Zahra Burton’s metamorphosis

HER co-workers describe her as warm and friendly on the outside, but once you get beneath the surface, they say a metamorphosis takes place.

They say she’s fearless and doesn’t back down, but she’s also thoughtful, fair, passionate about injustice and social issues and journalism — her first love — which she takes seriously.

Born and raised in Kingston, Zahra Burton recalls growing up with two working parents who saw her fit for either a paediatrician or hotelier after she did a hotel internship one summer.

Not fully convinced, Burton completed a bachelor’s degree in marketing and international business from Florida International University and landed a job in Miami as a journalist for a year.

It was here that she was sold on the career path that would later chart her course through life. But what Burton didn’t know was that in order to make it in this area, she would have to be resilient because the competition was tough, especially after she was laid off in the dot com bust in 2000 and had to return to her homeland.

“I wasn’t born in the States like my sisters were and I had a lot of problems. I had to come back because of immigration reasons, as at that point there were no jobs.

The economy was failing and I had to come back,” she said. “I was depressed as I really loved what I was doing in journalism in Miami at the time.”

After going through her period of depression, Burton told All Woman that her turning point came in 2001, when she decided to pick up the pieces and start again, after reading Live Your Dream by Les Brown, a book her mother gave her to help her regain her confidence.

Ready to take on the world, she also entered the Miss Jamaica Universe competition that year, which she won, gaining the required personal boost.

In the midst of regaining her enthusiasm, Burton also worked as a reporter at Television Jamaica, but she admits that the fire to work as an international journalist kept blazing and while on the local scene, she focused her energy on achieving what she really wanted.

“Michael Sharpe hired me at TVJ to be a journalist and I was grateful for that opportunity. He taught me a lot about the field and gave me a lot of assignments. But I knew I wanted more and I got more.

I went for it — to become an international journalist,” she said. And so, after completing a master of arts in broadcast journalism in 2004 from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, Burton reemerged on the international scene for a short stint as a field producer for Making It, a Nelson Davis Productions show aired on KTLA Channel 5. But her true test of stamina would come when she began working at Bloomberg in New York, initially doing what she describes as the “worst job ever”.

“At the time at Bloomberg the morning team was considered the stronger team and the afternoon team was considered the weaker team. After my internship they hired me on the morning team as a production assistant, where I rolled the teleprompter, did graphics and a bag of boring stuff and I just wanted to get the hell out of that job,” she said. “I hated rolling that teleprompter so much. It was the worst job of my life.

It’s mindless, you’re just moving your fingers for hours on end. There were days I wanted to just race through the prompter to the end of the show, and the anchor there would complain bitterly about me because I wasn’t rolling it right,” Burton said. As a result she was demoted to the afternoon team and admits that it’s the best thing that happened to her.

“I started interacting with regular people and doing additional tasks and they realised what I was bringing to the table, which was more than rolling a prompter. It was the beginning of my advancement.

I moved from production assistant of the afternoon team to being an assignment desk producer — where I did a lot of logistics — finding people for interviews in a matter of seconds or minutes, and a TV reporter,” she said.

Burton added that the experience she gained there has helped her in her job today as principal and founder of her show 18° North and company Global Reporters for the Caribbean. However, launching out was no easy walk for Burton, and she says her determination, which she describes as a natural trait, had to take the forefront.

“For season two I had no money, my investors asked how I made it through the last year, but somehow I found a way. I am very resourceful and I do it honestly.

I go out and hustle and find money to pay people to do the show,” she said. “I am on a faith walk — a different kind. I believe in God and I have a belief in myself as well that if push I’m going to perform and if I have no choice I’m to perform and succeed.

That’s how I see it, it’s not a choice, but a decision. “My strategy is, I corner myself, which is a very different kind of frustrating strategy for most people.

Most have an exit plan — ABC — and they know how they’re going to get in and how they’re going to get out, but sometimes I just go for it and I corner myself specifically because I know I will have no choice but to perform, that’s my strategy in life. If I set my benchmark very high and put myself in a situation where I have no choice but to perform, I will perform,” she said.

Burton, who was also named as a fellow in investigative journalism at the Logan Symposium at the University of California at Berkley, enjoys amusement parks and dancing up a storm whenever she gets the chance.

She is also intolerant and impatient of incompetence and mediocrity, and says her wish is to see much more being done in the area of investigative journalism. “Stop applauding mediocrity and patting ourselves on the back. We have a lot of work to do.

People believe 18° North is well funded, but that’s a farce. We work with few resources, both financial and human. We tend to think a lot about the daily news cycle, but we don’t think enough about what our jobs are as journalists, which is to make an impact in society and change things.

If there’s that appetite from a journalist, an editor should hone those skills and personalities and don’t let it go to waste. Once you squash it, you’re killing a dream and what could be.

Enable younger reporters to think differently and talk to you about their stories. To journalists, don’t let anyone stop you, if you have an appetite for something, relish the fact that you’re feeling ambitious about a story and just do it,” she said.

She added that at this juncture in her life, it is the time for her to do the things that are important now and those are the things that matter. She credits her friend Ruth for the thought that regardless of the things that happen, it’s about being the most honest to herself. “I’m now comfortable with who I am and I’m not going to be someone else,” she said. “What means the most to me is when people understand and recognise my work.

It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. I wish more people would be doing more, that it would be a more competitive media landscape. Be inspired to do more. We have so much to do. We are the ones sitting in a golden opportunity chair and we should be hungry to change what we can in our own little way.”