Rachel Carlton
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Heather Leighton, Web and Social Media Editor, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Calling herself a “Jackie-of-all-trades,” Heather Leighton has this advice for aspiring journalists: be nice, and try everything.

Houston-native Heather Leighton is the web and social media editor at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank housed at Rice University. In her role, she maintains the institute’s websites, implements its social media strategy, and produces and posts content to social media platforms. Leighton graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked as a social media manager for the Houston Chronicle.

During our slightly spotty video call, Leighton walked me through her journey from being a good writer to a versatile journalist, one through which she leveraged her desire to enhance her marketability and value to her employers. In high school, Leighton decided to pursue a degree in journalism based on her foundation as a strong writer. After navigating the college admissions process to find a journalism program that was right for her, she enrolled in UT’s journalism school. There, her professors stressed the importance of not focusing on just one aspect or type of journalism. While some of her peers came in as aspiring magazine editors or photojournalists, Leighton stuck to that advice and aimed for proficiency in all facets of journalism. 

Her breadth of knowledge proved to be key in future professional endeavors. To college students interested in journalism, Leighton suggested bolstering a conventional curriculum with classes in communications, marketing, photography, and other creatively-oriented topics that she has found helpful in her jobs. As someone who has never been able to zone in on a particular field of study, her advice allowed me to shed the self-doubt that I’ve held since the days I dropped my engineering coursework for lectures on languages spoken by fewer than fifty people. For Leighton, who was a yearbook photographer at UT and has always had an eye for design, her versatility is a major selling point, particularly in her line of work. For her career, she cites the ability to create visually-appealing content as second only to writing in importance. As the web and social media editor at the Kinder Institute, Leighton is tasked with the difficult job of translating text-heavy promotional flyers to posts on Instagram; her graphic design and video-editing skills have set her up for social media success.

Writing talent and self-learning skills are necessary but not sufficient in a field as cutthroat as journalism—according to Leighton, the connections she made at UT continue to lead her throughout her career. “One thing I would say to you is connect. Be nice to everyone… because you literally have no clue when you’ll see them again or what position they’ll be in,” Leighton said, adding that being nice is, in and of itself, a generally good life practice. 

Leighton has utilized her network to aid her job search throughout her career. One lunch with an editor from the Houston Chronicle who she knew through a friend garnered her an endorsement that gave her a leg up in the interview process. After landing that job as a social media manager at the Chronicle—a role in which she spearheaded the Chronicle’s presence on Snapchat as the platform was just starting to gain traction—Leighton found her way to the Kinder Institute with the help of another professional connection. Reflecting back to the day I hesitantly created a LinkedIn profile, I am glad that my skepticism of the site has faded, as I now eagerly connect with Leighton and other journalists without batting an eye. 

Towards the end of our call, we got into the day-to-day of her job, at which point I asked her to talk about the intersection between social media and journalism. With the advent of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, traditional news media outlets and their respective journalists have even more pressure to quickly report the news and pull in their audiences in a way that has previously prompted my discomfort with social media. Leighton said that at the Chronicle, that intersection sometimes meant investing only in platforms that provided revenue. Acknowledging the messy side of social media, Leighton emphasized its ability to connect to a broader audience.

“There are some really ugly things about social media but there’s also some really great things,” Leighton said. “One of which [is] how it has the opportunity to connect so many different people from all over the world. I really appreciate that, and I think with a social media team… there’s a potential of just being able to reach so many people in… a positive way.”

And that, she told me, is what excites her and connects to her goal of focusing on places where she could do some good in the world. As an aspiring journalist myself, there’s nothing I’d want more than that. 

Highlights from the interview:

What was your college experience?

I went to the University of Texas. I’m pretty indecisive about choosing where to go, but I felt that this is where I needed to go and I did and it worked out amazingly. I loved my time there. I connected with so many people and those connections still continue to lead me throughout my career. And that’s one thing that I would say to you, is connect. Be nice to everyone who, because you literally have no clue when you’ll see them again or what position they’ll be in again. And then, also just being nice is a good thing to do. Just in general, you know? So, that’s always the aim for me, is just simply to try and help people as much as possible and hopefully my helping is returned, you know, like a good karma kind of thing. So, that’s my number one advice, especially in journalism, because your professors and future colleagues have connections. And picking brains like this is also very helpful. I will always stand by the fact that, which is clear from our time so far speaking together. And if you just ask questions, then they’ll typically just spill the beans and tell you everything. So keep asking questions for everyone. And be nice.

Did you focus on anything in particular in your journalism program?

