Interview: Iliana Limón Romero, LA Times Sports Editor, on How a Diverse Newsroom Leads to Better Journalism

In this episode, Brenda Elsey talks with LA Times Sports Editor Iliana Limón Romero, the first Latina to head a major newspaper’s sports' section, as well as the chair of the Association for Women in Sports Media and co-chair of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Sports Task Force. They discuss how she got to her position, how having diverse voices in the newsroom changes how and what stories are told and how to best serve the reader in the changing media landscape.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It's the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Brenda Elsey, and today I'm thrilled to be interviewing Iliana Limón Romero. She is the LA Times sports editor. She is also an assistant managing editor there. She also serves as co-chair for the sports task force of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and chair of the Association for Women in Sports Media. Iliana, welcome to Burn It All Down. We're so excited to have you.

Iliana: Thank you so much. I'm a long time listener, and this is such a huge honor. 

Brenda: I think I'd been following you a while in Orlando when you landed this job, which…This is a big deal. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to this place?

Iliana: I don't know. [Brenda laughs] No, I'm just kidding. I do know, but it is a big deal and it is a little startling. I'm very grateful for opportunities and grateful for this chance and the faith and trust in me to be…I’ve been one of the first many times over since I moved into leadership within sports journalism, and so this is just another one of those firsts, but it's a pretty big one and a meaningful one and one that I can see not only has an impact for me in the community that we cover, but also for a ton of journalists and athletes who have come to me through the years and said it really mattered to them that I was in that position. People who aspire to work in journalism, that it really mattered to them, that they could see themselves and see a path. And that’s, whoa, a lot to carry and a lot to feel like, you know, you want to do a great job and open those doors. So, in terms of my journey, I will go through this as quickly as possible.

I'm from El Paso, Texas. I went to the University of New Mexico. I started off in news and had a chance to work as a reporter at a bunch of different publications through internships before really getting settled at the Albuquerque Tribune, a delightful afternoon paper that tried amazing things and just really nurtured great journalists and great writers. Just a beautiful place to be. And then a couple of weeks before football season, they had a beat reporter – Albuquerque loves women's basketball, by the way. So this beat job was you cover University of New Mexico football and women's basketball. That was your full-time job. The women's basketball team was averaging 15,000 fans a game. They were in the top 10 nationally in terms of attendance. So this was like two really big deal beats. And the person quit right before the football season. And I had covered a lot of crime and public safety stuff. It was super heavy, super difficult for years. I'd gone into meth labs. I’d interviewed grieving families, I had done so many different things that were a huge challenge.

And so it felt like a good moment for a change, but there were a lot of people who were like, oh, you're going to do this? That means you can really probably not go back to news if you do this for very long, you're just like done. Like, you're just off in that world and you don't get to come back into leadership roles, you're just making this huge life-altering choice. And I was like, that's ridiculous. [laughs] And fortunately, the industry has kind of caught up to my thinking, because it's been through so many seismic changes in terms of trying to capture audience that a lot of sports leaders have been elevated into leadership roles within newsrooms. And we can soon go over why that's good and bad. [laughter] But the good part is that that meant my career path was really open. I got the opportunity to work as a reporter in Orlando, through a series of relationships that I built with these organizations that you mentioned. I got to know people. That was really important, because University of New Mexico wasn't known for like having a ton of great connections out in the journalism industry.

It was really upon me to like learn to network, and that's not always comfortable for most folks, and actually isn't super comfortable for me either. It's something that like I gear myself up for, but it's not natural for me to talk about myself and put myself in that space. But I was able to do that, and it opened a door to reporting. And then at a certain point, I was really unhappy with a succession of really not great bosses [laughs] who were not wonderful to our entire team for a variety of reasons. They had their own reasons, they had their own challenges, but it just wasn't working. And I felt like I could do it better. So, I decided that I was going to storm the castle. And I immediately ran into a brick wall. [laughs] This was not easy to do, even though we had a bunch of vacancies – our sports editor, our college editor had left. The other editors were kind of spread across different publications within our company in Orlando. And so there was literally no one there for the day to day.

