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Transcription:
TEASER
In the journalism and media field, you see so many people saying, “Take that unpaid internship, work on the stipend, work, extra jobs,” which I did also, I did daycare, but I think the way I saw it then was like, well, why would I do that? Because I don’t have a financial safety net to fall back on. I felt like this kind of advice appealed to more people with generational wealth or people with connections, quite frankly. So after that, I was like, okay, I’m going to seek opportunities where I get paid.
PODCAST INTRO
Welcome to the Early Career Moves Podcast, the show that highlights remarkable young professionals of color killing it on their career journeys. I am your host, Priscilla Esquivel Weninger, Texas Latina daughter of immigrants and lover of breakfast tacos. Meet me for a coffee chat every Friday as we dive into a special guest story and hear all about their challenges, milestones, and lessons learned. If you’re a young professional of color and you’re feeling lost in your career or just need a dose of inspiration, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started.
GUEST INTRO
Priscilla: Hey, everyone. Today, I’m excited to introduce to you Lyanne Alfaro. Lyanne is a Mexican American from the Chicago area who works at producer host and social media strategist at NASDAQ. Lyanne graduated in 2015 from the university of Illinois with a degree in news editorial journalism. After graduating, Lyanne cold emailed her way into a social media role at CNBC where she got to pick it’s stories about the intersection of the Latino community, business, and entrepreneurship. Her pieces have been featured in CNBC, Business Insider, and NBC Latino. She’s also the creator of Moneda Moves, a bi-weekly newsletter and podcast where she dives deeper into the LatinX influence in the world of business. If you’re interested in journalism, a career in social media, or if you’ve ever been told that you should take an unpaid internship, this is a great episode for you.
INTERVIEW
Priscilla: Hey, Lyanne, welcome to the show.
Lyanne Alfaro: Thank you so much for having me, Priscilla.
Priscilla: Of course. So, Lyanne, I’m really excited to dive into your really exciting career that you’ve had in journalism and learn about what you do with Moneda Moves, but before we go in that direction, will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Lyanne: Yeah, of course. I’m first-generation Mexicana, my parents are from Guadalajara, Mexico and I grew up in Chicago, Illinois on the Northwest side in this neighborhood called Humboldt Park, and from the very start, my parents were educators in Mexico, so coming here to the US as immigrants, they may not have gone to college here, but they certainly had that grounding where they believe that education was so important. I grew up speaking Spanish. I didn’t speak a lick of English and neither did my parents, but they realized that kind of the first goal was just like, okay, we need to make sure she learns the main language in this country, and so I did see, I think early on, my parents really extend themselves, even though I recognized we were lower income, they extended themselves to make sure I had the best possible education on a low budget. So, that meant I spent a lot of my summers in libraries, I spent a lot of time reading. Eventually, I ended up in the school where I learned English and I fell in love with writing, and to be honest, for as long as I remember, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to tell stories, and funny enough, my dad did name me after a local well-known journalist called Lyanne Melendez, she was a Puerto Rican on ABC7 and she would cover stories about our community but just general assignment as well, and so I started tracking her career and I was like, okay, I see another Latina in the field. This was in the nineties, but my parents gave me the kind of like backing the education or the ability to get access to these institutions and just seeing them extend themselves and how hard they worked, I knew I’d be doing all of us a disservice if I didn’t pursue what I was truly curious and passionate about which was journalism, and it wasn’t always about in particular Latinos and people of color communities, I covered a little bit of entertainment. I started writing when I was 15 and I did a little bit of even fashion writing, but what I really fell into post-grad was business news, and in business news, I saw not a lot of people looked like me, not a lot of people of color and certainly not a lot of first-generation, and I thought to myself, I have so many friends in my life that are going through this, navigating the system for the first time, but also people that I’ve seen be very successful in starting their small businesses, why aren’t we seeing that represented in these national newsrooms? So, that that’s what has been my driver to do what I do to navigate my full-time jobs the way that I do, and so today I’m a producer at NASDAQ stock exchange, where I tell stories about technology companies or listed companies, market technology. But of course, at any chance that I get, stories about people of color.
Priscilla: Yeah. I’m so excited to hear like how you got to where you are today. So, when you were in college, what did you do during that time to figure out what kind of journalism you wanted to do?
