Why I Left Journalism

Last summer at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, I got to hear Seymour Hersh talk about why it's such a bad time to be a journalist:

“There's a time you have to say 'it's not worth it'. We're all going to be crossing that more and more as the business changes. Molly Ivins, the late Molly Ivins – what a loss she is – in one of her columns was remarking on the fact that yes circulation is down, yes interest is less among the readership, classified advertising is down because of the Internet, etc. Given these diminishing things, what do publishers do? They reduce the quality of the product by cutting the reporting. It's completely crazy.”

His observation stuck with me because I was beginning to see the same thing happen at my own newspaper, though another year passed before I came to my senses and finally quit.

I think the current crisis facing newspaper publishers must be what the record industry felt like when Napster launched. Blindsided by the Internet revolution, record execs blamed the new technology for undermining their business. It never occurred to them that sales were down because they were pushing a crappy product onto a disinterested public that was suddenly empowered to seek out music on its own.

Newspapers are making the same mistake, though the two industries aren't exactly parallel.

Unlike the music biz, journalism isn't concerned, primarily, with the redistribution of content. The business model is based on that idea, but a portion of the revenue it generates directly covers the costs of tracking down and reporting the news. New technology allows musicians to communicate directly with their audience. But with journalism if you take away the medium, you take away the reporting.

Unfortunately, the news biz isn't doing much to evolve. And as long as owners insist on clinging to the old business model, the quality of the their product will continue to decline.

Under the best of circumstances, doing this job requires a steady hand. If you're any good at it, someone will always be angry with you, and it will frequently be someone with a great deal of power. A publisher who lives in fear of an advertiser pulling their account is never going to produce a newspaper filled with quality reporting.

This is someone you want to invite to a poker game, because they'll fall for all of your bluffs. One of the industry's poorly held secrets is that advertisers still need us more than we need them. Advertisers will always put their dollars where the readers are. Newspapers only lose if they stop giving people a reason to read.

However, these are not good places to be a reporter. The pressure to return shareholder value makes publishers risk averse; it also makes them more likely to roll over on a reporter when an advertiser becomes the subject of a news story. This does far more damage in the long run because it short changes the readers and damages a publication's credibility.

It also opens the door for blogs to offer something traditional news outlets won't: authenticity.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. As long as the news industry's business managers feel threatened by their advertisers, the reader isn't the customer.

This is an industry that's prime for innovation – blogs alone aren't going to do it. The web has forced old media to come to terms with that fact, albeit reluctantly, but it hasn't pushed far enough. Even more disruption will have to occur before real change happens.

It's certainly not happening right now. Managers are driving out talent, there's no institutional memory left in these organizations, and the people who do stay are scratching their heads over the “series of tubes.”

Blogs are fantastic – more voices are always good for a democracy, and it should be easier for readers to be heard by the people who are out reporting the news. But blogs are not replacing the news publications they're challenging.

One of the reasons is that bloggers still act more as commentators. They rely heavily on professional journalists to write the stories that become blog fodder.

And for many bloggers (I would even guess most), blogging doesn't pay the bills. It's something they do as part of their regular jobs, or in their spare time.

News gathering, from the routine monitoring of public institutions to the in-depth investigative piece, takes time and money to do well, and it requires resources that have to come from somewhere.

This isn't to say that bloggers haven't generated good ideas. While the Internet has given a voice to anyone who wants to speak, it doesn't guarantee that anyone is listening. There is an imperfect meritocracy in place that, if nothing else, recognizes quality writers who otherwise would never be heard. (There is precedent for this, from the very people who helped build the web.)

Eric Alterman, who has been pondering the future of the news much longer than I have, said it better in a recent New Yorker article:

The Huffington Post made a gesture in the direction of original reporting and professionalism last year when it hired Thomas Edsall, a forty-year veteran of the Washington Post and other papers, as its political editor. At the time he was approached by the Huffington Post, Edsall said, he felt that the Post had become “increasingly driven by fear—the fear of declining readership, the fear of losing advertisers, the fear of diminishing revenues, the fear of being swamped by the Internet, the fear of irrelevance. Fear drove the paper, from top to bottom, to corrupt the entire news operation.” Joining the Huffington Post, Edsall said, was akin to “getting out of jail,” and he has written, ever since, with a sense of liberation. But such examples are rare.

And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.

But what do I know? My career in journalism lasted only five years, and I wasn't even a reporter the whole time.

After four years of college all I knew for certain was that I wanted to keep writing. Journalism looked like a good prospect – the news business needed smart people and I was eager to move beyond academia and get out in the world.

I think the 9/11 attacks played a big role in that decision, though I wasn't entirely conscious of it at the time. All of my attention was focused exclusively on The Program when I was in school. But after 9/11, it was nearly impossible to remain separated from the world.

Suddenly I was conscious of how poorly the national media covered the aftermath. There was a sharp contrast between the coverage by the mainstream media (coddled by the Bush administration), more independent voices from overseas, and the newer outlets that were beginning to emerge exclusively on the Internet.

I was intrigued by the possibilities of what could be done online, and eager to sharpen my writing (if you spend enough time reading Aristotle you start writing like Aristotle, and that's not a good thing) while participating in something I really believed mattered. I was going to make a career out of being a well-read pain in the ass.

The reality was I wasted too much time rewriting press releases and crafting flattering features to please our advertisers. I would have been happy to stick around and make a career out of this, if I thought I could ever regain the opportunity to do real work.

I'm still not sure what I'll do next, only that I want to be more hands on. I don't regret the experience of the last few years.

But after hearing Hersh speak last summer, I do feel like I finally got in to the best party in town, just as everyone else was leaving.