7 things I’ve learned about journalism in 7 years of being a journalist

hi everyone happy new year happy 2021. sitting here in washington dc uh right outside uh what is increasingly becoming a war zone because this week there is a hopefully peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another anyway let's talk about journalism i sort of stumbled into journalism first i wanted to be like a cinematographer filmmaker then i wanted to be a diplomat and i wanted to join the foreign service for the united states then i learned that i didn't want to do either of those things and then i could actually combine ingredients from both

to do this thing called journalism communicating kind of complex topics of the day to an audience i didn't go to journalism school i didn't formally study this but i ended up becoming what most would call a journalist over the years i've learned a few things about journalism that i want to share with you i assign a reporter to get all the important facts and to write the story i also assign a news photographer to take pictures the recorder and photographer will work together as a team now the reporter has all the facts he's ready to

write his story he puts the most important facts in the first few sentences then he adds the interesting details so let's make a list here number one objectivity is a myth there's no such thing as objectivity i often find myself in these conversations where people are just like if there was just unbiased objective news all of our problems in the media would just go away that's a really attractive idea but the more i do this the more i realize that objectivity isn't a thing it's a theory it's not a real thing you can ever achieve

every article you read every video you watch every photo you see was produced by a human being who went out and gathered that information and then decided what facts to put down on paper they chose to frame the issue a certain way to leave out some stuff and to include other stuff there were choices there and those choices were the product of a human and their biases even a photojournalist someone who takes pictures for newspapers presumably the least biased type of journalism there can be is still totally subject to bias the way that photo is

cropped and framed and who they decided to take a photo of and at what time and how they decided to expose the frame all of those are choices objectivity is a myth but what isn't a myth and what's real and i think what people are sort of getting at when they talk about objectivity is fairness being fair to your topic or your subject or the other side of the argument that you're making in your article my old boss ezra klein used to talk about this concept as generosity we as journalists go out and gather a

bunch of information and facts about a thing and then we sort of land somewhere on what we think about that topic and our journalism our story is going to reflect that decision but what you can do as a fair journalist is you can be generous to the other side you can present the best version of the other side's argument that to me is what healthy journalism has is generosity to the other side but objectivity it just doesn't exist i experienced this in the first season of borders when i was in japan doing that north korea

bubble story i clearly had a position in that story but at the same time i wanted to give the best version the most generous version of the north korean viewpoint and i tried to split that balance while also being clear and assertive about the facts that's a difficult balance but when it's done right it makes for better journalism number two a lot of journalists write for their peers and not for their audience this is another really useful thing that i learned from ezra working at vox a lot of journalism is hard to understand that's just

a fact like even now when i read the wall street journal or the washington post or the new york times i have a hard time getting around some of the language and some of the things that are happening especially for topics that i'm sort of new to i've always felt this and it's always sort of been frustrating because i'm like aren't you guys writing so that i understand like i'm an educated consumer of this news and yet i'm having a hard time understanding like that's a problem a lot of journalism is written for insiders people

who are already kind of familiar with the topic as a journalist when you're writing about something that's kind of complex you start to sort of get in your head you're like man a lot of people are going to see this and a lot of really smart people are going to see this so if i use really simple language what are my peers gonna think what are my journalist friends down the road at the washington post the new york times gonna think about this article if i don't use all the fancy jargon if i'm explaining the

financial crisis in venezuela it's a lot more tempting to write something like hyperinflation has led to the complete devaluation of the local currency spurring a collapse in wages which shows my peers that i'm actually really smart i have a master's degree in international relations and economics but what about my audience who knows nothing about hyperinflation they're left feeling left out and no more informed about the financial crisis in venezuela instead what i should do is write something like situation has gotten so bad in venezuela that the money is worth a thousand times less than it

was last year making those who were once really rich now struggling to find their next meal it's still accurate it's still smart and it's still a an accurate assertion about what's happening in venezuela i'm just not using any of the jargon if my peers judge me for that so be it at least my audience will understand number three journalism has a lot of very old customs or traditions there are a lot of old practices and habits in journalism that feel like gospel to a lot of people in journalism one of the big ones that i

always run into is that in sort of traditional conventional journalism we don't say the word i the journalist is a fly on the wall we're not there to insert ourselves our personal character into the story therefore we don't say the word i and i sort of understand the thinking behind that even if i don't practice it the other convention or custom mainly in like documentary and video journalism is that we're not here to make things look too beautiful beautiful b-roll evocative music beautiful motion graphics those are for like the brands and the corporate people here

in journalism we care about the story and all the fancy stuff is just fluff not necessary at all i disagree with both of those i disagree with the aversion to using i and i disagree with the aversion to using beautiful imagery and b-roll in music luckily when i came into journalism i came into an organization that was very eager to disrupt this old set of customs and journalism vox really encouraged me to experiment thank goodness they did i was able to start a series that was all about showing beautiful visuals of places around the world

