We’re thrilled to announce that Anika Myers Palm, a media leader with a background in content creation, digital platforms, and product innovation, has joined URL Media as our new Editorial and Audience Director. Anika has been working with us for the last few months as a contractor running elections coverage, and we’re so glad she’s staying.
Her employers have included CNN, The Orlando Sentinel, The Ocala Star-Banner and The (Broward) Daily Business Review. Most of her career has been focused on digital production, including push alerts, social media, newsletters and relationships with partner platforms. She has also reported on natural disasters, crime, religion and corporate bankruptcy, and worked as a copy editor.
Anika is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives with her family in Atlanta, where she enjoys hiking. She also is a voracious reader and self-described enthusiast of the works of Octavia Butler.
We caught up with her to talk about her new role and unique lens. Edited excerpts:
Anika, why URL Media?
URL Media’s mission, serving and amplifying the work of small Black- and Brown-founded news organizations, speaks to the core of who I am and what I want to do. I am at heart still the girl from Tampa who of course paid attention to mainstream media, but only actually trusted the Florida Sentinel Bulletin and what was then Black-targeted radio on WTMP-1150 AM to keep up with news about my community and people I knew — and balanced my perspective with La Gaceta, our local trilingual newspaper. URL and its partners remind me of how I first came to understand the world, and I’m genuinely delighted to be able to use my decades of experience in this way and at this critical time. My ambition at the start of my journalism career was to learn enough and save enough to be in position to own a small news organization. That idea has shifted with time and circumstances, but my work with URL Media certainly is in line with the spirit of that original ambition, which makes me happy.
You straddle a unique position among editorial content, audience and product innovation/technology. What do you think the road ahead looks like in each of these areas?
The audience is being very clear with us about how they want to be reached and what kind of content they want to see. Vast sections of our industry haven’t been listening and have lost the audience’s trust. The next few years will be focused on regaining it. Local and small media have a huge head start on this front. As an industry, we absolutely will need to figure out how to use the data we have and the technology we’re developing in order to work faster and smarter.
What did you learn managing coverage of elections for a network serving community media, BIPOC America and so many platforms, as URL Media does?
I learned how difficult it is to synthesize a narrative about what the country wants, because there are so many communities with so many needs and wants. We’re at least a part of that local journalism and can work toward that purpose, but it’s a nearly impossible task for mainstream media, which is why mainstream coverage misses the mark so badly. It’s also difficult for political parties to understand, especially if they willfully choose not to engage with the communities we and our partners represent.
What have you learned that you wish you knew as a mainstream media journalist?
Like most journalists, the gap between what I knew about the business side of news operations and what I really needed to know was gargantuan.
Whether in my private or professional life, I have a personal goal of learning at least one new thing daily. Working at URL Media is almost a cheat code for achieving that right now!
What’s your secret superpower?
My secret superpower is “calm.” I rarely panic and I am rarely shocked by anything. No matter how dark the tunnel or convoluted and confusing the path, I will eventually find a way through or out. I am told that my ability to be calm in trying circumstances can be unnerving and make people think I’m cold or uninterested in what they have to say. I’m neither. Honestly, I’m usually simply trying to think through whatever I’m hearing or seeing.
I know you are an Alpha Kappa Alpha. Tell us about that lens of identity you wear (proudly) and how it might inform your work.
Yes! It is an honor to be among the more than 300,000 women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. It is a special joy to share my affiliation with my mother and several other relatives. So many of the sisterhood are women of tremendous ambition and accomplishment, such as Vice President Kamala Harris. I carry them and their dedication to excellence with me in everything I do. Along with regularly wearing pink and green, the world’s best color combination, being an AKA is a lifetime commitment to the sisterhood and, as our mission states, being of service to all mankind. I see my work as a part of that service. I’m always asking myself: Am I being useful? Am I useful in the right ways? Is my focus in the right direction? Who else could use my help?