Lyanne: Yes, that’s a very good question. I think one of my biggest learnings was that there is no linear path, especially when you’re first-generation, you don’t, or at least I didn’t have access to the connections to get the references, to have people push me through the system, and I feel that’s the case for a lot of people that are Latino and first gen and/or lower income, we don’t have this network. So, I became aware early on that I needed to get out there and meet people, and yes, I loved to meet Latinos, but I need to get out there and meet all journalists, so I didn’t limit myself to journalism when I did internships, but I did start writing for my school paper in high school and there was a city paper, the Chicago Tribune which had a program for teenagers called Mash, so via that you would be able to do journalism at the scale of the Chicago Tribune. They picked a handful of people, everyone had to apply, and this was such a critical step for me for many reasons, I started writing at the age of 16 at a city-wide level. I was getting the skills from editors, professional editors and commentary on my work, and I got access to these connections, right? But the other thing that I realized and started getting a hang of was how the system worked and I think it was so valuable that at 17 or so, they started paying me for my work, so I may not have had a ton of experience writing at that level but the fact they they paid me for work set me up with this mindset where I was just like, okay, like, I value experience this much and I’m going to seek free opportunities, but I don’t believe any more that I will be doing free internships. So, I think that kind of set my mindset a little bit differently because in the journalism and media field, you see so many people saying, “Take that unpaid internship worth on the stipend, work extra jobs,” which I did also, I did daycare, but I think the way I saw it then was like, Well, why would I do that? Because I don’t have a financial safety net to fall back on. I felt like this kind of advice appealed to more people with generational wealth or people with connections, quite frankly. So, after that, I feel like that was very formative because after that I was like, okay, I’m going to seek opportunities where I get paid. So, that meant that I wasn’t always working in straight journalism. Sure, I always made sure I was freelancing at some point for a journalistic company, but I would pick up jobs in PR, in comms, in strategy, and these are the kinds of internships that I did. I worked for a channel called Weather Nation which is, like, Weather Channel’s competitor and learned about acquisition of companies. So, I learned a little bit about the business side and I found that to be very instrumental.
Priscilla: Yeah, I think that’s really important, just the mindset shift and the realization that yes, that advice around getting an unpaid internship might apply to someone who literally can do that or someone’s going to help them, or they have the connections to get in the door, but for us, when we’re, like, literally the first in our family to do this and we don’t have anyone we can talk to to get us in the door, it’s, like, such an important realization to say, yes, I need to take care of myself, but I also need to proactively look for opportunities where I will get paid for my time and my work. So, so cool that you were able to have that shift pretty early.
Lyanne: Yeah, no, it was absolutely instrumental because I was in college and I’d hear people who would advocate for taking free opportunities, and don’t get me wrong, I did do things at some point unpaid, but they weren’t internships, they weren’t long-term commitments. I did short term commitments to get experience where I was just like, okay, there’s a skill share swap here, but at the end of the day, I am of the field of thought that interns should be getting paid, and I would say that most of this burden doesn’t actually fall on the interns or students themselves but on the corporate companies, like to me, the older I got, the more a little bit frustrated I became with the fact that we okayed these unpaid internships and said, “This is fine,” knowing very well that not everyone in society has an equal shot at these kinds of things, or even being able to do it even if they did have the talent and skill.
Priscilla: So, tell us about your first job as producer at CNBC. What was it like to get that opportunity?
Lyanne: So, this is an interesting one and a pivotal move because it’s my first full-time job in New York city, so I got this after doing six months of an internship at Business Insider also in New York and this came as a result of a cold email. I sent a cold email to the head of social media at CNBC at the time, her name is Anna Gonzalez. She had about 15-plus years of journalism experience. I did extensive research on her and it really appealed to me that she was head of this at what seemed to me at a very young age but also was Latina just like me, and so I was like, okay, we have something in common, and I knew that wasn’t gonna secure it, but I said, maybe I can reach out to her. We can talk about what value I can provide and what things she needs in her team. So, I cold emailed her, I reached out to her via Facebook. It worked because she was hiring for social media and I will say social media was my way in for journalism and I find that for a lot of times, young journalist today is you can move across, but it is a way in because people tend to look increasingly towards younger people for social media, it’s just the way it is, but so the cold email set up a call with her and that was probably one of the quickest processes ever because once we got on the phone, it became very clear what she needed and actually, the original position I reached out to her for, I was underqualified for it. It was my first job, and so she’s just, “This isn’t quite the fit, maybe in a couple of years, but I do have another position that’s opening up that I think would be great for you,” and so I started as associate producer, started doing social media, realized CNBC has free range for you to pitch stories. So, I started doing that. I worked across networks. I went to NBC Latino, met the editor in chief, Sandra Lilly. She was fantastic, pitched my stories, worked on them after hours. So, that’s what CNBC was like. I got a little bit of experience in a bureaucratic environment because it was, it’s a bigger company, but also being able to have that leeway to do things beyond what’s written down in your role.
