Kimbap Media
Kimbap Media helps news and mission-driven organizations navigate change by building stronger leaders, more thoughtful systems, and workplaces where people can do their best work. Emma Carew Grovum is the founder of Kimbap Media and a newsroom hiring, retention, and culture leader based in Brooklyn, New York.
Emma partners with organizations to strengthen leadership, organizational effectiveness, hiring, and workplace culture: the foundations that allow great journalism to thrive. Her work includes coaching leaders on management and strategic growth, and designing systems for hiring, onboarding, and retention that hold up over time. She also believes strongly in integrating formal mentorship mechanisms and professional development programs into newsrooms, to ensure staff and leaders continue to learn and grow over time.
Emma holds a certificate in Building a Diverse Workforce from Cornell University, complementing her hands-on experience leading equitable hiring, onboarding, and retention programs.
Services
Excellent journalism depends on excellent organizations. Strong organizations don’t happen by accident, they’re built through thoughtful leadership, healthy management practices, sustainable systems, transparent communication, equitable hiring, and collaborative cultures.
Kimbap Media partners with news and mission-driven organizations to strengthen these foundations, so people can do their best work together.
The challenge: Many organizations hire under pressure: inconsistent processes, unclear evaluation criteria, and candidate experiences that erode trust before someone even joins the team.
What changes: Kimbap Media helps organizations build hiring systems that are transparent, structured, and consistent: from job descriptions and interview design to candidate communication.
What becomes possible: Stronger organizations and better employee experiences from day one: teams built on trust rather than urgency, and new hires who arrive already feeling like they belong.
The challenge: Onboarding is too often a checklist, and retention is treated as a problem to solve only after people start leaving.
What changes: Kimbap Media designs onboarding as a sustained experience, not a single event, and builds the professional development and career pathways that give people a reason to stay.
What becomes possible: Organizations that retain the people they invest in, where growth and belonging are built into the everyday experience of working there, not addressed after the fact.
The challenge: Managers are frequently promoted into leadership without the training or support to lead well, which limits both their growth and their team’s.
What changes: Kimbap Media coaches leaders and managers directly, building the skills and confidence needed to lead with clarity and care.
What becomes possible: Leadership that’s intentionally developed rather than assumed, managers who can support their teams through growth and change, and organizations with a deeper bench of capable leaders.
The challenge: Important organizational decisions often stall in rooms without a clear process for reaching alignment: retreats and planning sessions that produce conversation but not direction.
What changes: Kimbap Media facilitates the conversations organizations need to have, creating the structure for real alignment and decision-making.
What becomes possible: Organizations that move forward together: with decisions the whole team understands and is prepared to act on, not just a room that agreed to disagree.
The challenge: As organizations grow or navigate change, structures and workflows that once worked start to break down, often invisibly, until they affect the work itself.
What changes: Kimbap Media works alongside leaders to redesign organizational structure, workflows, and systems to match where the organization actually is.
What becomes possible: Organizational effectiveness that scales with growth: systems people can rely on, instead of working around.
The challenge: Many organizations don’t lack good ideas: they lack the leadership or executive capacity to carry them out. A critical initiative stalls because there’s no one with the right seniority or bandwidth to own it.
What changes: Kimbap Media steps in as a fractional leader: an experienced executive or skilled staffer who embeds with your team, not just advises from the outside.
What becomes possible: A custom-designed program or engagement built around your organization’s specific needs, led by someone with the authority and expertise to actually execute it, not a one-size-fits-all package.
