I am honestly at a loss for words to explain the amount of appreciation and respect I have for Michael Graff. Growing up in Maryland, Michael found his passion for writing and storytelling through the love of baseball. Over the past few years in Charlotte, Michael has been sharing with us the stories that show this city in a different light for us to gain knowledge and perspective on how to move the process one way and that is, forward. I had the distinct pleasure to sit down with Michael last week and ask how he is doing:
“I’m in a thoughtful space right now — we’re doing well, we’re very fortunate. I try to feel gratitude every day and I try to remind myself to be grateful every day. It’s a strange time. Mostly this year the question I have every day is “what kind of world is my son going to have?” I thought about the future before, but he was born on March 6th and that changed the way I think about the future. He is such a blank slate, he doesn’t know that any of this stuff is happening. All he knows is that he laughs really hard when his Mom walks in the room or when I whistle or make monkey sounds — he is just so sweet. Every day when I look away from him and I look at my phone and I see everything that is not sweet with the world. I want him to hold onto that as long as he can.
To be able to do that we have to make a better world for him, we have to make a better Charlotte for him, we have to make a better community here, for him. We have to make sure every kid gets what he or she needs.
I don’t know, like “how am I doing?” wrestling with those questions, I’ve been drifting toward stories about father and sons this year, I’ve gotten to know the family of Justin Carr, who was shot and killed in 2016 during the protests outside of the Omni, and I’m sitting there that day watching his four-year-old run around and he wasn’t born on the night he was shot. I just looked at him and thought, 'We want you to have a better fate than your Dad did, and we don’t want your Dad to have died in vain.' So what's the point of all of these protests and stuff that we are covering? Well, the point is to make the world a better place for the next generation. It’s not about me — that's our job. I spend a lot of time thinking, in terms of five years, ten years, fifteen years.
And I think that way at Charlotte Agenda. Are we perfect every day? No — we are not even close to perfect. Do we make mistakes that I cringe at? Yeah, we do. We are also moving fast. We publish five to six stories a day with a small staff. Occasionally we are going to mess up but what I always try to check is: are we closer to our goals that we want five years down the line? I want to leave a media organization that hopefully, my son can read one day.
This year has been a year that caused me to think and be reflective and think long term rather than “what am I doing this weekend?” which I did for a long time and was a lot of fun. And the Agenda serves a lot of readers who think like that too. We are making stuff for a wide range of people. The core audience of the Agenda are millennials. You’re trying to do a lot of different things for different types of people. It looks weird to people sometimes and I get this. You know, I’ll spend ten days in tent city working on a story about homelessness and then I work with an organization that publishes a 5 million dollar home listing. People ask, 'How can you do both things?' and my response is that we are holding a mirror up to Charlotte. We didn’t make Charlotte this way; Charlotte is this way. That's a totally different thing. What you’re frustrated with is actually Charlotte and you should work to fix it. It’s on us but if we present something to you that you don’t like then go out and fix it. If you are upset that we have 125 tents outside of uptown then what have you done today to help make sure those folks have a roof over their head? Living in Charlotte, one of the things I have learned is that when people are giving something, accept their generosity wherever they are in their generosity. I learned this from @gregjackson704. He’s said, “Look, some people want to just give food to our kids, some people just want to give money and that’s fine, you never turn away generosity.”
A few months back, Michael spent some time in tent city to talk to those who are having a hard time finding affordable housing. For me, someone who is fairly new to Charlotte and the issues at hand, it opened my eyes to the amount of work we need to do as a community to make Charlotte equal for all of us. With all of the stories he has written over the years about strong issues and important topics, I wanted to see if he saw any change from us, the community, to help change the narrative:
“I think we have more people trying to make a difference, we have more good work being done now than when I moved here eight years ago. We are in a better position to help those people in need. The challenge is the city has grown in other ways. The city is responding to people who are making 80 to 100 thousand dollars a year. The developers are building things that might not serve the interests of people who have lived here and can’t get ahead. Anywhere you have growth, you’ll have challenges. In 2016, during the protests, I covered them and they were some of the most profound evenings of my life. Most of the change has come after that year. It was a big millennial movement on council. A lot of positive change but it’s not keeping up with the need right now. We need to make sure when we build, that we aren’t pushing people out. It takes political will to make sure that you’re not just putting affordable housing in neighborhoods where there has always been affordable housing and make sure you put it in the most valuable land in the city. We need to be better at that.”