Priscilla: What were the biggest challenges for you in that role, especially as someone who was, it was your first job, you were fresh out of college, what did you have to ramp up on pretty quickly?
Lyanne: Yeah, I must say graduating from college, I thought I knew more than I actually did, and so I learned to be a student. I think that was the first thing that just because I had graduated from college didn’t mean I was done being a student. I needed to continue being a student. Media is very different from the world that I am now when you talk about work-life balance and what it means to be a good employee. I feel like in media and in journalism, you need to do a lot more managing up. You’re often working on a very lean and mean team. You don’t always get guidance that you need, you get very aggressive KPIs that you need to meet in working for a social media department, and it’s just not easy. It’s not easy, period, but what helps is setting these managing upskills for you in place so that you can set the expectations for your boss because they won’t always do it for you. So, that was one of the big learnings, which is more corporate, actually, than you might think. The other thing, I guess, is just like in terms of reporting, it was just that you’re going to be your biggest advocate, like, my boss was a really big advocate, but at the end of the day, I was the person who needed to reach out for the additional opportunities, I needed to speak up, I needed to work those extra hours, and I needed to really explore it and then finesse what it is that I wanted to do.
Priscilla: And so, tell us about the passion for the Latino population and money, how did that start for you and at what point did you start to think about pitching stories or creating content around this?
Lyanne: Yeah, honestly, it’s when I started to have my own journey where I was coming back in touch with my own roots and culture, and that probably started towards the end of college. I think I was coming more to term with my roots and I spent a very long time not talking about my identity and not really exploring it. Maybe when I was younger, there’s a little bit of not really wanting to embrace it fully, and then in college, I was just like, our culture is so rich. I became fascinated with a little bit of history, with a little bit of culture, music. Actually, one of my earliest stories for NBC Latino was about a woman mariachi band in New York City. It was nothing to do with business, but the fact that I was in the business space and I saw a need, it wasn’t completely, solely passion. I was like, okay, I’m passionate about this and I see a need, those two things can intersect and fulfill me and drive me, and so that’s where I was just like, okay, the market needs this because it’s not there. I think that’s one of the fallacies, I think, of national media that we get placed into one bucket and we increasingly need to have these hard conversations about how we’re a lot of people, Latinos, we’re a very diverse bucket.
Priscilla: Absolutely agree, and I think we saw that with the election, right? Like this past 2020, we’re not a homogenous group. There’s a lot of intersectionality and race, and class, and so many other things play into our understandings of ourselves and, like, how we show up, and yeah, so I love that, I totally agree. What really resonated with me was that I’m Mexican Peruvian American and I grew up going to predominantly white schools, my whole life, and so for me, I was in a space in school constantly where I just wanted to survive. Like, I was just trying to survive, just trying to do well in school, just trying to get to college and make my parents proud, and then there was also a lot of racism I grew up in Texas. There were definitely always comments being made about Mexicans that were derogatory. So, for me, when I went to college, it was also a time of re-embracing that identity.
Lyanne: As diverse we are, like, that’s one thing that we can resonate on. You’re saying you embraced it in college. I feel like I met other people in college who had a similar narrative and said growing up, it was just so hard for me to see the things, the way that I see them now, and I appreciate things so much more, and just having that community and being able to relate to that meant so much.
Priscilla: And so, on the topic of money and career, what comes to mind for you in terms of one of the biggest lessons that you had to learn in terms of navigating money and career, whether that’s, like, negotiating for a salary or honestly, just anything?
