When I was in college, in J-school to be specific, I dealt with a kind of ugly clique culture. At least from my vantage point, if you weren’t on the staff of the school paper, it was like you didn’t exist in any of the journalism classes.
I got very frustrated by this treatment, because I was in the same classes as they were. But they seemed to treat journalism as this competitive thing where if you didn’t get one of these coveted spots, you might just be getting a blank piece of paper, rather than a degree.
This frustration, at the time, ruined my self-esteem. I remember in one J-school class I took where my nerves were so shot that I blubbered through a presentation, unsure of my own abilities.
I know better now. Journalism is an open door, full of opportunity, and that dynamic was merely a construct of the school where I was at, where the independence of the paper was treasured over the educational experience it gave to students. Can’t get a job at the school paper? Best of luck to ya. (I much prefer the Mizzou model on this front, where the paper is a central part of the J-school experience.)
But there was a bright side about this. I eventually took a design course and realized that was where I wanted to be. I found my niche. And it made me scrappy and resourceful. And when the moment arrived where I could potentially get a temp job at a real newspaper, I shocked myself by actually pulling it off.
After years in newspapers, I realized, by choice, that I could build outside that ecosystem if I wanted, so I did. I thought I was late to the party, but it turns out that I was early. I have always had something else going on, whether full time or freelance, but this is my digital home.
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However, I didn’t realize that having a digital presence was a liability. Over the weekend, I was attacked by a fellow journalist who, frustrated that I was telling him he should get on Bluesky, attacked my career, calling me a “creator,” and suggested that I was not a journalist.
In other words, I was gatekept.
Doesn’t matter that I spent years in newsrooms, all the reporting I’ve done, my years in the B2B salt mines. I run a blog—so, therefore, I’m not a journalist.
Shout-out to the guy who uploaded all the fencing photos on Unsplash. There’s enough here that I could get into fights with people online every single week and never run out. (Nathanaël Desmeules/Unsplash)
I’m not trying to single out the guy in this post. (Please don’t start anything on my behalf. Please.) There’s already enough drama in the world coming out of the Automattic camp. But the comment stung in much the same way that feeling of being an outsider in the J-school did.
It feels especially insidious given that the context it was made in was in response to me saying (in so many words), “Hey, Meta has done things in the past that have led to hundreds of journalists getting laid off, are you sure you want to hook your stake here?”
(Are all the people who lost those jobs and were unable to make careers in media work also not journalists? I argue no. Whether you’re a onetime journalist or novice Linux user, you always wear the fedora.)
Journalism is an ecosystem that has expanded gradually over the past 30 years even as its economic prospects have dwindled. And honestly, if we’re going to kick out anyone, it should be the gatekeepers who want to keep the parameters of journalism as tight as possible.
Just as the standards have moved away from print, and printing presses can be had for close to nothing, so has the spectrum of what journalists cover and represent. Journalists exist to tell others about the world around them, and that world has a lot of colors. If you only color in one tone, that’s on you for ignoring the rest of the crayon box.
I have learned as much from amateur journalists as I have from professionals. In some cases, more. Unshackled by presumptions on how they interact with the media ecosystem, they come up with more creative ideas and take bigger swings.
I have heard from others that this person has said similar things about other journalists. So, I guess this is for them, too.
I have used my little platform here to speak up against gatekeepers in the past, and here I am again, doing the same thing. It matters more than ever, because I don’t know if you know this, but we lost some big players this year.
If you put up a gate, it’s my job to show that it’s an arbitrary line that someone put there to put down the work or interests of someone else.
Gates harm the discourse and harm access to knowledge. But the nice thing is that you can step around them. If this fellow journalist wants to try to embarrass me because he thinks he’s better than me, fine. I’ll maintain my empire of salsa jars, of odes to foot-measuring devices, and of laments for old search engines while his existence dares me to write a Taylor Swift-style kiss-off that I simply don’t have in me. This dude is not my Jake Gyllenhaal.
If you feel like you must clutch onto these archaic standards of what journalism is and isn’t, fine. But in an era when the higher-ups clearly don’t care about that integrity, because they’re literally firing everybody, consider what that says about you.
Dramatic Links
We just lost a giant in the history of online culture. Ward Christensen, the co-developer of the first BBS, has died at 78. If anyone you know was online before about 1994 or so, ten to one, it was his work that helped them get there.
SNL, in aggregate: Some crazy person decided to take one second from every episode of Saturday Night Live to appear over its first 49 seasons. It makes a show that’s only intermittently chaotic feel completely so.
The WordPress drama continues, of course, with Slate having a pretty good roundup of the situation as it stands, which is already out of date because more stuff happened. Also of note: Mathew Ingram wrote a take on the situation with the mildest of criticisms, only to get a friggin’ spreadsheet of pushback from Automattic.
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Back at it in a couple of days. May Matt Mullenweg call off the dogs by then.