And I went into the managing editor's office and said, I would like to do this, I can just do it on an interim basis until you have people in place. I know I've never done this at a professional level before, but I can help you. And he said, yeah, no, no. We're going to let the sports editor hire their person. So we're not going to do that. I said, you have no one in that corner. Like, there's literally no one. You're borrowing resources from other places. Just let me help you. And it wasn't til, you know, another woman who was an assistant editor at a sister publication said I'm not moving to Orlando for a month until you figure this out. Just let her do this. She's active in the Association for Women in Sports Media and was smart enough to be very vocal in that room. And they're like, oh, okay, fine. So that's how I got in the door. “Okay. Fine.” [laughter] And so I–

Brenda: What a red carpet rolled out for you. Okay. Fine!

Iliana: I know. Right? Okay. Fine. But just for right now. So I juggled two jobs. They did hire that sports editor, but there was no plan for this really huge football section that Orlando does every year. It's like six additions of the sports section that come in all at once. No plan whatsoever. It usually takes six months to do. We did it in three weeks. And at won national awards, like, just by luck and effort and sheer will, we pulled it all together and it did really well. And at the end of that, it was like, okay, you're settled. You're here. And it was time for this person to hire their assistant sports editor to be over colleges. And he asked one of his long-time best friends first. And that person said, no, I don't want to work that hard. [laughter] So, he was like, well, I feel like you earned it. And there was no conversation that this had been offered to anyone else. I knew this because I was a reporter and because everybody in journalism talks, and so I had already heard.

And I just had to make a choice that I've had to make over and over my career, which is you can be fixated on that barrier, or you can just say, cool, I'll take it. I'm in. Because this is where I can make change. This is where I can do something. This is where I can get to the goal. And I will do my very best to focus on my team and the things that I can control and not on the people who are the gatekeepers, who are still at times a little problematic. There’s a mix of things and decision-making. And within journalism, the number one thing, the stressor that I see the most, the most consistent excuse for the lack of inclusivity is that they're afraid to take risks. They're afraid to take risks because there's such great consequences. There's chances that it alters the team chemistry. People are asked to do more with less. And if they have someone who's unsuccessful, it can be hard to get them out. And also, it can be hard to replace them if you lose them.

So, every job in media in general, like, you don't know if you're going to fill it again. So, these are the excuses that longtime people who have been in leadership, who are predominantly are white men, they're looking for people that they feel like they can trust, that they are a known quantity, that they feel like will be successful, will put them in position for success and won't leave them hanging. And so if they don't know journalists of color, if they don’t know women, if they don't know other voices, it's easier to trust the ones they do know. And that is the number one thing that I hear the most. And it was something that right out of the gate, I had to decide that I could either just be so angry and refuse to do it because I had been disrespected, in my opinion, or I could just go and figure out how to do the best in the role, show them that I was always the best option, and reach out to other people and continue to try to open that same door for them.

So, that got me in, and then I plateaued for a while in that assistant role, and it took a long time to get a sports editor opportunity. Not because they didn't think I could, but because there were just corporate issues with instability for my supervisor, who gave me a chance and who I really liked and who had really tried to support me. There was concern that his job might be eliminated if they moved him over to something else. So they kind of kept him in limbo and that was sort of it and sort of not. There is a lot of that in the industry. And then finally I got the role, amazing opportunity. And then not too long after, you know, the Los Angeles Times reached out, which was a big surprise. It was the middle of the pandemic. It was a really hard time, like, personally, for my family, not the ideal time to move across country, lots of things going on, but they said, just listen, just give it a chance. And I did, and it worked out and I was hired as the deputy sports editor to run day to day operations.

