Pass it on
At some point between Woodward and Bernstein and whatever this is, the profession forgot its job description. Not the lofty parts; the parts about speaking truth to power and comforting the afflicted; those it remembered well enough to put on coffee mugs. It forgot the tedious parts.
The parts about showing up. About staying in the room after the cameras leave. About verifying something before publishing it. About being boring in service of being correct. The assignment was never to be interesting. Interesting is a byproduct of good reporting; sometimes. Often, good reporting is tedious to produce and unglamorous to read. The Watergate investigation was not a series of thrilling revelations. It was months of knocking on doors, making phone calls that went nowhere, reading documents that yielded nothing, and refusing to stop. The movie made it look exciting. The reality was mostly boredom punctuated by the occasional breakthrough.
Everything Else Is Just the Funeral Arrangements
The assignment was to find out what happened and tell people, accurately, in a way they could verify if they wanted to. Everything else; the brands, the personalities, the hot takes, the sponsored content disguised as journalism, the award ceremonies where journalists congratulate each other for being brave while working at institutions that have not broken a significant story in years; everything else is just the funeral arrangements. The body is still warm. The profession is not beyond resuscitation. But resuscitation requires remembering what the job actually is.
The job is not to build a personal brand. It is not to become a celebrity. It is not to generate engagement or drive traffic or satisfy advertisers. Those things may happen as byproducts of good work, but when they become the work itself, the work stops being journalism. The job is to find out what happened and tell people, accurately. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It is not glamorous. It does not require a large following. It does not require a podcast or a newsletter or a verified social media account. It requires a notebook, a telephone, and a stubborn refusal to stop asking questions until the answers make sense. There are still people doing it. They are just not the ones you see on television.