As I sat down to write this essay, my wife walked into the room carrying a box.

“This is for you.”

“I don’t remember ordering anything,” I said.

Inside was a gift basket from URL Media: popcorn, cookies, peanuts and enough assorted snacks to undermine whatever discipline I had planned for the week.

“Garry, thinking of you! Enjoy a few snacks and take a moment for yourself,” the note read.

Credit: Garry Pierre-Pierre

The past several months have been emotionally exhausting. The end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, coupled with ICE actions affecting Haitian families and other immigrant communities, has made it difficult to separate the work from the personal. My colleagues at URL knew that.

They sent the basket because, as Janelle Zagala, our VP of operations, later explained, they knew it had been a difficult stretch and hoped this small gesture might lift my spirits.

It did.

And, yes, I ate the popcorn.

And it helps explain why Fast Company recently recognized URL Media as one of the best workplaces for innovators.

I’ll get to the innovation. There’s plenty of it. But what struck me about that box was something harder to measure: the humanity built into URL’s culture. In a business increasingly obsessed with scale, efficiency, algorithms and artificial intelligence, sometimes innovation looks like remembering there is a human being on the other side of the screen.

I joined URL Media last year as Director of Partnerships, charged with recruiting, retaining and resourcing our growing network of Black and Brown publishers and creators.

It has been a blast. It is also not for the faint of heart. URL moves fast. Medusa has nothing on us when it comes to wearing multiple hats. Partnerships, revenue, audience, technology, events, fundraising, strategy—on some days, you can touch all of them before lunch.

There is really only one speed: FAST.

But there is freedom at that pace. Ideas are welcomed. Experimentation is encouraged. The staff is a wonderfully multicultural and multigenerational mix of people who collaborate without much regard for whose lane something supposedly belongs in.

Not ‘marginal’ publications

And we are experimenting with things that would have been almost unimaginable when I entered ethnic media nearly three decades ago.

We are helping publishers test new audience strategies and use AI to improve operations rather than replace journalism. We are exploring how tentpole events can become revenue and audience engines. We connect publishers to national advertising opportunities they could rarely access alone. We provide editorial support, grants and even catalytic loans. We help independent publishers think not simply about surviving the next crisis, but about building businesses capable of lasting.

That last part is deeply personal for me.

A year and a half ago, I stepped away from The Haitian Times after 25 years. Some friends in the industry had an amusing question for me: After being the boss for a quarter century, how was I going to handle reporting to someone? Fair question.

But leadership can be lonely. After 25 years, my ego had little left to prove. I had spent my final years at The Haitian Times building the scaffolding that I hoped would carry the organization well into this century and assembling a leadership team capable of taking it there.

Then came my version of retirement. I got up later. I worked on my book. I enjoyed not having every organizational problem eventually land on my desk. For a while, anyway. Then I started getting restless.

When Sara Lomax and Mitra Kalita offered me the opportunity to join URL, I realized the job represented something larger than a career change. In some ways, it bookended work I had begun almost from the moment I left The New York Times to start The Haitian Times.

That story begins with Abby Scher and the Independent Press Association. The IPA represented independent magazines and alternative publications around the country. Abby believed New York needed something similar focused on the extraordinary ecosystem of ethnic, immigrant and community media that served the city. She knew I had left The Times to start a Haitian newspaper and pulled me into the effort.

We met with foundations. We talked about the importance of these publications. We tried to persuade funders that newspapers serving Haitians, Latinos, African Americans, Asians and immigrant communities were not marginal publications serving marginal people. They were essential civic institutions.

That effort became IPA-New York. The need was obvious. The business model was not. Financial struggles eventually forced the organization to close. It was succeeded by the New York Community Media Alliance, which also eventually disappeared. Later, former CUNY journalism dean Sarah Bartlett and I helped bring those assets and that mission into what became the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at CUNY.

Eventually, even the word “ethnic” disappeared from the name.  It became the Center for Community Media. I wasn’t there to object, which may have made the decision considerably easier.

The value of ethnic and community media

“Ethnic” had somehow acquired the quality of a scarlet letter, as though acknowledging the communities these publications served made the journalism less legitimate.

Through all those iterations, however, the problem remained remarkably consistent.

The publishers doing some of the most essential journalism in America were often doing it without a line of credit, without two years of rainy-day reserves, without sophisticated sales departments and without much room for error. I knew that reality intimately because I was one of them. That is why URL Media feels different to me.

Sara and Mitra are not trying to rescue community media. They are trying to build an economic and collaborative structure around publishers and creators who already possess something enormously valuable: trust.

URL now brings together dozens of independent Black and Brown media organizations. The network creates scale without requiring publishers to surrender their identity. It creates access to advertising while preserving independence. It invests in audience, technology and revenue. And when circumstances change, the organization pivots quickly.

I’ve been at this long enough to know better than to declare that we have finally cracked the code. I’ve helped build institutions, watched others disappear and learned that a noble mission is no guarantee of survival. But URL feels different.

Looking back, I can draw a fairly straight line from those early meetings with Abby Scher, through IPA-New York, the Community Media Alliance, CUNY, 25 years of building The Haitian Times, and now URL Media.

The names have changed. The technology certainly has. The challenges have evolved.

But the mission has been remarkably constant: Give independent publishers serving communities too often overlooked by mainstream media the resources, leverage and infrastructure they need to thrive.

Nearly 30 years later, I’m still working on the same problem.

Only now I have more colleagues, better technology, bigger ambitions — and apparently, snacks.

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Garry Pierre-Pierre is the founder and former publisher of The Haitian Times. He’s a former reporter for The New York Times where he was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s reporting of the World Trade Center bombings in 1993.