And then once my boss moved into a new role, they offered me this opportunity, and I'm the first woman at the Los Angeles Times to be the sports editor. They've never had a woman before, which is a little disappointing, but that's okay. [laughter] I'm thrilled to have the honor. I am the only Latina sports editor at a major US newspaper in the United States, which is very disappointing, and something that I'm working on fixing through the organizations that I work with. And I'm the first Mexican American sports editor at the Los Angeles Times, which is, in the community that's 40% Latino and predominantly Mexican American, that's like a big deal here too as well.

So, I think that the journey had many more twists and turns even than what I described. I've had a ton of allies that helped carry me through that, through those organizations and within newsrooms. I've had a lot of champions and people who have helped me so much, and I've had a ton of really frustrating barriers and setbacks that you just at some point have to decide if you're willing to tolerate what it takes to move past them. But I think that's universal for a lot of women in professions in general. 

Brenda: Yeah. So much of what you described has parallels in other fields – mine too, in academia.

Iliana: 100%.

Brenda: Particularly about informal barriers and the kind of informal obstacles to the success of people of color and women. I don't know which is more shocking, the women or the Latinx. I mean, it comes together, right? I mean, it's just so incredible. Of course it's 40% Latino in Los Angeles and California, which was Mexico. I mean, you're talking about like all these places that were also Mexico. 

Iliana: Yes. [laughs] 

Brenda: Like, it’s been Latino like that forever. Some people might say, oh, “the changing demographic,” which drives me insane about the southwest, right? It's like, I guess like there are more Salvadorans than there used to be. There are more Panamanians than there used to be, but you know, there have been Mexicans there since Mexico existed.

Iliana: First. They were there first. To be clear. [laughs]

Brenda: Yeah! Of course. And it's incredible, on top of it, to then think about fandom and sports in that across the United States, globally, much less within the LA area. So, what types of stories do you think get lost when we don't have gender representation, sexuality, and of course racial diversity in these newsrooms? You know, what kinds of sports stories do we miss?

Iliana: For me, it's class race, gender representation across the board. Like, we've had gatekeepers against class because access to this has been hard. We've had race issues and we've had gender issues and, you know, as much as we've made strides, we have issues in all of those places. What we lose is we lose accurately reflecting the community that we're covering. You know, I do not let my friends and allies, older white male journalists, or, you know, white women or fellow women who were non-black journalists, non-queer journalists, all of those. Like, we don't get to opt out of the conversation. It's not that we're not covering those topics. You have an obligation. It shouldn't just be like, oh, you’re the Latinx journalist, you're just covering all the Latinx issues. We're just gonna put it over there. Not doing that. Although you do bring a powerful voice, nobody gets the opt out of the conversation of accurately and fully representing the community that you're in.

But inherently, based on your experiences, you decide who you interview. You decide the questions that you ask. You decide the framing of those questions. And even well-intended people who don't come from diverse backgrounds don't understand how to ask that array of questions or how to connect and relate and put people in positions to feel comfortable to truly share their stories. And I think aside from public safety issues and aside from just really core health issues, like, people don't necessarily have to come to you. And so I've emphasized to leaders that I've talked to, this is not just important for the quality of your work. This is not just like a community obligation or the right thing to do. This is detrimental to your business interests, because that community will continue to grow and they will just move on without you. They will get their information and they will get their connection through other paths. And eventually you are going to age out, you're going to work your way out of having a spot there. You're going to see diminishing returns.

It's certainly fairness, accuracy, representation of a community, a reflection of the community, but it's also, you know, just truly being indispensable to that community in a way that felt automatic and easy for media outlets in the past that's no longer there. People have so many options. And it's not just like the print product, but even digital options. People are not beholden to cable networks anymore. They stream things. The media has largely been democratized in terms of what people choose to engage with. And even if it's one that you used to have disdain for that maybe doesn't share your journalistic values, that doesn't matter. People are choosing, and they are choosing sometimes in not the most well-informed ways if it's just like biased resources. But you have put them in this position because you have not acknowledged them and reflected their needs. 

