Zoom Conversation with Soledad O'Brien

In a series of segment interviews saluting famous moms, KGW News talked with journalist Soledad O'Brien after she had recently appeared at a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser in Portland. 

Soledad has a long list of professional credits including NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Weekend Today and HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. These days she's hosting her own show, Matter of Fact, which can be found streaming on the show's website. O'Brien also runs the PowHERful Foundation, which mentors young women to send them to college. 

The conversation was done over Zoom from her apartment in New York City and is a wide-ranging conversation about life and family.

watch video at www.kgw.com

Soledad O'Brien on 'The Daily Show' Talks Media and Trump

In this segment from THE DAILY SHOW with Trevor Noah, Soledad O’Brien criticizes how the media covers Donald Trump, breaks down the biggest problem with access journalism and explains why cable news favors pundits over newsgathering. 

Soledad O'Brien Interview - Rolling Stone

Longform interview by Jamil Smith for Rolling Stone talking with Soledad O'Brien about race and gender in media, covering Trump, and the role of social media in journalism.

Her Own Boss: Soledad O'Brien

In a Rolling Stone magazine article, "Soledad O’Brien Isn’t Holding Back Anymore," they say that "After a new executive pushed her out at CNN, the veteran journalist became one of mainstream media’s most fiery critics."

She tells how when she was an anchor there, a CNN executive admonished her for a comment she had made while promoting her series Black in America. and requested that she stop publicly speaking about young black men and police brutality.

That was a story that CNN didn't allow her to tell, but now via Twitter and with her own company, Soledad O’Brien Productions, she does get to tell the stories that resonate with her.

At 53, she has spent half her life as a broadcast journalist, winning Peabody Awards for her coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, and gracing the pages of People’s 50 Most Beautiful list.

As the article points out, the past few years, she has become "one of establishment media’s most fiery critics." Her million+ Twitter followers frequently have blasts at outlets (including CNN) for weak coverage of Trump’s administration and other issues.

But all the bridges she crossed were not burned. When she left CNN, part of her deal was that CNN would be the first client for Soledad O’Brien Productions and she ended up doing some of those tough stories, like "The War Comes Home" on veterans with PTSD.

Based in New York, she spends one day each week in DC to record her syndicated TV talk show, Matter of Fact where she is the boss.

Soledad on Late Night with Seth Myers

A year ago... time for a reappearance and update.

You can watch here: https://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-seth-meyers/video/

Soledad on Real Time with Bill Maher HBO

Soledad O'Brien: Changemaker

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Tamsen Fadal, anchor of PIX11 News at 5, 6 & 10pm in New York, talked with Soledad O'Brien, Starfish Media Group CEO, about reinvention, journalism and how she balances life as a Changemaker.

Tamsen is passionate about empowering women, writing 3 self-help books. Her latest book The New Single: Finding, Fixing and Falling Back In Love With Yourself (St. Martin’s
Press 2015), seeks to help women emerge from a big life change with confidence, grace and a recipe for self-care.

Journalist To CEO: Soledad O'Brien

Soledad O'Brien handles many roles and responsibilities – CEO, wife, caregiver, mother of four children and the roles she is probably best known for - journalist. Lauren Wesley Wilson interviewed O'Brien for Forbes about her transition from journalist to CEO of her multi-platform media production and distribution company, Starfish Media Group.

Here are a few excerpts:

I start each morning attending a yoga class... I follow up Yoga with a 30-minute treadmill workout. I try to get my workout routine all done before 8:30 am.

Most recently I’ve taken on the role of Caregiver for my aging parents. My dad is sick and I’ve spent recent mornings having breakfast and attending to him.

I also run the PowHERful Foundation, focused on getting women of color from low income backgrounds the financial resources and training necessary to attend and graduate college. We just sent 4,000 girls to a series of PowHERful conferences across the country (seven conferences in seven cities). One of our graduates just got her PhD in nursing, which I’m really proud of.

Women, particularly women of color, need to leverage their network. Who will be your accountant? Lawyer? Your IT person? You want to get these items set up before you jump into running your company because it will be hard to balance the work while looking for the items that keep your business structured. Network in advance of your leap. ColorComm Network is a good example of teaching this.

There are so many people who are willing to be helpful in developing your career. When I was younger I was more afraid to ask for guidance. I would encourage young people to speak up and ask for help when you need it.

In my personal life I would tell my 30-year-old self to not stress over the stuff that worry won’t fix. Sometimes you just have to let things work themselves out. And most importantly, I would tell my younger self to stop stressing.

Horseback riding. It’s one of the very few times through my day where I have to be disconnected from my day-to-day tasks and solely focus on riding.