I loved that he mentioned Greg Jackson. When I connected with Greg earlier this year, he said something that stuck with me: “Let your passion lead you to your purpose, and when you bring that work to the community, it changes legacy.” Michael touched a little more on that topic of what Greg said:
“We all have a role, and you can't do everything that everyone else is doing because that's the thing to do right now. The best protest I’ve been to and the most meaningful ones I’ve been to, they have leaders who knew their role in running protests. Kass Ottley has a role in this city; she’s amazing. Queen City Nerve has a role in this city. We all need to recognize that. If you don’t want to march, you can do other things. You don’t need to march to move equity in Charlotte. A friend of mine, James Ford, I didn’t see him at a single march. But he is on the state board of education and he’s trying to figure out how to change the history curriculum for generations of students. He’s making a huge difference, but that doesn’t diminish what the marchers are doing, so we all have roles to play. Find what you’re passionate about. Just do your part.
I asked Michael if he can share his journey on how he became a writer and how he landed in Charlotte:
“I grew up in Maryland, my Mom was a first-grade teacher, my Dad was a charter fisherman on the Chesapeake. I am a big Baltimore Orioles fan and we went once a year because it was always an extravagant cost. I found out that people went to the games for free and they were called sportswriters. I set out to be a sportswriter.
I was a sportswriter at a small-town newspaper in Virginia covering high schools and the Washington Football Team. I moved to Rocky Mount, NC, and covered high school sports and the ACC. Then after, I moved to the Fayetteville Observer, where I was a sportswriter covering college sports. At 28 years old I missed a lot of my nights and weekends. I moved over to project reporting and news and that's when I became more of a longer-form feature writer covering mostly military issues at the time. (Fayetteville is home to Fort Bragg.) It was the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when I was there, and just the world of trouble from people being deployed six or seven times, I would write stories to help build the community around those issues.
After that I freelanced for a little bit then I got a job at Our State Magazine as an editor and that's where my career really changed. It was a lot of fun; I traveled around North Carolina for four years or so and interviewed people all over the state and fell in love with North Carolina all over again. This is home now and I care about it deeply. Then an opportunity came to lead Charlotte Magazine as the editor there and I came to Charlotte in 2013.
Charlotte was the biggest place I ever lived. Charlotte just wrapped me up when I got here. I saw it as a stepping stone to go into Washington or New York and I started to get offers to interview but I didn’t want to go and leave Charlotte. I’m glad I didn’t because I met my wife here and now, this is home. We get to see her family; we have her mom and cousins and uncles all here, and it’s just a lot of fun.
When I came here I’m like 'Wait, there is stuff to do every night here.' I love live music and sitting there with a beer with live music I can do that any night of the week. I still cling to that very rural, peaceful upbringing but I still get wide-eyed about Charlotte. I like to see Charlotte as this wide-open place of possibility. I don’t like it when people in Charlotte accept things that are wrong that they will be permanently wrong. I see this as a land of possibility and that WE can make the city that we want to make. Don’t stop because something is bad.”
Any takeaways from this year that you will take with you going forward?
“I won’t take concerts for granted anymore. I won’t take eating at a restaurant for granted. I probably won’t shake hands with anyone the same way. Business-wise, Charlotte Agenda was doing very well before this but it got scary for a while there. Was I going to lose my job? And I feel for everyone who has lost theirs.
This is always what I’ve known: You never know where someone is in his or her story when you pass them on the greenway when you pass them in the car. If someone gives me the finger on the road, I always try to think “I wonder what happened to them before that moment?” Then you think maybe something terrible happened before that. This year has really hammered that home. You just don’t know who's dealing with what. So I'm just going to keep telling meaningful stories to hopefully improve someone's life. I want to keep telling stories that will make people see the city differently.