Brenda: Is it fair to say we see that parallel in other ways with Latino communities across the US that, you know, even sometimes when we see political affiliations that don't seem on paper to make sense, given what the candidates are saying, there's a way of neglect that just produces a kind of, to some degree, conservativism?

Iliana: Yeah. There's a massive way that conservativism in this country in some ways had preyed upon this idea of the American dream. Like, for example, let's just take something basic like taxes. And so for a while it used to confound people, why would a lot of people who are extremely low-income vote Republican when the Republican party tends to be in favor of, you know, retention of wealth in the classes that exist? That's a strategy, that it would trickle down through their business interests and their business needs. Why would so many low income people do that? Well, they sold the dream. They sold the idea that you can have this, and once you do, you shouldn't share what you have with anyone else. You should make them earn it too. And if you spend in the business world, it will eventually trickle down to jobs and economic impact for others. That was weird to a lot of people. Like, why would I do that?

So if you look at it by the same way through race or gender lenses, it's also the same idea. It's selling this other vision of what's possible and selling them on the idea that they too can be exceptional, and that they don't have to share what's theirs once they get it. And I think it's challenging. And I think there is a lot of negativity. There's a lot of nuance. I think looking at it as one note is challenging. And I think those same class differences that exist within other countries also exist in Latin America. And it's not necessarily people don't vote based entirely solely upon race, and they don't always identify in the ways. They have certain values. The cultural touchstones still exist. So, the single issue voter still exists. And so, yeah, understanding that is essential to, you know, accurately covering things. The other thing is, if you've never targeted anything towards those audiences or provided anything in bilingual versions…

What we saw when I was still in Florida, in south Florida, like, the radio stations are really popular and powerful, Spanish language radio, and they say whatever, and it is as crazy as the darkest corners of the internet. [laughs] So, those things are the only form of news that comes in because media outlets have not been covering or providing as much information, and so a lot of times it's unconventional sources that come through. And like I said, it's whatever version of the narrative that's there is there.

Brenda: So, let's get to language. For many of us in the New York area, it was inexplicable, it continues to confound why the New York Times shut down the Spanish section several years ago. It didn't make sense to me. I didn't understand it. I still don't. What does that landscape look like nationally? And in California right now.

Iliana: Yeah, I think it's, again, a series of executives and marketing people saying we want the Latino market. But what it's like to actually get the Latino market means, again, a very nuanced picture. It's just as fragmented and shifting as the general English speaking American audience. So if you came and said I want to engage and get a lot of eyeballs and put my advertiser in front of the American market, you'd be like, oh, you crazy. Like, how do you reach all of those people? That's a wide range. That's not really targeted. General purpose stuff will not do as well. You have to understand that there's nuances and differences and you're not quite grasping it. Well, that's been the same approach to the Latino market, oftentimes poorly handled, poorly done, in terms of marketing and advocating and sharing.

And as I mentioned, we probably will touch on this when it comes to sports media as well, but the general patterns are that when you have ignored in market for so long, and when you have talked down to a market for so long, when you finally step into the space and invest some resources or do something, a lot of times the audience doesn't have the signal to turn to you or to feel like you should be part of their world, like you should opt in. They've gone to other resources, they've done other things. You're just not a part of their life. So, in order to get enough audience versus the expense, in order to do it, you know, like I said, in a consistent, high quality way, and in order to get advertisers to get behind it, understanding that the audience is smaller than what their outsized expectations are, because it's growing and has to be nurtured, because it just didn't automatically exist, and the misconceptions about this massive Latino demographic.

Well, why hasn't the Latino vote changed everything in this country? Same reason the Latino vote hasn't gotten all behind the Spanish language outlets in this country. It's because they're poorly marketed, haven't been in existence for a long time, and there's just been many challenges along the way. And there are outsized expectations for a return on the investment because they just look at the demographics of this country, not really like who can read, who can pay, who has access, who remembers being mocked by that outlet and doesn't want to, who reads in that particular voice. There are a million dialects within Spanish and some come across poorly. Who can engage and connect with that content? Who's going to be the consistent audience? It's really knowing who you have and what you have. A lot of the projects have suffered from great expense and the lack of understanding of who they're trying to target. 

