But that really does concern me that we live in sort of segmented that society is more segmented now and that we don't understand each other as well because we don't talk to each other.

Everything news is sort of oppositional.

People stake out.

You know, I'm conservative or I'm liberal, so I listen to this or I listen to that and you don't have to listen to the other guy's point of view.

Luckily, this journalist works hard to even the playing field, ensuring that her listeners are presented with all sides of the issues.

Tonight on the A-list, I talk with Michele Norris of NPR's All Things Considered.

With nearly three decades of experience, Michele Norris is undoubtedly one of the most respected voices in American journalism today.

She's had a remarkable career in both print and television.

But for the past ten years, she's brought thoughtful and in-depth reporting over the radio airwaves.

As co-host of NPR's All Things Considered.

She's known for her broad range as a journalist, having covered everything from politics to pop culture.

And in 2010, Michele used her keen investigative skills to uncover the secrets of her own family.

In her first book, The Grace of Silence, and now she's here in Chattanooga to share her story with the young women at the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy.

In order to be truly successful in life, you have to follow the things that make you really happy.

Michele, thank you so much for being on the A-list.

It's great to be here.

A List, makes me feel important.

Sitting with you.

I feel important and I'm excited that we're here at the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, and I know you are here to speak at their annual Odyssey event.

Is this something you do?

Is that a priority for you specifically to speak to young women?

It is, and to young people in general, But it's always a special treat.

When I have a chance to speak to young women, I do a fair amount of travel and a good deal of public speaking.

And if I can, when I'm in a town, I like to try to meet with young people because I remember what it was like to be a young person and to have big dreams, but feel like the people who steps I was trying to follow were so far removed from my personal life.

And so I do try to make time to do that.

And so in this case, it this is what this trip was all about, was to actually come to a leadership academy that was full of young women who were doing really interesting things and that people have high hopes for.

And and so I was glad to, you know, to come and be a part of this and see it firsthand.

And what do you always hope that take away is when a young person hears you.

Hears you speak well, that that they can do it and that it might take a lot of hard work, but that they shouldn't be afraid of that.

And one of the things that I will talk to the young ladies about today is confidence, but also failure.

That confidence is like a garden that has to be cultivated.

And I think a lot of young people feel like confidence is this thing that marches up and sort of gets inside you and then it's there forever.

And for some people, maybe it's like that and God bless them.

But for most of us, confidence is something that you have to sort of go out and find or that you have to make sure that it's still inside you.

And some days you you have to surround yourself with people who are going to stoke that for you.

Sometimes you have to stare down your fears.

Sometimes you you have to do something that you have never done before and and just have the confidence to do it and have the confidence to know you're going to be okay on the other side of that, no matter the outcome.

I hope that I can encourage young people to think about failure in a different way, to not be afraid of it.

That failure is is an opportunity to learn something about yourself.

You know, I was just at it at a business conference not long ago, at the beginning of the year in January, and with a bunch of people who run the the companies that these kids all, you know, the device that they all use on their little devices, Instagram, Twitter, Google, you know, and people who run these companies were all there and in the hallways when they were talking about just business.

You know, in between the these sessions at the summit series, they were all talking about failure.

And it was a real epiphany for me because they are risk takers.

They value risk and they value most of all the lessons that they learn when they fail.

And then they take each of those lessons.

And that's what led to Facebook and that's what led to Instagram and that's what led to Google.

And if I can help young people see that, that, you know, they were walking around with t shirts, I said, failure is awesome, literally, because they they embrace the culture of risk.

And you can embrace risk without anticipating failure.

And and that's something that I'm not sure that a lot of people understand.

It changed my outlook.

And it's a message that I try to share now.

And Michelle would know her own story is one of embracing a risk that paid off in a big way.

She grew up in Minneapolis as the daughter of two hard working news junkies who always placed an emphasis on education as the only black family in an otherwise all white neighborhood.

Her parents encouraged her to become, as she puts it, a model minority and to challenge adversity by pushing herself to excel and surpass expectations.

And looking at her career today, there's no doubt she's accomplished that.

But it might surprise you to know that journalism wasn't always the plan for Michelle.

Now, when you first went to college, you majored in electrical engineering.

I did.

So I did.

When did you make the turn from that to journalism?

I when I was about this age, they had a program called Inroads, and they identified students who had a particular talent in math or science, I guess what we would now call STEM education.

And and I was recruited for that and actually took courses at the University of Minnesota on the weekends and loved it and loved the sciences and had a head for math.

And it was great.

And I thought I was going to study electrical and biomedical engineering.

I spent a summer working at a minnesota company called Medtronic.

You may have heard of them.

They make medical devices.

At that time.

They had just started making pacemakers and the work was interesting, but it was incredibly isolating.