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INTERVIEW CONTINUED
Lyanne: Yeah, I would encourage you to keep tabs on your wins. Literally keep them in a folder, keep them in a Google Doc, keep those emails that you get from clients or from editors, readers, praising you, use that as leverage when you’re asking for a negotiation and if your company doesn’t do this, set metrics for success a year out or even six months out, but six months to a year out with your manager. Again, managing up, so that that way, you can revisit those and use that as leverage when you’re asking for a raise.
Priscilla: Yeah. Okay, so now, I want to transition to your decision to leave CNBC, so what prompted your decision to leave and then what made you move over to NASDAQ?
Lyanne: Yeah, I got to say, I didn’t think I’d leave a full-time journalism job in the near future, but the opportunity came up. My former boss actually moved over and she wanted to bring me with her, and so to that end, she became a big thread in my early career because she was what I realized we call a sponsor. She was more than a mentor. She wanted to take me with her under her wing to advocate for me, put numbers to that too, like, money and, and say, “We can offer you the opportunity that you’re looking for,” and so what really drew me to NASDAQ was the opportunity. It was an opportunity for growth in skillset. At CNBC, I was doing social media and I was writing articles in my after hours, and while I really appreciated that flexibility, it was a little bit harder to get some of these other hands-on experiences at such a big outlet that I wanted to get. And NASDAQ was in a time of growth, and so they had a studio, they were working on video production which is really fascinating to me. After I joined the CMO, even became interested in a podcast, which I launched for the company alongside our comms team, so the opportunity for growth is really what appealed to me. Once the opportunity presented itself, I really pursued it for the skills and the growth proposition that was there.
Priscilla: That’s huge, and so has it fulfilled a lot of what you expected in terms of your growth and, like, all of that?
Lyanne: Honestly, it’s more than I could have imagined. I went there not with the title of, like, supervising producer that I have now. I went there as a booker. That’s what I was, I used to book people for our live interviews, and the thing about NASDAQ, it has a very flat structure, at least on the marketing end, which I sit under, which means that you have insane access to the C-level executives and I was just like, what is this place, this amazing place? Because that certainly was not CNBC which is very structured, and you had to really climb up and do time and all of that. Here at NASDAQ, it was the second day and I was sitting in the studio in an interview. So, the opportunities and the speed at which they were coming I think brought about by such an innovative company, because NASDAQ is relatively new for stock exchanges founded in 1971, second biggest stock exchange, but it’s not that old, so I think it was that, that kind of just, they move really fast. You have access to all the C-level executives, and so the opportunities have been endless, like, I’ve been sent on projects around the world to do video, to speak with different companies, I’ve learned so much about different fields, from the health industry field to biomedicine, just things that I would’ve never thought that I would cover, and I just, no, not all of them is related to Latinos and money, but tactically, I’m just like, okay, I love being in these different environments and I love learning things that I can apply then to my coverage which I continued to do around Latinos and money. So, I found it a great place to grow and get experience of everything, a smattering, so to speak, across the board.
Priscilla: Yeah, and what’s really cool to me is that you didn’t really have a business background, right? It’s not like you worked in corporate or finance or had a BBA or something, but you were willing to be a beginner and be like, I’ll learn as I go, and I think that’s a big deal, that you were willing to do that.
Lyanne: It’s a big deal, but I think I practiced that muscle early on. I will say, I think it’s difficult for a lot of people in the Latino community to admit to things we don’t know and be vulnerable in that way, and I would venture to say that in my family, it’s because they went through such hardships early on immigrating here, everything they had to go through that it’s just, okay, I’ve lived, like, what else do I have to do? Especially for my parents, it’s a lot, but for me being a first generation who didn’t have to go through that immigrant experience in all of that, I’m just like, okay, well, this is the least I can do, admit that I don’t know things and then say, okay, I’m going to go out and learn it, and that’s been my approach to life. That’s my approach now, too, as I’m even getting my personal finances in order, because I’m still on that journey and I don’t mind saying that because I like being transparent. I like for people to know where I’m coming from and that we may be coming from the same place.
