Emma Carew Grovum thinks part of being a journalist is giving back.
Carew Grovum, a ThreeSixty Journalism alumna and product manager at The Daily Beast, spends time coaching, speaking and training aspiring and current journalists.
“I think that you cannot not just do your job as a journalist. You have to kind of contribute to the journalism community as a whole,” said Carew Grovum, a Minnesota native. “Whether it’s through volunteering with AAJA (Asian American Journalists Association), whether it’s doing coaching or speaking or training at different workshops. To me, that’s just a big part of my job and my career.”
As a high schooler, Carew Grovum wanted to become a newspaper reporter and storyteller for her community. Driven by her passion, Carew Grovum signed up for ThreeSixty Journalism in 2002, at age 15. Being in the program further inspired her.
“When I went to ThreeSixty, I met all of the journalists who we got to work with,” she said. “They all were very happy with their jobs and they were all very passionate about their job. They felt very deeply about the work they were doing. And I was very inspired by that.”
After the ThreeSixty program, Carew Grovum studied journalism at the University of Minnesota. When she graduated, she relocated to New York and stayed. Carew Grovum further connected with AAJA, a national organization that focuses on media diversity, coverage for communities of color and advancements of Asian American journalists. It elevated her interest in those topics.
As a Korean adoptee, Carew Grovum is a strong advocate for media diversity and accurate portrayal of communities of color.
“That’s just something that I feel very strongly about,” she said. “I feel that our newsrooms in local and national publications need to better reflect the communities and the audience that they’re trying to reach; I think that there’s a lot that goes into making sure that we take good care to tell stories of our communities … communities of color very truthfully and very accurately.”
As a product manager at The Daily Beast, Carew Grovum works with software engineers and designers. Her job ranges from building tools for the newsroom, managing how editors publish stories to the web, to designing and formatting newsletters.
“My job is very broad in looking at how journalism is at the very least distributed, to all audiences, and how it’s produced and published to our website,” she said.
Carew Grovum also coaches women in journalism through the Digital Women’s Leadership program. She helps those involved in any part of the journalism landscape with resumes, cover letters and transitioning from the newsroom to the product side. She utilizes her skills and experiences to advise journalists on how to navigate the situation of being one of a few journalists of color in a newsroom.
“Even since my first job at the Star Tribune, training has been a large part of all jobs I’ve ever held, so whether it’s teaching journalists about Twitter, social media or training reporters in my newsrooms about data journalism,” Carew Grovum said.
For a person who loves to give back, and as a former ThreeSixty Journalism student, Carew Grovum gives this advice for current students and aspiring writers: practice, practice, practice, early and often.
“Tell as many stories as you can. And always be reporting, always be thinking about a story, always be asking good questions, always be looking for a story that hasn’t been told yet,” she said. “What makes me successful in my current role is the fact that I started as a reporter, and that I started as a storyteller, and I learned social media, and then I learned web production, and then I learned multimedia production, and I went on to learn all these other skills. But all of that is built on a strong foundation of storytelling, reporting, news writing, accuracy, fact checking and all of those really important basics.”
This advice is aimed at ensuring a bright future in a rapidly changing profession. Carew Grovum said she isn’t sure what her next chapter will be, but for now, she’s just enjoying it for the moment.
