*Jemele Hill revealed during a recent appearance on Revolt TV’s Assets Over Liabilities that while working at ESPN she was paid $200,000 less than co-host Michael Smith, “though we were doing the same job,” she said.
“It’s not so much about what you’re worth, it’s about what you will negotiate. I started at ESPN at such a low salary to begin with. One of those, ‘We’ll see how it works kind of contracts. A 2-and-2 contract: two-year deal with a two-year option, one of the worst contracts I ever signed,” she explained, as reported by MadameNoire.
“My first year was $120,000, but that’s as an independent contractor, so that means I had to pay my own taxes and no health insurance. The lesson that I learned, you can’t sell out for a name,” she added.
Hill joined ESPN in 2006 as a columnist and ultimately landed appearances on “Outside the Lines,” “First Take” and “SportsCenter,” where she became a co-anchor alongside Smith in February 2017.
READ MORE: Cari Champion and Jemele Hill Join CNN+ with Weekly Show | VIDEO
“It wasn’t until I got to ESPN that I really got serious about the business side of journalism because I got to see what people made. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s possible?!’ ESPN forced me to really grow up because it’s a different game being played at that level than it is at the previous places I had been,” Hill explained to the show’s hosts Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings. “This is the first time I had an agent and the first time I really had to learn how to manage my money.”
Hill’s first news job with the Detroit Free Press answering phones for the sports department.
“Journalism is very much a ‘working class’ profession, especially on a local level,” she said. “I thought I would be winning the game if I made $50,000. ‘If I made 50 grand, I’m out here ballin!’” she said about her early career.
During her tenure with ESPN, Hill was often criticized for speaking about her political and social opinions. In 2018, she left the network and her role at “SportsCenter.”
My guest on this week’s episode of @JHillUnbothered is @BerniceKing. We discuss how non-violence is key in movement building, what today’s civil rights movement lacks, and why it took her some time to truly embrace the King family legacy. TO LISTEN —> https://t.co/IP5WN3Sqmb pic.twitter.com/jRYoYGmMjG
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) May 31, 2022
“The thing about ‘SportsCenter,’ [it] was never my dream job, so it was easy to walk away. That’s because I was unhappy. I didn’t like the job,” she recalls. “I didn’t like some of the things they were doing to our show, I didn’t like the leadership that was in charge of our show so I was like, ‘Let me find something else within the company to do.’”
After parting ways with ESPN, Hill landed her dream job at The Atlantic and she “linked up with Spotify to build a podcast network for Black women and that is Black woman-run,” she said.
“I can hit the speaking engagement circuit in a real way. So, essentially I traded in one job for seven different jobs,” Hill laughed, before adding: “In a way, it opened me up to more streams of income … every job that I have now is a job that I want and not a job that I need.”
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