Wesley Wilson: How do you conclude each day?
O’Brien: With a big glass of red wine.

The Myth of a Work/Life Balance

Pioneers is an original video series from The Huffington Post that goes inside the lives of ten people who have made it their mission to redefine what success means to them. At the top of their respective fields, from business and technology to entertainment and pro sports, they’re leading the way to a less stressful, more fulfilling life — and inviting us to join them.

In the second episode, Soledad O'Brien talks about her work/life philosophy and how she moved from being an award-winning journalist into also starting her own company, and the meaning of quality time and why she doesn't believe in work/life balance.

View at shows.huffingtonpost.com/shows/pioneers

The Power of Showing Up

Soledad O'Brien speaks with the ballet dancer Misty Copeland

Soledad O’Brien compares mentorship to a good gym habit—it’s not just about working out today, but every day for years.

For The Atlantic’s series, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” O’Brien talked about the kind of guidance she sought out for her new endeavor, as well as her work with the PowHERful Foundation, an organization she founded that mentors and financially supports young women seeking to earn a college degree.

The conversation is excerpted at theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/soledad-obrien-mentorship/541257/

Soledad O'Brien "Says It Like She Means It"

Soledad O'Brien "Says It Like She Means It" during an appearance
on the Wendy Williams show in 2012.

A PowHERful Summit with Soledad O'Brien

Interview with Emmy-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien.
Her Starfish Foundation brought one of its "PowHERful Summit"
gatherings for young women to St. Paul's St. Catherine University in 2016.

What’s Wrong and Right With the Media

In a wide-ranging and detailed interview, Soledad O'Brien spoke with nymag.com about the state of the media in America.

One Q&A exchange:

Just because you’re a black person in the newsroom doesn’t mean you want to single-handedly wage battle against white America’s preconceptions. So just hiring black people in itself isn’t even enough. There’s only so far you can push without risking your job.

And it’s also exhausting. By the way, you take your career in your hands every time you do it. I get it. I really understand why people don’t want to fight the narrative. Your career will end. I am telling you. You become a pain in the ass. Because you’re the one who says, “So, I just want to say …” And listen, I believe this happens in corporate America all the time. I’m sure there are a million executives who will tell you, right, you suck it up, and you suck it up, and then one day see something, and you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got to say something now,” and then you couch it very carefully. “So, I’m not criticizing anybody, and I’m sure this is just completely an oversight, I just might want to go back and maybe …” That’s what it’s about, and it’s exhausting to operate like that. And listen, the more that you have power — certainly I did when I was anchoring a show — you can say, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m not reading this.” But most people don’t have that opportunity. And even I don’t have that opportunity to a certain degree. I can do it to a certain level, but I certainly can’t do it all the time. You’re just always very careful. A person who pushes back against the narrative is a pain. That person is annoying. That person slows down the meeting. Even bosses who say, “I really want to make sure that there’s someone who’s comfortable telling me ‘No,’ ” they’re usually not. They usually do not like that person. Nobody likes that person. That person is a pain, I am telling you. So if you do that, you absolutely take your life and your career in your hands.

Soledad O'Brien on Becoming a CEO

Soledad O’Brien, chief executive of the Starfish Media Group, a production company, was interviewed by Adam Bryant for The New York Times.

In the interview, she spoke about becoming a CEO.

... it was a real challenge when I started this company three years ago, because this was really the first time I was fully and utterly responsible for managing a team.

It was a very steep learning curve, mostly because there was not a lot of overlap between the kind of journalism I was doing and running a business. A key insight for me was that if you want good feedback from people, you have to create an environment where people want to come and tell you things. But I had no concrete idea of how to do that.

Another challenge was that I was successful in my previous role because I really worked hard and took a lot of responsibility for making things good. But that’s not actually a great skill for being a boss. The job of the boss is to help other people reach their goals and their dreams.

The area where I’ve grown the most is that I am good at making decisions in the macro and helping other people make the decisions in the micro.

The broader learning curve has been exciting, but while you’re in it, it’s also kind of annoying. It felt like a slog. At what point will I actually grow into this job, because I have the title? At what point will I actually be making decisions like someone who is the C.E.O. of the company? I would say it took a solid year before I felt good about it.

Soledad O'Brien on Reddit

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning broadcast journalist, producer, and philanthropist. Over the years, Soledad has ignited lively discussions across Reddit — especially in the Politics community — earning a reputation for speaking openly with guests and asking tough questions.

For her second AMA, Soledad shared journalism tips, how to deal with patronizing guests, favorite travel destinations, and her most powerful interview.