I spent time working in a clean room with microprocessors and saw the same four people every day.

And I just wanted to see more of the world than that.

I sort of saw my future and I decided that I wanted to open a door.

Number two, you know, I wanted to try something else.

Made my parents crazy because this is after three and a half years finish line inside.

They were just they were focused.

I mean, they were so mad that I wanted to change my major.

But I, I decided that I needed to expand my education.

I wanted to take a little bit more in liberal art and the world of liberal arts and and I really like to write.

And I had a professor who who really championed that she, she saw some talent and and really pushed me, you know, to to think about writing.

And so I just started working for the Minnesota Daily and I started working for a local television station, working in a dispatch shack, listening to the police, fire dispatchers and sending camera crews out to, you know, when bad things happened and needed to send a camera crew out there and and just stuck with it and eventually landed an internship with the Los Angeles Times and drove cross-country and and that that.

And then I just haven't looked back.

I just been working in journalism ever since.

Do you remember your first big story?

Well, you know, when I worked at the Minnesota Daily, I had a couple of pretty big stories.

This is a newspaper at the University of Minnesota, which is the fourth largest newspaper in the state because the University of Minnesota is 68,000 students.

It's a it's a really big campus.

And even before I left school, I wound up covering some pretty big stories, budget battles in the legislature, zoning battles, you know, in Minneapolis.

So those were probably my biggest stories.

But the stories that I think that resonated most in me were not the great big, huge breaking stories.

They were the smaller stories that I did that wound up having a big impact that were not necessarily the the stories that were raining down from the assignment desk.

When I went to work for the Los Angeles Times, I worked in that first in the San Diego bureau, one of the suburban bureaus, and I did a couple of stories that that changed me as a journalist.

One was I did a story we were just talking about this actually on food deserts.

They didn't call them food deserts at the time.

There was no name for them.

But I just did a story about a rough community that I was in, and I had actually been working on a different story, a homicide story, and it was looking to buy something while I was there, just like a water or something like that.

And we walked into a store and realized that this was the local grocery store, but it was like a convenience store.

And if you wanted to buy something fresh, there was you couldn't find a tomato.

You know, you could find all kinds of canned goods.

You could find malt liquor, you could find candy, you know, an entire aisle of candy and chips.

But there was nothing fresh.

And that was so odd to me because it was California.

It was, you know, the fruit basket of America.

And yet you couldn't find an orange or, you know, strawberries or anything and came back and said, I wanted to write a story about that.

And the editor said, you know, you get a week.

And I went out and did the story and asked why Ralphs and Vons, the big grocery store chains, didn't locate in those communities and and wound up doing a story about what it's like to live in a community where you have to drive 22 miles to find a tomato.

And it started this whole debate around this issue in San Diego.

And that that made me feel powerful as a journalist and realized that I could help set the agenda.

And so it's those that's the kind of story that I really like, like to tell.

Have you felt pressure as a journalist, though, not just to report from a socially conscious standpoint, but things that are going to get attention?

I mean, and I know those garnered attention, but more, you know, we say Richard Jeni, the comedian, you say, I used to turn on the news.

And I just want to say and here's the bad news.

You know, if we don't report all the bad, ugly and, you know, insane, you know, they feel like they the media, we feel like we're not going to get the attention we need.

How do you balance that?

That's hard, particularly right now.

I mean, I always circled all things considered in double digits that are all things or at least most things.

And a lot of the things that we're considering right now are really grim.

You know, we're at war on two fronts.

The nation is experiencing economic tumult.

Politicians are throwing political tomatoes at each other all the time.

I mean, it's just it's a it's a really rough news cycle.

I have the benefit of hosting a show that's 2 hours long.

So we can also find opportunities to bring you joy and whimsy or to introduce you to a story about culture or something else that's harder when you have a half hour broadcast, you know, it's a little bit more difficult.

So I have the luxury of time and the luxury of working for a news organization that sees that as part of its mandate to give you a moment of uplift or joy or surprise, along with all of all of the bad news.

But I understand your question.

You know, the the society has just become sort of course, and a lot a lot a lot edgier, you know, right now and that that works its way into the news a certain amount of of cynicism and and and negativity.

And the thing that I actually am most concerned about is is, you know, a little bit of that, but I'm really most concerned about is the kind of narrowcasting that I see the segmentation in in media that if you want to, you can sort of swim in a very distinct plain in terms of your media diet.

I know I'm mixing metaphors there, but you can you can you can basically consume a media diet that allows you to only consume news that either confirms or affirms everything you believe.

You will never be met with an opposing opinion depending on what you listen to, what you watch, the blogs that you read, or the news sources that you read on the web.

And that does concern me because we don't understand each other very well.

If we never listen to another point of view and interested in the other point of view, because there's usually more than just two.

