Every morning I wake up with renewed optimism. Maybe something good will happen. Maybe the headlines will be slightly better today.
But every day it’s been harder and harder watching the very people delivering the headlines continue to face the toughest consequences.
Just a few examples:
The Biggest News Story in the World Costs Journalists And Their Jobs
Hundreds of journalists are being laid off, right when the public needs them the most
The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard parent company lays off more than 100 people
Protocol, 11 weeks into life, is already laying off a big chunk of its staff (it had just launched in February).
BuzzFeed. Conde Nast. Vox Media. The Denver Post. Fortune. Sports Illustrated. Don’t even get me started on local media. All of these outlets have been providing crucial information to readers. Yet all of them — and many more — are facing massive layoffs. I’ve emailed many a reporter only to get an auto-reply or a bounce-back telling me that person is no longer with the news outlet. Every day brings down more incredibly talented writers. What kind of society do we live in, that we can’t place more value on good storytelling?
I’ll never forget my first day of journalism school at Mizzou. My very first lecture was Principles of American Journalism and the very first paragraph of our textbook reading was about a journalist who was assassinated (which has happened again and again). The message: Journalism is that powerful. Your words can make a real difference and people will fight it. It was a gnarly way to kick off your freshman year at college.
It was made very clear from Day One that journalism can be not only thankless, but dangerous. And yet I was surrounded by people who were there to do it anyways. While I went the PR route, I still see it the same way as I saw it on that first class: The media has a critical job to do. I went to J-school because it was important to me to make sure I knew how to do it right, to tell stories like a journalist. It’s why I chose to work at a PR agency with the tagline “A Journalism-Minded Agency.” An appreciation for journalists and journalistic storytelling is what makes us better at what we do.
It’s gutting when people don’t share that same appreciation. Reporters are not reporting for their own health. They are doing it for YOU. They are the first to make sense of the massive amounts of information in the world, which they then distill into a logical story that ends up on your TV screen or Twitter feed. They are the first ones up in the morning to send you the newsletters you wake up to. They are the first ones to see the bodies. They should not be the first ones to lose their jobs.
Last week I asked everyone reading this newsletter to order Chinese takeout. This time I’m asking everyone to support journalists. Many of you reading this are journalists (this one’s for you, Mizzou J-schoolers); please know how appreciated you are for doing your thing.
Check on your reporter friends. Contribute to journalism in any way you can. You can bet I still have my print Vogue subscription, because I refuse to let magazines die. I also just subscribed to Polina Marinova’s The Profile, because she’s one of the smartest writers I’ve seen and I could spend all day reading her profile stories.
And this one’s easy: Keep passing it forward by sending people the important articles you see. Read the news! Share the stories.
And in my usual mission to Share The Stories, on to the news part of the newsletter…
The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder: What happened to Lee Holloway, one of the original founders of Cloudflare? This absolutely heartbreaking profile is all about your sense of self, and what it means to lose it. (WIRED)
My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?: A beautiful essay about shuttering a business. A must-read. (New York Times)
How to Transition Between Work Time and Personal Time: Now that work is also home, it’s harder than ever for me to separate the two. I wake up and immediately fire up my laptop. And then I keep gravitating back toward my laptop until it’s 11pm. This is because A) now is the time to be putting 200% into work, and B) I can’t help myself. But this is bad and I need to draw the line somewhere. (Harvard Business Review)
Allergy Insights with Watson uses AI to predict allergy symptom risk: An algorithm can assess allergy conditions in your ZIP code. So then at least I’ll know I’ll be sneezing all day.
America’s Coffee Shops Just Might Survive This Moment: I believe it. (Eater)
On the bright side: Who wouldn’t want free coffee from a gorilla?: In other coffee-related news, a man uses a gorilla costume to hand out coffee from his window. (SF Chronicle)
Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: Okay, I have to do a roundup of the best quotes from this Bloomberg story:
“Laurie Miller was in the Da Vinci dining room eating chocolate peanut butter ice cream. “Oh my God,” she remembers thinking. “This is real.” Then she ordered more ice cream.”
“Evvverrrybody went to the buffet.”
“I just thought, Oh, crap, the ukulele concert is going to be canceled.”
You can now add a real Van Gogh to your ‘Animal Crossing’ home thanks to the Getty Museum: I’ve been actively avoiding Animal Crossing because I got WAY too sucked into Stardew Valley, but now you can be an ART COLLECTOR? This might be what turns me to the dark side. (Fast Company)
What you need to know to have a great edible experience on 420: It was 4/20 this week and it’s also 4/20 alll April long, so here’s a shameless plug that may be useful if you live in a rec state and also features my client Coda Signature. (Mashable)
What day is it today?: Vox asking the important questions.
Try Something You’re Bad At
I’ve talked about how much I hate being bad at things in public, and now I have no excuse not to try new things, because I can be bad at them in private!
So. Here’s a new section that may or may not appear in future newsletters called…drumroll…Try Something You’re Bad At!
This week I tried “urban sketching.” It’s a fancy way of saying I bought a new pencil set at Target just to buy something new, and then doodled some buildings in my neighborhood. Drawing met the requirement for this particular exercise because it is, in fact, something I am bad at. Especially when it’s actual sketching and not one of those wine-and-paint classes where someone walks you through every step and you’re past caring how it looks because you messed up a critical first step.
Also, starting with buildings was kind of a cop-out because I can’t draw figures. Not even stick figures.
Anyways, here is the result of this week’s Try Something You’re Bad At:
I took a ~socially distanced~ walk around the neighborhood and sketched. That way I could practice my drawing skills and visit some of my favorite places, even though I can’t go inside any of them. At least I could appreciate from a distance.
I also learned how to draw in 2-point perspective, which I knew was something you’re supposed to do, but I had to watch a YouTube video to figure it out. Is this what they call learning a skill?!
Chris insists that drawing is actually Something I’m Good At, and I said absolutely not, and he said “If you compare yourself to experts, you’ll always be bad at everything.” Which is the whole point of Try Something You’re Bad At: You can’t let being mediocre stop you from trying.
A preview of next week’s Try Something You’re Bad At: I started a balcony herb garden! We all know gardening is Something I’m Bad At since I killed a succulent.
Hop take: Craft beer of the week
We’re back on the Modelos. I apologize. This section is getting increasingly bleak.
Well, there you have it. Another week down. Many more to go. Keep hanging in there. Try something you’re bad at! Let me know how it goes.
-A