Our stories are what make this country great. Look at what happened to places like Teen Vogue, one of the few newsrooms that was actually speaking truth to power and telling the full breadth of what's going on in this country. That's why there was so much outcry [when it folded] because those newsrooms are shrinking.

What I'm heartened and excited about is that journalists are starting to decide, ‘If we can't fit in the mainstream, let's figure out how to get our stories out in other ways.’

We can't all be on Substack or newsletters. Some of us are going to have to start creating our own newsrooms and getting audiences to support the news and stories they want to see. We're in an interesting position: if all these newsrooms are being monopolized, shutting down, or merging, why don't we just create our own spaces?

There are worker-owned outlets like Defector and Aftermath. We can tell the stories and we can also develop business acumen, and we can figure out how to tell our own stories and shield ourselves from the worst parts of the industry.

While it looks depressing right now that so many layoffs are happening, I think there's so much talent out there and there are so many storytellers out there who, if they decided to, today they could band together.

We're in a place where journalists are being pushed into a corner, right? But that opens up an opportunity. I'm excited to see what people do about that.

What advice would you give little Phil at the beginning of his career?

I would have told myself to experiment with video. But not just video, experiment with all of the different platforms

And just pay attention to what's happening in the industry. We’re great at covering our beats and the stories we care about. We need to be just as cognizant about what's happening in our industry.

I didn't do this when I was an intern, but now I read a lot of media-specific news. I want to know what mergers are happening. I want to know who owns what. I want to know where people are going. We need to be just as aware of what's happening in our own industry and just as curious about it.

What things bring you joy? How do you protect your energy?

I love Pilates. I try to do it twice a week, and I enjoy the reformer classes near me. What's most important about this is that I can't be on my phone. I have to put my phone down. So it's my time away from the news cycle.