Brenda: How do you get then to fulfill the outsized expectations when you've got this historically marginalized, neglected audience that you're trying to connect with? Not always even marginalized, as we said, economically or anything like that, but marginalized from the mainstream press. How does a place like the LA Times use sports to try to reach that goal?

Iliana: I think we have honest conversations internally. You have to have people who understand what caused the failure in the past, people who understand what the many shades and many layers of what they're doing and what impact they have has. And you have to pitch it in a way that is smaller and has a chance to grow. We have to build trust. These have to be one-to-one relationships. This has to grow, and the publication has to understand that. The media outlet has to understand that. And if they're willing to do that and to invest authentically, then you can grow it steadily. But you have to adjust expectations. Sometimes that means adjust investment, but by virtue of singling 1) who you hire, 2) the resources that you give them – and those don't always have to be a financial resource, but they can be time resources and a belief in what they're saying, a belief in their knowledge and their ability to connect. We've had great success with the Latinx Files newsletter. We wanted to do something that was a full vertical, that was, you know, a whole separate section that covered Latino life in this really important way. But we learned from other problems, and so we started with a newsletter.

We started with something that was really accessible and something that could connect. And the goal was let's get 20,000 subscribers in the first year. We blew past that, because we found a person who had a great voice and had a chance to connect. And it's not for everyone. It's not going to cover all aspects, but we also have reporters in other departments who do different kinds of stories. We have people who do Spanish language stories, and we have people who do completely English language stories that serve the Latino community. And then we also have people who are just there, who just cover that every day but happen to be Latinx, and their voices and representation in the everyday product are just as important. You don't want to just kind of shove it all off into the corner and do it in that way. You want to offer people a variety of points of entry. And over time, the Los Angeles Times is hoping that it grows a greater foothold in a community, that I mentioned 40% of Los Angeles, but a much smaller percentage of our overall readership because they were not all represented in the past and it just didn't seem like something that was for them.

Brenda: Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting too, to think about how then you interact with players and have access to different athletes. Have you found a better, a different connection with the athletes that you're covering, who are Latinx?

Iliana: I mean it's different in all different ways. It's been different in each example for me at each level and each location where I've gone. Generally, I just encourage reporters to play to their strengths. Whatever your strength is, whatever makes you comfortable for building relationships and getting to know a person and trying to gain their trust so that they can tell the most complete story possible. That's what you gotta do. I personally try to be super polite. That's like, that's how I am. Like, I just thank you for your time. How can I talk with you and go through those things? If the interview goes better in Spanish, I could do the interview in Spanish. That's an asset. But generally it's more…I don't really think a ton of people think in those terms. They do want to help if they see somebody who is different. I think I've come across female athletes who have said, like, it mattered a lot to me. It didn't register in the moment, but maybe they said a little more or they felt slightly more comfortable, and that was enough to make it a better experience.

There's a whole range of Latinx athletes. There's some who are you new, fresh immigrants from other areas where women don't even work in sports. And they're like, what the hell? [laughs] And there are some who are super happy and comfortable, and it does mean a lot that you can speak in English or Spanish or that you can do things that make them comfortable. It's a wide range, just as any other experience. But the journalists that I've supervised and mentored, I've just encouraged them, you know, play to your strengths. You know, you might be a veteran in the industry who brings us a lot of authority and people just naturally look to that and you should never shy away from that. You should use that. If you're a puppy in the industry, like brand new, your superpower is you don't know everything and you don't offend people with your condescension and you're like telling them leading questions and other things, and they open up more because you ask them to explain something more broadly in ways that people have never bothered to listen to.

And for Latinx athletes, it's a whole gamut of experiences too. Some can be really nice and really happy to see, you know, Latinx journalists doing well. Others don't care because they're athletes, [laughs] and sometimes they just don't care about anything but themselves. And some are like startled by the number of women who are in media, who are in their clubhouses or in their space. That freaks them out initially and then they get over it. So, it just runs the gamut. 

