The Brown Daily Herald with Mariel Jackson: Creating Your Own Path
Welcome back to Small Talk with WIB, where we interview various student groups at Brown to show that business can expand to a variety of industries. For this installment, I was joined by Mariel Jackson, who is in charge of business for the Brown Daily Herald!
The Herald is our main student newspaper on campus, and it is editorially and financially independent from Brown. Mariel describes her journey at the Herald as a bit “serendipitous.” Initially drawn to the writing side, she joined the newspaper as a freshman on the sales team. However, she found that she loved collaboration and interacting with people, so she worked her way through various positions until she found herself in charge of business.
Mariel is excited to share how business and journalism intersect. “The two work together,” she says, noting that “business can support reporting.” The business aspect of a newspaper is particularly prevalent in the modern age: “It’s something we really think about on a daily basis,” Mariel tells me. She works with the editor-in-chief and her co-manager to think about how the journalism industry is moving to the digital side, and how the Herald fits into that shift.
Mariel’s job depends on the time of year. The Herald follows a business cycle, where during mid-March to May, her work is dedicated to administrative tasks (such as state filings and taxes), while the fall is more focused on fundraising. As the finance general manager, Mariel’s job includes accounting, generating reports, and overall making sure the business is running operationally. She oversees a small team, which completes tasks such as depositing checks at the bank and balancing the books. “It’s just like a small business would be doing,” she notes.
Like my first guest, Hailey, Mariel knows that being a woman in business comes with difficulties. Reflecting on past internships and her job search, Mariel reflects that she would subconsciously “dismiss my opinions” and “apologize for my ideas”. She remembers starting sentences with “Oh I’m sorry, I just wanted to say…”, and lacking the same confidence and assertiveness her male colleagues had. While she hasn’t felt this way at the Herald at all, she has felt it in the real world of business and has noticed the same tendencies in her female co-workers.
However, this is “something I’m trying to work on,” Mariel tells me, and she has advice for young women in the same boat. She notes that the best way to grow more confident and build a greater skill set is to try new things. “Apply for it and see where it takes [you],” Mariel says. It’s advice that has worked in her favor: “My path hasn’t been a straight line from point A to point B, but every experience along the way has given me some new perspective that has really helped me.”