Editor’s note: This article is a special feature for the Tufts Daily Alumni Newsletter that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Jonathan Graham (LA’05) is a consultant, investor and board director, with a focus on climate and energy. He has held leadership roles in energy policy, market strategy and corporate advocacy, and is a board director at a global leader in industrial quicklime solutions. As a consultant and private investor, he advises startups, venture funds and corporations on clean energy investment and go-to-market strategies. Jonathan is a Tufts graduate with a Master’s in Public Policy from Queen Mary University of London, and lives in Vancouver, Canada. Jonathan is the current chair of the Tufts Daily Alumni Council. He served as editor-in-chief of The Tufts Daily in 2004.
Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to the Daily and the different roles that you had throughout your time on staff?
I was always fascinated with newspapers. In high school, I tried to read the newspaper every morning. I loved following the news, but what I really loved was the idea that I would get to understand how things work and what was going on behind the scenes. When I came to Tufts and there was an opportunity to take part in a daily newspaper, it was awesome. I remember the first day I put my name in and said I wanted to work in the newspaper. On my first day, a news editor called me up and said, “Great, there’s something that’s happened, and we’re going to go investigate.” So this news editor, Nick Ferre (LA’04), took me around campus while he did interviews. We went around campus to get a hold of people and tried to find them in the Campus Center and the dining halls. It was just very exciting. We took our work back to the office and sat down and wrote it up, and I was hooked. I started writing for the News section, then I was an assistant news editor, and then a news editor. We invented something called Special Projects for a while, which was essentially doing more deeply researched, longer-term stories. Then I joined the managing board: I was an associate editor, managing editor and then editor-in-chief in my senior year. I also had a brief foray as a sports columnist, writing the NHL roundup.
Transitioning to what you do now, can you share a little bit about what the Alumni Council does and its relationship to the paper?
The Alumni Council is there to support the Daily and its staff to grow and achieve what they’re trying to achieve, and to provide some consistency across different semesters as staff changes. It tries to be a support network for the Daily. I’ve been involved in the council since it started. I was incredibly passionate about it when it started, because it’s the type of support network that I wish I’d had when I was an editor at the Daily 20 years ago. It would have been great to just know that someone’s got your back, and that there’s someone you can call. We’re guided by the Daily and its staff to a large extent. It’s not our role as a council to push things — it’s a constant conversation with the students to find out about where they’re passionate, what they want to achieve in their time at the Daily and how we can support them to do that.
Going off of that, how has your previous time on the council informed your plans for your term as chair? Do you have any big ideas you want to implement?
My role in the council to date has been largely on the fundraising side. We developed a fundraising campaign in 2023 which raised nearly $40,000 for the Daily. Normally, the Daily raises about $10,000 a year from alumni and parents to help with operational costs, but in 2023 we were able to put out a major campaign. That $40,000 is going to the Expanding Access Campaign, which enables more students to access what the Daily can provide both as a news resource, but also as a professional resource — as a place where students of all backgrounds can experience journalism. It was such an amazing experience for so many of us, and we want to make sure that as many students as possible can get that.
We have three stipends a semester to help writers to work for the Daily. We’ve taken on the cost of the work study program so that we’re able to pay students for their time, and we are looking to see if we can expand the number of staff members who can secure work study. We now have funding to get students into professional journalism associations. I think a big focus this year is around supporting connections between alumni and students. This is an area that Daily staff said was important to them, and it’s something that’s important to the alumni as well. We want to see how we can develop better networking tools, better communication databases and better mentorship programs. We want to look at how we can support and enable Tufts students to connect with Tufts Daily alumni so that alumni can better support staff as they progress through their Daily career and then on to post-college careers.
The Daily’s 45th birthday is coming up. How have you seen the paper evolve since your time at Tufts, and how do you see it continuing to evolve in the future?
I’d probably be more likely to ask you that question about where you see it going, because the Daily is really driven by its students, and the Alumni Council isn’t really in a place to say how the Daily should or will go from here. How can the Daily continue to build and compound its knowledge, its expertise and its skill set, year in and year out? That’s where the Daily’s strength is: It builds up an amazing reservoir of experience and skills, and it has the ability to keep compounding that each year. I’d love to continue to see it do that. I think the Daily has proven itself very successful over the last few years at adapting to the new media environment through its new website, through podcasting, through digital tools and through social media. It’s really exciting that the Daily is reflecting how students and staff are engaging with the news.
How has your time at the Daily continued to shape your life?
I worked in the Daily for all four years of my time at Tufts. I spent a lot of time at the Daily, and I ended up working in journalism after graduation as well. I worked for two years for a local newspaper in Massachusetts, and then spent another year working for a magazine as a feature writer. I don’t work in journalism anymore — I moved on to a different career path — but I would say that working at the Daily shaped my career and personal trajectory, and it gave me confidence to step into boardrooms, to challenge ideas and to pick up the phone. It gave me a platform to understand how issues intersect and interact. I think that’s pretty universal for alumni I speak to about their time at the Daily: The Daily gave them that foundation for whatever it is they did next.