Priscilla: That’s the thing is I think so many people, we’re actually all in the same boat, like we’re all figuring things out as we go, and we all have to be beginners at different things at different times, but we have such a hard time admitting that to each other and we build so much, so much community when we can actually just be vulnerable and be authentic about where we are and what we’re doing to get to where we want to go.
Lyanne: Yeah, I am absolutely about that, and I’ve embraced that a lot in the last year, I think, with more online communities where people can be vulnerable like that.
Priscilla: Yeah, and so I noticed that you’ve interviewed Ryan Leslie, which I was really impressed because he was, like, one of my favorite RNB singers and he kind of stopped singing, but what has it been like to interview these really cool people and what has been your highlight from that time?
Lyanne: Oh, my gosh. Oh, boy. Yeah, no, Ryan, he was great. He was so down to earth and we interviewed him because he started an app on his phone to kind of help facilitate communication. He’s a really smart guy. I would say I just enjoyed the diversity of it. I interviewed the first company to go public on an American exchange from Costa Rica, which is so specific. It’s so specific, but I was just like, this is really cool, and at the time, we did the interview in Spanish, too, where I was just like, wow, this is powerful, like it’s just the Costa Rican media outlets picked it up too, and honestly, that was an interview, I know he’s not a celebrity, but that really stuck with me because my heart swelled with pride where I was just like, okay, the whole theme of opening doors and paving roads, and being the first, that, I feel like the most impressive part about that is not that you were the first. It’s that now you’ve opened up a road where you won’t be the last. That’s what is most impressive about that, and so I think I really enjoyed interviewing people, not just Latinos, but people of color, people in general, who were the first to do things, but if I could think of one person, oh, my gosh, there’s just so many. I interviewed at some point the actress from Nikita, and I love her, I interviewed Maggie Q because she has her own fitness line and I think she was with some health company that came to ring the bell, but I absolutely adore this woman as an actress. I watched her shows like all throughout college and I was just, I don’t get starstruck very often, but I was just like, I literally, I watched all of your acting career and I literally felt so empowered watching you, and so the fact that she’s also a business woman is obviously really appealing. So, yeah, she was definitely a memorable person for me.
Priscilla: So awesome. It sounds like your job gives you a lot of energy and like you’re really excited and super engaged a lot of the time.
Lyanne: Yes, it’s super engaging and that’s kind of exactly what I look for. I like being able to move from one thing quickly to another, adapt and just continue to tell those stories.
Priscilla: So, I’m really curious about Moneda Moves. Tell us how it started, what it is and your mission with your podcast.
Lyanne: Yes, of course. So, Moneda Moves is a platform, newsletter podcast all about Latinos, our relationship with money and role in the American economy. Basically, what a CNBC would be but to Latinos. It’s largely aggregated at this point because it’s just me, but I have a weekly newsletter where I give you the kind of top line stories that you should know. Lately, we’ve been covering the Latinos on the Biden cabinet, and actually, they would have a big hand in managing money in this economy. So, it’s really important to track those and see where they are. It usually takes a hundred days for cabinet members to get approved, so that certainly will be really impactful, and then we have a podcast that is bi-weekly. The goal with that is to have different conversations around money with people who are successful in the field, that money can mean a lot of things. So, I’ve been talking to people in financial technology, people building personal finance platforms for Latinos by Latinos, but the goal is also to provide contextual story. So, we’ve done a story about the PPP loans from last year, 2020, and how Latinos were having a really hard time getting these loans for their businesses. So, I think just giving a little bit more context is really important. I love the profiles, but I also think we need to be aware of the bigger picture and our role in it.
Priscilla: So, my last question for you, what would you tell your younger self if you could tell her anything today?
Lyanne: I would tell her to trust yourself a little bit more. I think sometimes, I held myself back because I wanted things to be perfect or I just didn’t think I was good enough. I think that leads to overthinking and analysis paralysis, which is understandable, but taking risks once in a while and trusting yourself, and trusting your gut and your intuition, I would tell my younger self to trust yourself and take the risk because action is how you get started. If you have an idea, go for it, shoot for the moon, and then see where you land.
OUTRO
Priscilla: Thanks for tuning in to the Early Career Moves Podcast. Be sure to visit ECMpodcast.com to join the conversation, access the show notes, and become a part of our newsletter community, and if you loved this episode, head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Talk to you next week.