I focused on, as terrible as it sounds, everything. When I was in school, they told me you can no longer be a journalist who only focuses on photography. Essentially in journalism school, we call it J-school, they told us that you cannot focus on just one aspect of journalism. You have to try and be proficient, you don’t have to master, but just be proficient, in a lot of different things. They told us to know how to take a photo for situations where you need photojournalism skills. They told us to know how to take and edit videos, edit photos, and know how to format and do a design sheet for a magazine, a newspaper, or marketing. So that you can, as I do in my Houston Chronicle bio, identify as a Jackie-of-all-trades. Diversifying your expertise is really, really helpful. Because you can then apply it across multiple different situations. 

The reflection that I’m going to write after this interview is supposed to help people who are in college and still trying to figure out different career options. Do you have any advice for current college students? 

I would say in terms of current college students, I would probably try a lot of different things and take your time. Try random linguistics classes. Try photography classes and video editing classes. Try a random art class, where you’re sculpting. This is the time of your life that you have all of these essentially random things at your fingertips and the world gives you permission to do it. And to try it. And take your time through it. Because I graduated high school with credits, I pretty much came into college as a sophomore. And I took the minimum for full-time, 12 credit hours, every single semester and I could have graduated early. I chose to graduate in May 2015 so that I was with everyone else, but I was taking one class the last semester and it was online. So, I was already applying for jobs before I graduated, and started working for the Chronicle before my graduation ceremony. I had to ask my boss for the day off to attend.  

I would also say to broaden your skillset. I wouldn’t say that I am a master editor or a videographer or anything like that, but just having the skill to put something together can be really helpful. Also, Google and Youtube are your friends. You can learn so much from the internet and the resources that we have right in front of us. And there’s no problem with that. And to me, Googling how to slow a video down because your boss is talking way too fast demonstrates that you ask questions and use the resources at hand to produce something. So that’s another thing, and I think that I’m not the only one that Googles how to do things in their professional career. Hopefully, I’m not. 

How do social media and journalism interact, and in what direction do you think journalism is going with new technology?

Yeah, so one challenge of journalism is that you obviously want to reach your audience in any kind of way that you can. And social media’s a really great tool to do that with. First, you have people already on social media who are sharing information and sharing content. Why couldn’t the Kinder Institute, and before that, the Houston Chronicle, produce these great stories as well? You already have that built-in audience and social media is just another resource for you to use to reach that audience. So why not use it? The tricky thing is that typically, there is the weird intersection of social media and journalism with regards to revenue. A lot of the times at the Houston Chronicle, we would only invest in platforms that provided revenue. I got there way back to when Snapchat first started, and I was like, “My goal is to get the Houston Chronicle on the Snapchat explore or discover pages so that we can share stories that way.” I mean the Washington Post was on there, why couldn’t the Houston Chronicle be on there as well? Houston is bigger than Washington D.C., we don’t have as big of an audience but our population in Houston is bigger and more important. So I was like, “Let’s do it,” and it was difficult because it didn’t provide any revenue. You couldn’t link back to Snapchat like you can a website, which frustrated my bosses in terms of revenue. It was more of a play for branding than for revenue, so that was one of the tricky things about emerging social media platforms. I’m sure the Chronicle is facing the same hiccups with Tik Tok right now, and asking questions like “Do we need to get on Tik Tok, how do you tell stories on Tik Tok? Would that be something worth investing our time in?” I don’t know what the Chronicle is doing, but we started the Kinder Institute’s Instagram page in January. We’re not super hot on all of the social media trends here, but that’s also partially because it’s difficult to take social issues and really text-heavy reports and put them on an image and video focused platform. You have to create graphics.

Who do you like to bounce ideas off of? 

Sometimes I like reaching out to the researchers because they have a very different type of brain, they’re very left-brain focused. And they might have different ideas or different perspectives of what I think might be brilliant, or of what works better for people of different educational backgrounds. And also there’s another team, they’re called the development team, and they do a lot of the fundraising for the institute. And sometimes I bounce ideas off of them from a sponsor’s perspective. So I ask questions like, “If a sponsor was to see this on social media, would this be a problem, or what would they think about it?” So it’s obviously helpful to communicate within your team and with the broader organization.

Do you have some sort of path that you’re following for the next five to ten years, or are you just seeing what happens?

One thing that I have learned is that you really can’t plan it. And you know during interviews sometimes they ask that and of course, there’s the scripted response for what you aim to do. My scripted response is to be a director of communications or a manager of a broader social media group or organization for some company or something along those lines. It’s typically more fleshed out and rehearsed than this, and it sounds a lot better. But, one thing that I have learned is that you can’t over plan things, and sometimes when you look back at what you thought would happen you kind of chuckle to yourself because what’s currently happening is sometimes even better or way different than what you even thought. And either way it goes, it’s OK. We’re all just doing the best that we can. 

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.