Soledad O’Brien, the headline keynote speaker for the 2024 Soirée Women’s Leadership Symposium in Little Rock, has worn numerous hats throughout her career in journalism. An award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist, O’Brien credits her success to never backing down from telling a story that deserves to be told.
“Sometimes it actually requires a fair amount of fighting,” O’Brien told the sold-out SWLS crowd. “Every time I would get cut off at the knees in some capacity, something kind of remarkable would happen — I would get stronger.”
O’Brien demonstrated what she calls “the tight smile,” which is the expression she gives when she gets a “no” and must push back harder to cover a story she really believes in.
“My tight smile in a lot of ways was me taking a breath so that the intractable thing that was being said didn’t get inside of me and kill my confidence to actually make it happen,” O’Brien said.
She acknowledged that many women in the workplace today are also faced with these situations and encouraged women to address these issues through civil but persuasive conversations.
“It’s a conversation that says, ‘Listen, I’m not giving in, but I insist that you hear me out on why this is a good project to do,’” O’Brien said. “And then if I got the green light, I would make sure that the performance was top tier.”
One of the stories she fought for that ended up being a huge success was her CNN special, “Beyond Bravery: The Women of 9/11,” which focused on the rarely covered experience of female first responders.
“Everybody else was doing the same thing, and we just said, ‘You know, there’s a whole bunch of people that you’ve never actually heard of or maybe never even thought about their contributions, and we have a really compelling story about them.’” O’Brien said. “In the end, our piece beat out everyone else’s, and I wasn’t surprised. We told a different story.”
O’Brien said she took that same attitude into the business world when she founded Soledad O’Brien Productions, where she continues to produce documentaries and series on topics like youth incarceration, police brutality, veterans with PTSD and the opioid epidemic. O’Brien also anchors and produces the political magazine program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien,” where she shines a light on political matters that don’t often garner attention on other networks.
“When I decided I would start my own company, I started leveraging what I did know,” O’Brien said. “Searching for information and asking awesome questions. I knew that what I personally wanted to do was elevate voices of people who often don’t get a lot of coverage.”
Learning how to monetize without a large platform like CNN backing her was intimidating at first, but O’Brien didn’t let that stop her.
“I dove in, eyes open, ready to lead and challenge the issues I knew I would come up against, knowing that all those other challenges that had come before, I had navigated my way through,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien said her success is just a part of the trend for women in business as she shared some interesting statistics. According to the American Express “State of Women-owned Businesses Report,” between 2014-2019, the number of women-owned businesses increased by 21%. Research by the National Association of Women Business Owners found that women-owned businesses reported higher revenues in 2020 compared to the previous year despite the challenges posed by the pandemic.
“The world needs more women in leadership,” O’Brien said. “Women who are committed to listening and learning and bringing great ideas to life even when we run up against obstacles, and even when we’re embarrassed or humiliated. I learned when I lost. I grew. I pushed ahead and I created things that I’m proud of.”