and it had music and it had motion graphics and of course it had a lot of turning the camera on myself and talking to the camera i was a character in the story and i would go to these conferences these journalism conferences and i would always get sort of interrogated by these legacy news people who are like can you really consider this journalism and my response was always i don't know like you can decide i'm not here to chase the label of journalism i'm here to tell stories about people and to bring big audiences to

those stories the reality is a lot of these customs are sort of arbitrary and they were developed at a different time when information was shared differently let me caveat just one big thing here by saying that a lot of these norms and a lot of these customs and ethics within journalism are actually really useful the idea of staying honest and fact-based and accurate and making sure that your assertions actually have some evidence to them i am all for that i love that there is a very strong tradition and burden of evidence within journalism that says

if you can't prove it it's not real especially because a lot of those customs which i believe are the really important customs of factual information are sort of going out the window and if you need proof of that just go five miles away from me to the capitol like a week ago and see how that was covered by journalists on both sides when it comes to the formats the oh that guy turned the camera on himself or did a bunch of drone shots and therefore it's not journalism i'm here to tell stories that have facts

and data and characters and help inform people if you decide to call that journalism or not i don't really care that's how i do it but i guess the lesson here is that if you're going into journalism those are really serious intense customs that you will come in contact with which gets me to my next lesson which is number four journalism school isn't always the best way to get into journalism now let me just pause for a second and make it clear that i am not saying don't go to journalism school most of the people

who have taught me what i know about the craft of journalism went to journalism school and i am deeply grateful thank you joss fong and others for teaching me how to do journalism when frankly didn't know what i was doing when i walked in the door the first day of box but let me make it clear that going to journalism school is not the only or even the best way to get into journalism man i've said journalism the word journalism so many times in this video it's starting to get to the point where like the

word feels weird to say because i've said it so much so anyway my critique of journalism school is the same critique i have of film school which is something i started and stopped after about a year and a half the critique for both of these is that the institution spends so much time focusing on theory tradition history critique of the old style of doing it the old way of doing filmmaking or the old way of doing journalism that they don't give the students much chance to actually experiment and play around with like the new versions

of how this thing is being done we spend so much time looking back and talking to faculty who sort of had their heyday in like the old days that they don't spend a lot of time doing the type of journalism that happens today which is under very different circumstances economically politically etc so my big critique is that there isn't enough in the trenches experience with journalism and that you end up getting a sort of warped version of what you're going to be doing and a lot of fixed ideas that are hard to sort of shift

when you actually get out into the real world now there are a lot of journalism schools who are doing really great work in this department and letting their students see what it's really like i go and speak to a lot of these journalism schools whether it's the university of oregon or stanford or yale or whatever it is when i speak to students at these schools i see an appetite from faculty to give these students perspective on what journalism looks like in 2021 what it looks like in this new age of digital journalism and what are

the different versions of journalism that one can go into the big strength of journalism school is that they teach you the importance of reporting meaning going out and gathering facts of fairness of facts of accuracy of evidence the heart of journalism you learn in journalism school absolutely that is totally irrefutable i believe in that but i believe that you get a lot of that fluff on top of the customs and how you're supposed to do journalism and what is and what isn't and those fixed ideas if they root too deeply can hinder you once you

get out into the field go there learn like go for it but make sure you don't get too entrenched on what journalism is and isn't the next lesson is that journalism is economic in its very nature it has to be it is a business just watched little women the new one with hermione is really good i watched little women a bunch growing up but i never really got it and then i watched this one and it totally made sense and i loved it anyway there's this amazing line in there where she says so don't sit

there and tell me that marriage isn't an economic proposition because it is journalism is an economic proposition meaning if you're starting a journalism outlet in the united states you are doing so as a business you need to keep your lights on and your doors open by selling something whether it's subscriptions or whether it's ads or whether it's some other new version of economic value that you can create with your journalism you have to do that and with that comes a certain set of expectations and incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with the incentives of telling really

good stories and now of course i've ranted about this in a previous video called why i hate the news i'm not going to go into the depths of my thoughts on this if you want to go watch that video you should but whenever i go speak at a journalism conference in europe i always chat with them about the economics of journalism in switzerland or the netherlands or whatever and in europe they've really realized that like private media can get out of control and can lead to some really bad outcomes and so they really try to

buffer the media machine from private interests and they do so in a pretty good job there's still private media in europe but here in the united states private media is the name of the game and the effects of these incentives on journalism are very apparent we are incentivized to chase volume to chase numbers to chase like a little bit of like what's going to get people to click it's hard to compete when the information landscape is incentivizes us to be in that environment money usually comes from attention and advertising not necessarily subscribers who pay a

monthly fee for your newspaper and attention and traffic are not always conducive to telling the best story or doing the best journalism which is a real travesty the best thing that took the most time the biggest article that has the most information is not actually the most valued among the attention economy but anyway i'm not here to lament human psychology i do offer two pieces of hope to this capitalistic incentive of the media quandary number one is that there are still really great outlets that publish really in-depth media and that you just have to pay