Brenda: One question that I have then is when you're looking from the perspective of a task force, or you're looking at this association – and you talked about how important the networking has been for you, and the support and the allyship. When you're sitting down at the table to kind of look forward and say, what do we need to do? What is jumping out at you? 

Iliana: I think it's really opening doors. It's continuously opening doors. We have a good history with…We have good partnerships with the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian-American Journalists Association, LGBTQ+ groups, just a variety of different affinity organizations to support journalists, and even the Society of Professional Journalists. I will go so far as to say right now it's an inhospitable climate in general to be a journalist. So I just think in general, support across the board is important for everyone who chooses to partake in this industry and feels like a calling toward telling other people's stories. There's just a general hostility and lack of filter in this country and an anti-journalism wave that makes it very difficult. So, you have all of those things. You want to support, you want to empower. You want to help them feel like they have a purpose and a belonging and support if they get reader negativity, if they get source negativity. There’s a whole wave of online harassment that goes along with having the audacity just to speak and write. So, you want to support in those ways, but generally within our industry, we've seen that we have a danger zone about three to five years after a sports journalist is in sports media.

There's a lot of internships. It's getting better – it's not perfect, but there's a good number of internships that people are looking. And they've been called out on their lack of diversity, and that's an easy fix. So you've got that, some entry-level jobs, although there's still some barriers along the way. And then, like I said, in that three to five-year range, the advancement stalls, the support stalls, the general support for their ideas, for their development, for everything. There's a disconnect over what they should be doing. Sometimes miscommunication, understanding what a manager needs, understanding the values of the company, understanding what success can and should look like. It gets stressful. It gets very frustrating. You're often one of the only ones. It's very isolating and people leave, people leave the industry and they go on to be successes in other industries, which is great for other industries, but super problematic for like having a sustained opportunity for people to move into leadership roles and having them continue to grow and really shape naturally and organically the way our media covers its communities and covers the entire country covers the entire world. You have the absence of those decision-makers, absence of voices that becomes really problematic. So we are really targeting toward retention and mentoring.

Brenda: When you think about journalism, how do you balance…Okay. So, some weird things from an outside observation that I'm just dying to ask somebody. So help me through this. Like, for example, all of a sudden there's academics writing for newspapers, like me, like not really journalistically trained, not even on the job trained, often asked to do it for free – there’s a range. Then you've got people who are “journalists,” and I'm putting air quotes in here not to try to create a hierarchy, but to say there's like a social media influencer versus journalist, there's investigative versus kind of opinion pieces. I feel like there's a lot right now going on, and without trying to gatekeep those types of categories, right? Because that can be really easy to be like, you're not a “real journalist,” whatever that is. So, how do you balance people's persona coming in, their quote-unquote popularity, their journalistic credentials? And how do you think that figures into this anti-journalist wave? 

Iliana: So, the thing that I learned in Albuquerque that was invaluable from a really smart editor was just when you have these quandaries, when you're unsure about how to proceed with something, when you feel like, you know, how do we present this? How do we include all these different voices? Which we think is a value, we want to be of the community and we want to represent a range of voices. We want to label them clearly so that the readers understand what's going on. Any difficult question I usually come back to, how does this serve the reader? Or how does this serve the viewer? How does this serve our audience? And so the goal is not to confuse. The goal is not to give them limited information. So, if we're putting a bunch of different voices out there, we want to make sure that we have mechanisms that signals to them very clearly who this is, what their perspective is. And if they come with various biases, then we signal in a couple of different ways to them whether that's a tagline or an introduction, an editor's note or whatever that must look like.

