The Evolution Will Be Televised

How A Single Question Shook Me Into the Future (And The Past)

I’ve spent the last few weeks out in the field working on a special documentary project (stay tuned). It’s my first independent production—and my first Executive Producer credit. It’s also the first time I’ve assembled and led a crew that looks like me. Nearly every key role is held by a Black creative: our director, director of photography, associate producer, second camera operator, camera assistant, and production assistants. (Big shoutout to our lone white sound guy!)

At this stage of my career, and life for that matter, firsts are rare. I’ve been around the block a few times and it often feels like I’ve seen it all and done it all. But this experience has been a breath of fresh air.

And these firsts, and this project, are fitting. Because this project is deeply personal. It connects me back to an earlier version of myself as a man and a reporter. It’s the kind of story that puts into stark relief how much I’ve grown—and how unexpectedly—I’ve evolved in life and career.

A question over lunch the other day brought it all home for me. My camera assistant, a cool young brother from Trenton, posed a question that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

“Are you still a reporter?”

That question hit me like a ton of bricks.

When we first met, he lit up when I told him that one of my earliest newspaper jobs was as a police reporter at the Trentonian, a scrappy little tabloid in Jersey’s capital city. We shared a moment of joy and joint admiration for a familiar and legendary local name, L.A. Parker, a longtime Black columnist at the paper.

“I grew up reading him!” he said, beaming.

I cut my teeth in that newsroom and in that city—chasing cops and chasing stories. Being a police reporter gave me license to embed myself in the city’s most challenged neighborhoods. Cops, crime and killers were the assignment, but I was after something more: humanity. I’d cover the tragedies and triumphs alike. And yes, more of the former than the latter. But the way we live and die, you can’t have one without the other.

In Trenton, I turned what I’d learned in college news reporting courses into craft. This was reporting. This was journalism. This was a dream job come true. The only goal I truly ever had coming out of college (which took me a very long time) was to get paid to write. But the paycheck was always secondary. I took all my hopes and dreams and incessant gut-burning to tell our stories and syphoned it through the medium of news writing.

The writing part was the loud part.

A year and some change later, I got another police beat gig—this time at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. More cops, more killers, more community. Then Katrina came and punched a hole through the city and let the flood do its best to drown it.

It didn’t. That city is too strong and too buoyant to go out like that.

The people of New Orleans were warped by the flood, but not whipped by it. Bent but not broken. I’ll save the tragic recollections of post-Katrina New Orleans for another stack. But I witnessed enough corruption, brutality, and institutional betrayal to fill a trilogy.

If I went into The Times-Picayune as a reporter, I came out a journalist. I went from capturing scenes and quotes to understanding the systemic forces that shape what we see. I began connecting the dots—not just documenting events but naming the structures behind them.

From there, I moved to The New York Times, which gave me a masters level education on writing and reporting. I covered Brooklyn and Harlem for the Metro Desk and got my first foray into political coverage as a member of the team covering Albany in the aftermath of the Gov. Eliot Spitzer sex scandal. About four and a half years later I made the leap to the pioneering digital newsroom at Huffington Post when they were bolstering their news operation from opinion to real deal journalism with real deal journalists. Then came Trayvon Martin. And as the world quaked in his death, so did the ground beneath my career. I was on the very front of that tragedy and I used every skill I picked up along the way, and every natural instinct I had, to contextualize what it meant when Black boys die young and violently at the hands of people who don’t value our lives. I found myself on national TV, trying to make sense of his killing. That coverage brought me to MSNBC, where I wrote for digital and made occasional TV appearances on the weekend panel shows. Then came Ferguson and Michael Brown Jr. More earth shaking. More rebellion. More trying to make sense of the senseless. That’s when I became a full-time on-camera journalist.

Since then, I’ve covered elections and voters and race and power and politics and poverty and policing and protest. I’ve done it in studio and in the streets, in hour-long specials and in front of crowds. And for the last five years, I’ve done it through the lens of audio, as the host of Into America. There’s something so special, so intimate, about the relationship between podcast host and podcast listener. Your voice and their ears is a beautiful dance.

From newspapers to digital to television to documentaries to podcasts, I’ve evolved as a journalist in ways I couldn’t have imagined. And I’m still adding new wrinkles. I’ve been around the block and I’m back again, still learning and still growing.

I’m executive producing this new project and serving as its host. And on September 9, 2025, I’ll publish my first book, A Thousand Ways to Die—a chronicle of how guns, racial injustice, and systemic violence have shaped and scarred Black America. Of all my titles, author may be the one I’m most in awe of.

So when that young brother asked me, “Are you still a reporter?” I immediately said yes.

I told him that I’d be back on MSNBC more regularly starting in August, after a hiatus and reconsidering of my role there. When I return to the network I won’t be doing what I’ve been doing for the better part of a dozen years. I won’t be a correspondent in the traditional sense. I’ll be contributing in new ways, taking everything I’ve learned and accomplished over my more than two decades in the business, and showing up on your screens and in your feeds with more agency and more nuance.

I told him yes, I’m still a reporter, but the truth is, that title doesn’t fully hold me anymore. It never really did. I’m still that and so much more. I’m pushing myself to find new ways to tell our stories. To reach new audiences. To explore new platforms. To claim new heights of creative and professional freedom. Because right now, the stakes are too high not to. This moment, with democracy and freedom and the truth in peril, requires us to show up as our fullest and most free selves.

That young brother’s question came at a cosmically perfect time and place. The day was April 22, 20 years to the day I first landed in New Orleans. A day that changed my life and the trajectory of my career. Without that moment I wouldn’t be here writing this to you now.

So, am I still a reporter?

Yes. But I’ve never been just that.

Stay tuned for what comes next.

Coming September 9: A Thousand Ways to Die

I'm thrilled to share that my first book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, will be released on September 9. This deeply personal narrative explores the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America, weaving together history, reportage, and my own family's story.

You can pre-order your copy now.