money to and by doing so you shield the need for them to have to just chase pure volume one of my favorite outlets of all time and where i get most of my news and my ways of thinking about the world is a british weekly magazine called the economist and i pay for it i like to consume media that i know was crafted by the incentives of serving me the payne customer as opposed to serving a different master which is an advertiser who will keep them afloat there's still a lot of amazing media that happens

through advertiser revenue it just is a fact most media had to pivot to that but more and more those incentives are pushing media into more sensationalized polarized places okay my second piece of hope here is that when i joined vox we were just sort of taking off we had less than 100 000 subscribers on youtube it was like the early days and there was this hypothesis among the whole organization which was like a few dozen people that if we could tell really good stories and explain really complicated things to people that we would actually win

the views game like people would actually come to us instead of the funny cat video because they actually want to understand people actually want to engage with good information and it turns out that that hypothesis was totally correct the most popular videos i ever made at vox one a six minute explainer of a complex middle eastern war really complicated but got hundreds of millions of views and another really popular video i made was a 10 minute video explaining the housing policy crisis and tax law in hong kong like some of the most boring but important

information you could ever think of but because they were presented in a way that people could access it actually made them really popular and people said yes i want to understand what's going on with the syrian civil war because everyone's talking about it and i don't understand it i will sit through this six minute video and that video by the way took off not on youtube but on facebook like the place where people's attention is apparently the lowest and where people are just there to click on whatever's sensational that's a problem that's happening but you

can still get people to watch really in-depth stuff if it's well told and well presented so that that's a hopeful thing to my to my little lament about the economics of journalism man i'm getting deep right now i'm getting like deep into my theories of journalism yeah yeah this is great this is good let's get on to the next lesson number six good writing is rare and beautiful what i've learned in journalism is that the difference between someone really connecting with a story and not connecting with a story is just a few words good writing

whether it's for a video or a text-based article it can bring you into a story it can illuminate a topic it can humanize a character it's really important i wasn't very good at writing when i started at vox and over the years i had some really good story editors who would look at my writing and help me reshape it and simplify it and make it more concise and make it clearer i am grateful for the people who taught me how to write because a lot of the videos you see on this channel yeah there is

beautiful maps and there's fancy footage and there's lots of drone shots and whatever but at the end of the day behind all of that the reason why you're interested in watching those videos is because i put a major priority on writing i spend so much time choosing my words so that every story i tell sinks in on the other side when you're listening and that's because good journalism is good writing at the end of the day and it's incredibly important if you want to get better at writing i have a book for you i'm going

to put the link in the description if i forget to do that call me out in the comments because i don't want to forget because i want to tell you about this book i mean i could just say it right now and then you could go find it but oh but if i put it in this link in the description i could make it an affiliate link and then i could get money every time you click it man the incentives of the 21st century economy are just plain on my mind right now oh gosh okay

the last lesson here good journalism is important now hear me out on this this might sound trite but i've learned over the years that journalism is hard to go out and gather information that doesn't exist in the world and to communicate it to the rest of the world is is hard our country these past few months has shown me just how important and how sort of delicate good journalism can be facts don't matter for a lot of people these days and before you know it you can have a person in power creating fake stories about

an election and you can have a news outlet that claims to be doing journalism jump on board with that narrative and make up facts to support it that's scary good journalism the stuff where people are going out and actually scrutinizing evidence and presenting robust arguments to an audience that is scrupulous back towards them and there's a discussion in discourse that's rare and special here in the united states we call it the fourth estate this institution a free press that keeps our leaders honest keeps our corporations honest keeps our society together and honest there will always

be people and institutions whose sole purpose is to gain journalism offers a spotlight or a watchdog on those actors on those institutions and because of that it's really really important i am very very grateful for those journalists especially right now at this time in history where covering the facts is so freaking important for keeping our society peaceful and together and honest and working i just i'm grateful for the good journalism that's happening the people are out there hustling and i lament the hostility that has been shown towards those people and i hope we can move

on and get back to facts and truth thanks for watching this video is sponsored by squarespace which is an all-in-one platform where you can create any sort of online presence you want whether it's portfolio for your videos or for your photography or you are launching a business and you want to have an online presence that isn't just a website but also a place where you can do email campaigns and seo so that your website shows up on search or integration with social media whatever it is squarespace is a place where you can create online presence

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all for watching thank you patrons like always like i've now had a patreon for like maybe six months or maybe more and i'm just i sort of thought like man the patrons are gonna be there for a few minutes and then like after month two they're all just gonna flee but they haven't and i'm so grateful because it helps support my work i have some very zesty videos coming out in the next couple weeks get ready for those just telling you like how the us stole the middle east part two i know you've all been

asking for it it's coming all right see you all in the next one have a good day happy new year bye this is the plan for page ten then he writes a headline a title for the story then the printed story is checked against the original story to make certain that there are no mistakes warning light the presses are starting to roll newspapers are sold on the streets newspapers are delivered to homes and they are red everywhere i like my job helping to bring the news to our community