Jemele Hill details ‘tremendous amount of growth’ in Raleigh as N&O reporter in new memoir

Before Jemele Hill became one of the faces of ESPN and had her name spoken by two sitting presidents, she was simply a college graduate with a career decision to make.

Hill weighed two offers after completing her degree at Michigan State. She could stay in her comfort zone and take a two-year internship at her hometown newspaper, the Detroit Free Press.

Or she could take a calculated risk and move to North Carolina, where she didn’t have a support system in place. The internship offered by The News & Observer was only three months, but if she performed well she’d have a pretty good chance of being hired.

Hill bet on herself and moved to Raleigh in the spring of 1997. It was one of many pivotal moments in her professional career that Hill writes about in her new memoir, “Uphill,” which was released Tuesday.

“They say sometimes ignorance is bliss, because you don’t know the decision you’re making,” Hill told The N&O. “But I look back on my time in Raleigh very fondly and it’s one of the places where I worked where I had a tremendous amount of growth as a professional.”

‘Lessons of growth’

Hill parlayed that internship into her first full-time job in sports and worked at The N&O for almost two years. During that time, she wrote her first award-winning story as a professional.

The N.C. Press Association recognized Hill with its best sports feature award for a story on Fayetteville native Mandy Garcia — the first woman to attend The Citadel on an athletic scholarship — and the challenges she faced during her freshman year as a cross country runner.

“I had some of my best times in Raleigh and it’s funny because I look back at some of my more dim witted professional mistakes, which also happened in Raleigh,” Hill said. “It was so many lessons of growth that happened there so it will always have a special place for me.”

Although her stay wasn’t very long, it was one of several examples in the book where Hill bet on herself and had no regrets in doing so.

“I know it was kind of risky to turn down two years of guaranteed employment versus three months,” Hill said. “But really what sold it was the type of paper that Raleigh was and reading it, I just enjoyed a lot of the writers who wrote for them. And also looking at the staff — I can’t speak to what the staff looks like now — but it was extremely diverse then. And there was a collection of Black writing talent in particular that I thought was really outstanding, and very different from what you might see throughout the rest of the industry. So there was a lot of things that pulled me to Raleigh.”

‘Is this real life?’

Following her time in Raleigh, Hill returned to her home state to cover Michigan State football and men’s basketball for the Free Press. From there, she would carve out a space as a respected voice covering sports, first as a columnist at the Orlando Sentinel, then at ESPN.com.

Her tenure at ‘The Worldwide Leader in Sports’ moved her from writing to the broadcast side. And she went from being known in sports circles to being known nationally as the co-host of “Numbers Never Lie,” which later became “His and Hers,” with Michael Smith. The pair eventually became the lead anchors of ESPN’s flagship SportsCenter show at 6 p.m.

Never setting out to be famous, Hill said it was a surreal experience when she met President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House.

“The first thing President Obama said to me was, ‘Hey ... from my favorite morning show,’” Hill said. “And the first lady said, ‘I watch you all the time and I love the way you give it to those men.’ My soul probably left my body at that point like, is this real life?”

The second sitting president to know her by name wasn’t as thrilling of an experience. Hill sparked controversy when she tweeted in 2017 that President Donald Trump was a white supremacist.

In the resulting fallout, he openly lobbied for ESPN to fire Hill. She did eventually leave ESPN on her own terms, but she joked two presidents were enough.

“Let’s just say at this moment I’m really happy that Joe Biden probably doesn’t know who I am,” Hill said.

Walking in ‘confidence of betting on myself’

Hill’s book isn’t just about her career. She details personal pains of watching her mother battle a drug addition spurred by an abusive past, the triumphs of seeing her get sober and how they would later clash ideologically over her mother identifying as conservative and voting for Trump.

There are many moments of levity too, like Hill describing an argument with a former boyfriend that began over what brand of jelly to buy at the grocery store. And her proclaiming, “The Free Press don’t raise no punks,” before taking shots.

“I came into it with the intention of being entirely transparent,” Hill said. “Of being as open and honest as possible about myself, about my past and my present because I feel when you write a memoir that people can sniff when you’re not being real.”

Hill’s authenticity is part of what has made her stand out and why she has no intentions of slowing down. She has her own podcast, “Jemele Hill Unbothered” where she interviews some of the biggest names in entertainment, and started a podcast network through her partnership with Spotify to empower the voices of Black women. Hill also owns a production company and is an executive producer on an upcoming documentary on Colin Kaepernick that will be out next year. And she still writes as a contributor to The Atlantic.

“A lot of people felt like if you left ESPN you were walking off the edge of the earth,” Hill said. “We see that media is much more expansive than when people had that thought process. So now I think over the last 10-15 years of my career, I’ve been able to walk in that confidence of betting on myself.”