For example, this is Brittney Griner's agent, so you should know that. Her perspective is specifically this world and this world only. It should be labeled as a commentary, as an op-ed essentially. And it can live within the sports section outside of the traditional opinion pages, but we just need to tell readers who it is and where this person's coming from, and they can form their own opinions about whatever bias may exist as a result of that. So, I think transparency and clear communication. We have severe media literacy problems that are not entirely the fault of our audience. It is the fault of us for not clearly labeling what we inherently know is our business and what we do. And then as we add new layers to it, it becomes even more confusing. And not understanding that it is a fragmented world where athletes are their own media outlets on their own social platforms. And then there's the influencers, and there's people who are super fans who get bigger roles because they develop a following and an audience. Then there are the academics who are their own research perspectives that are highly valuable but sometimes a little skewed by their research.

And then you have people who have opinions, some of which are based on experiences that are incredibly valuable to have, and if they're clearly stated it's great. And then others who are not based in fact or reality that are quite problematic and have developed their own outsized voice online. And those are a whole different one. You have to kind of not talk down to the reader, but give them the best chance. Like, this is my world. This is not their worlds. This is what I do everyday, but it's not necessarily what they do every day. And to assume that they always knew who we are and know what we do and how we go about how we do our job is a failure on our part. And so again, when there's tough decisions or I'm unsure about something or I'm trying to figure out why something works or doesn't, it's really, how does this serve our audience? How does this serve the reader? 

Brenda: Just a couple of little tiny sports questions. Growing up in El Paso, did you like sports? 

Iliana: Yeah. Yeah, I did. 

Brenda: What did you like? What was it like? 

Iliana: So, my dad played high school basketball, and so it's a big basketball place in the southwest in particular there. So I played high school basketball. I went to a bunch of camps, but also my parents…I think they were trying to tire me out. I liked to ask a lot of questions when I was younger, which is like, hello, future journalist. But they're like, ooh, she's got too much energy. We gotta tire her out. So they put me in every sport and every dance group and everything you can imagine. Like, I was in all the activities until we settled on what it was going to be. I played three sports in middle school that were the core ones, volleyball, basketball, track and field. And then finally I settled on basketball in high school. I liked it a lot. My parents didn't put pressure on me to do that. They were readers.

My mom's side of the family had a newspaper. They sold it in Mexico, but they had one. The crossing the border changes the wealth factor exponentially. So my grandfather, even though my great uncle had this paper, and that was a pretty good thing, once you've crossed the border, you drop down and you're just hustling to get by. So he was an accountant by trade, but ran a fruit stand here as his job and held a number of odd jobs, even though he had this immense education and background back in Mexico. So, that's not an uncommon thing, but they did value newspapers. So there were two newspapers in town. That's what I grew up reading. I read the box scores, the El Paso Diablos were the minor league baseball team. Fernandomania was a huge thing. I watched Fernando Valenzuela pitch late in his career with my grandfather because he was a Dodgers fan. And you could see the Dodgers in El Paso, like KTLA and other stuff was available there. My dad was big into the Showtime Lakers. Yeah, it just kinda went from there. So, I had a lot of exposure from that sort of thing.

Brenda: What's your favorite sport to cover now? 

Iliana: I still find that the men's and women's NCAA tournaments are my favorite, because basketball is close to my heart, and I feel like it's just the biggest opportunity for an amazing succession of games and upsets and fun. And so, yeah, March is my favorite time. But I'm still learning about other sports. I will learn cricket eventually, but that's like the big one to still unlock. But like I'm learning and trying and developing, and I am pretty endlessly curious about the world. And so there's not a lot that I don't find interesting. [laughs]

Brenda: That's good for you, and for your readers. Iliana, thank you for being on Burn It All Down. We really, really appreciate it. Best of luck to you. We're following you closely and enthusiastically. 

Iliana: Ah, thank you so much. Like I said, long time fan, and I will encourage everyone to continue listening, because this has been an amazing podcast. Congratulations on all the work that you all have done and all you've achieved. 

Brenda: So that's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find links to our merch at our Bonfire store if you want, you know, some very belated holiday presents. And thank you to our patrons, your support means the world. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. I'm Brenda Elsey, and on behalf of all of my wonderful co-hosts, burn on and not out.