But that really does concern me that we live in sort of segmented that society is more segmented now and that we don't understand each other as well because we don't talk to each other.

Everything news is sort of oppositional.

People stake out, you know, I'm conservative or I'm liberal, so I listen to this or I listen to that and you don't have to listen to the other guy's point of view.

And you develop, no matter what your beliefs are, you develop a sort of more muscular view of the world, a stronger view if you learn about lots of different things, your own beliefs, you can express them better if you're made to defend them, you know, or you or you're confronted by somebody else's particular point of view.

That's that's really my biggest concern in the media right now.

While reporting balanced news and today's political climate can be challenging, Michelle has built her career around achieving that ideal, and her talent for storytelling was clear from the beginning.

After college, she worked for some of the biggest news publications in the country and in 1993, she was hired as a correspondent for ABC News.

Her near-decade worth of experience at ABC earned her an Emmy and a Peabody Award for her coverage of the 911 terrorist attacks and also gave her the experience needed for the transition to her role as co-host of All Things Considered.

Let's talk about NPR.

And I know you're on a break now from All Things Considered, but how does it work?

How Who chooses your stories?

How much of the research is done by you and Robert and Melissa, and how much do you have assistants in the staff who help you?

Do you sit around the table every week?

Every day.

I'm so curious as to how that comes to be, because you do have 2 hours, which is wonderful in terms of getting the news out.

But 2 hours is a long time to fill.

It is there is an assumption at NPR that we have this great big, huge staff, and when people come to visit us, they are astonished that how small it really is.

We row very hard because we are under-resourced.

We do not have a staff or resources that are commensurate with the size of our audience.

Robert, Melissa and I are now Audie, while I'm on sabbatical, while my husband is doing his political work this year, Audie CORNISH is filling in for a year.

We all do a lot of our own research.

We all do a lot of our own writing.

If we're doing interviews, we get help from producers.

But a lot of what you hear in the order of the questions in the background is something that we put together.

And because we're on the air every day at four, it's a very you work in the business, you understand it's a really early deadline.

And so we have to it's like the equivalent of a sprint every day to make sure that all of that that we're considering all things before for.

And if you have to back that up really before three, because you have to go in the studio and do your billboards and everything like that.

So it's it's it's it is I've worked in many jobs in journalism.

I've worked in some of the best newsrooms in the country.

God, you know, Our Lady of the editorial has been very good to me.

This is the hardest job I've ever had.

I mean, you really have to row very hard.

And it all starts in the morning with a big editorial meeting and people just throw out stories and we talk about, you know, the big stories that we know we have to do that day.

But it's 2 hours and every hour has four segments A, B, C, and D, So we also talk about the C and D segments and where you sort of shift down a little bit and what kind of stories we want to we want to take on in that segment.

And the thing that really struck me is that producers, whether they be senior or whether they be junior producers, interns who just showed up like a day or two ago are there and they're throwing stories out.

I want to put a story idea on the table.

Then you have to you have to defend it.

You have to support it.

You have to explain why you think it needs to, you know, deserves time.

Who you would talk to, how you would tackle that story.

And we want to do a particular piece.

Where's the interview?

You know, how do we find that person?

How do you support that?

And sometimes the stuff is just silly, but it's all right because you need sort of a moment of joy like that.

And and, you know, to balance out the news and I thought, this is unlike anything I've ever been.

And it's a world of yes, it's it's how ideas get batted around and they they shift and they morph, but they turn into something that really makes you think and that you wind up sort of fighting and talking about after you've read that.

That's part of the impact of NPR as people think, Oh, yeah, I heard this a really interesting story on NPR, and that's how that happens, is it's it's an idea that gets sort of honed through careful conversation and it starts in that.

It was these types of conversations that started.

Michel On the path to writing her first book, In The Grace of Silence, she unearths some startling truths about her own family, secrets that had been buried for decades and never spoken about.

But this wasn't the story that Michelle had planned to tell.

So you are now an accomplished author.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

2010 The Grace of Silence came out and it didn't start.

It is a memoir, but it didn't start that way.

You know.

What was the impetus for writing the book initially?

I originally wanted to write a book about how Americans were talking and thinking about race.

I was just telling myself in a series of very interesting conversations in the run up to and in the wake of the election of President Barack Obama, America's first African-American president.

And I thought it would be an interesting time to sort of take the pulse on the nation's discussion about race.

And what happened is I, I started listening, trying to listen carefully to discussions, you know, wherever I went and traveling and and actually trying to eavesdrop on that conversation.

And I started to hear a very interesting conversation about race close to home, something the elders in my family were sharing, stories they'd never shared before.

And I realized that they had been holding on to secrets that they had seen much but said little.