Read the entire AMA at: reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3luiz2/i_am_yo_soy_soledad_obrien_ama/

Did Soledad O’Brien "School" CBS host Bob Schieffer?

The headline reads "Soledad O’Brien schools CBS host: Black protesters deserve to ‘survive an interaction with police’" and goes on to describe how Soledad tried to explain to Schieffer that the protests over law enforcement “criminalizing” black communities were about much more than the recent deaths of black men in Missouri and New York.

“Anybody who thinks that what is happening right now [with the protests across the country] is only about Eric Garner, is only about Michael Brown is really missing what is happening in black America,” she pointed out. “African-Americans feel that they are treated differently in the criminal justice system, they are treated differently under the law.”

“There is this aggressive targeting of black people,” O’Brien added. “That doesn’t happen in white communities, and it’s that anger over so many years that is really percolating up now.”

In her recent CNN documentary Black in America: Black and Blue, she found that 90 percent of the 5 million stop-and-frisk stops in New York City never resulted in arrests.

“Those people had done nothing,” she explained. “So 90 percent of the blacks and Latinos that were stopped in stop-and-frisks in New York City didn’t do anything. Imagine what that does psychically to a culture if you ‘fit the description,’ which means you’re black, male, 19 to 25.”

“I think the challenge is that it’s not being applied proportionally,” O’Brien declared. “For example, if you are arresting and stopping people where many of them haven’t done anything, you create a culture in that community — even a high-crime community — where people feel like they are being criminalized, even those — as we saw in our documentary — who haven’t done anything.”

see full post at www.rawstory.com

Soledad O'Brien in Essence Magazine

Did you catch Soledad in the May Essence magazine? The story covers her transistion from CNN anchor to CEO of Starfish Media Group.

Soledad O'Brien in Conversation at Harvard's Institute of Politics

Soledad O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s Institute of Politics with Callie Crossley, a Boston-area journalist with WGBH and producer of the documentary series Eye On The Prize.

Besides discussing journalism and social media, the discussion also took in some criticisms she has received for her Black In America, which has also been praised and received awards.·



A video from the Harvard Institute of Politics is available. This discussion is part of The IOP’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

O’Brien was named Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2013-2014 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Q&A with Soledad O'Brien About "Black in America"

A sample Q&A from "10 Questions for Soledad O'Brien" on the TheLoop21.com site which offers insight, resources and opinions on African American issues.


Loop 21: As a mom of four young children, do you want your kids to grow up respecting the complexities of race in America? Can you see where they already do?

S.O.: You know, my kids watch every [Black In America] documentary. When we start looking at screeners, they sit down…we all sit down together…. It’s very interesting for me to get their reaction to what they’re seeing. They were really broken up…I mean, it was painful for them to watch Nayo’s struggle. They really had a hard time with it because I think they don’t see me struggle with [being biracial]. We’ve had conversations about race at home… and I’m sure I’ve completely bored them out of their minds talking about race. I think it was very disturbing for them to see a young woman tortured about something so essential to who she is.

More at http://loop21.com/life/10-questions-soledad-obrien-black-in-america

Soledad 2004

Soledad, 2010

From  a September 2004 interview for CNN , Soledad talks about the birth of her twins. 


"I feel great, so much better than I did [after I gave birth to] the two girls. This time it's much easier, my nursing is going much better. My recovery has been great. Sofia was an especially tough recovery. I am sleeping well. I guess I would say that, by three weeks, everything starts coming together.

Some of the logistics are tricky; you just really need another set of hands. It's physically gone well, and that is a basis for everything going well. If Mommy is feeling well, that makes everything better. I have been very lucky, no postpartum depression.

You end up being a hostile person if you don't take time for yourself. Balance comes at the expense of sleep. The more kids I have, the more calm I become. I just get more and more relaxed. You realize you can't control it -- you can't make a newborn stop crying.

You get very Zen. Twins are logistically trickier, and I am glad they weren't my first and second children. Having a baby nurse, or your mom, or your friend come over really helps.

...I do I miss work. I couldn't stay home all the time. It's hard to be a working mom, but it's also hard to be a stay-at-home mom. I like when you work, you also get time for yourself, which is great.
In another couple months the girls will have their play dates, and everyone gets back on their schedule including me. But it's been very nice to be home.

I also have a nice schedule [because] I will be home by noon during the week. I will still pick up the girls from school, then try to get to the gym and then be home with the boys. I try to be home with everyone in the afternoon. I haven't quite worked it all out yet. With Sofia I didn't really go to the gym, [but] with more kids I want to take time out, and try to figure out where do you squeeze in going. The more kids you have, [the more] you realize they'll be fine if you go to the gym for an hour."


Soledad returned to CNN on October 18, 2004