They had lived through the roughest periods of the civil, um, the pre civil rights era of Jim Crow America and that they didn't much talk about it.

I always knew, you know, what that was like and I knew my parents probably had experiences with it.

But when the story started to spill out, I realized that I was really writing the wrong book.

I mean, among the things I discovered is that my father, postal worker very affable man, and yet he had something happen to him early in his life that made me realize how extraordinary that was, that he had this really optimistic attitude because as a young man, he had been shot by a police officer in Birmingham, Alabama, when he was attempting to enter a public building where black veterans like him were gathering to learn as much as they could about the Constitution, because if you wanted to vote, even though you had participated in the fight for democracy overseas, if you wanted to participate in American democracy and vote, exercise your right to vote.

In Birmingham, Alabama, at the time you had to pass a test.

You had to prove that if you were a man of color, you had to prove that you understood or could recite the US Constitution.

And so the veterans basically said, game on.

If we have to know about the Constitution, we're going to take these classes and learn as much about the Constitution as we can.

And my father was trying to enter that building.

A police officer tried to stop him and a scuffle ensued and he wound up being shot in his leg.

And he never had talked about it.

His five brothers all knew about it.

Of course, they all left Birmingham shortly after this to move up north to Chicago to get out of that city.

They never talked about it with their kids, this wide diaspora of cousins that I had.

Some are still in Birmingham, many of them elsewhere in the country.

Now, usually in the Midwest up north, none of them talked about it.

So I realized there was this vast conspiracy of silence in the family that everybody stopped talking about it.

Dad never told me or my sisters.

He never even told my mom.

In all the years of marriage, he had never shared this with her.

And what I discovered is that that was not unique, that there were many people who had similar experiences, whose family members experienced things that were deeply painful, not always violence, but often things that rob them of their respect, sometimes their dignity, sometimes their life.

And the family stopped talking about it, in part because it was painful, but largely because they wanted the next generation to have a clear path forward and they didn't want to fill up their pockets with all these stories of pain and and terrible things that happen about America because they wanted them to succeed in America.

And it's harder to succeed in America if you grow up with this sort of jaundiced view of what America used to be.

And so that's why I called the book The Grace of Silence.

I realized that I was writing the wrong book.

I had to explore more about my family's story, and it wound up being an opportunity to learn more about America in American history, in the sort of pockets of American history that we talk about in the civil rights moment, but less about the sort of everyday stories that people experienced on the road to integration and diversity.

And, you know, you refer to it as a memoir.

For me, it was an accidental memoir.

It was not the book that I set out to write, but it was the book that I had to write.

So now, as you're raising your own children, what lesson is learned in that?

You know, I think you probably attempted to talk about race and to enter a discussion about that.

It seems like you've entered a discussion much more, you know, of a journey about how the importance of your history shapes your future.

You know, how how do you relate that to your own kids as you as you move forward?

Well, it's the conundrum my family didn't share some of these stories because they wanted us to saw because they didn't want us to be weighed down by tales of, well, I think it's beneficial to share some of these stories, at least in my family, with my kids, because I want them to be grounded.

You know, I might not want to put boulders in their pockets to weigh them down, but I putting little pebbles or as I say, pearls of wisdom in their pockets is okay because they'll be grounded.

They know where they came from.

Knowing what we know about what my dad's life was like in Birmingham, Alabama, will perhaps help them understand that they should not take what they see around them in America today for granted that they have friends who come from all kinds of backgrounds, that they can eat where they want and sleep where they want.

When we go on the road that they can dream of doing big things and not have to worry about running afoul of laws that say this is where you can only be educated, this is where you can live, that they will never, ever take that for granted.

But I hope the other lesson that they take from this is that when bad things happen to them in life because they will they will face adversity at some point, maybe not the kind that my parents faced, but everybody does.

And when that happens, it doesn't need to define them that you know, that you can get past this and it doesn't need to define you that you need to demonstrate that word grace.

Again, you need to demonstrate grace and how you deal with success, but also how you deal with failure and how you deal with adversity.

And I hope that the lessons from my father's life, even though he kept those stories to himself, that those stories now that they're made public and I'm able to share them, will shape my own kids lives and will shape their point of view.

And I think if my father had lived long enough that he may have experienced the same thing that all these other elders in my family did when they were in this period of sudden disinhibition, shedding of stories.

And I think a lot of that was because of this moment in America where suddenly we're sending a black man to the White House.

Really for them that that uncapped or uncorked something and all these stories started to come out.

If my father had lived long enough to see that day, I think he would have been sharing some of these stories as well.

Well, it's obvious why you're on a show called All Things Considered, and we'll be waiting with bated breath for you to return to that show, but are excited to see the other things that you produce and report on for NPR.

In the meantime, thank you for being with us.

Thanks for having me.