/reader

By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week.

Anyone who thinks they want to be a reporter but doesn‘t want the satisfaction of knowing they wrote a thing themselves should go fuck themselves instead. Any editor who encourages reporters to eschew the actual act of writing should be fired and never let back in the door of any news outlet ever again.

Look, it’s absolutely true that the act of writing can truly, deeply, aggravatingly, dysregulatingly suck but there is simply no substitute for turning your reporting notes and experiences into a single, structured thing that helps other people know something about their world. That’s something that you have to do, and doing so not only is an intrinsic value but literally is part of how you get better, over time, at many (if not all) of the other steps involved in reporting.

Understanding how you came to put things together informs how you come to put new things together, and how you look for the things to put together in the first place. The knowledge about knowledge that you gain from writing feeds back into the rest of the reportorial process.

“Before the Watergate era, many journalists did not have college degrees,” notes Quinn. “They were just smart people who knew how to get information. They were naturals at talking to people. And they knew enough about how things worked to recognize news.”

In fact, I never studied journalism, and I did not have a college degree of any kind, before I spent three years of my life conducting daily acts of journalism on Portland Communique that were widely-read inside City Hall and in local circles of political wonks, and got me a front-page profile in The Oregonian for the effort.

All of which is to say that none of this can be replaced by the so-called artificial intelligence of generative bullshit bots. As both a neurological process and an act, writing is thinking, and as I wrote last month, there not only seems to be “no cognitive amplification going on when people use LLMs” but in fact “people who use them to write essays afterward exhibit cognitive deficits”.

If you want one thing in your reporters, you want them to be able to think about what they are doing, and about what they are reporting. Putting together the things they have learned is not some sort of optional step to be sacrificed on the altar of “greater productivity”. In actual fact, it is the productivity, and (yes) it costs time, money, and effort to get it.

“Many graduating students,” asserts Quinn, “have unrealistic expectations.” Woe unto the profession and practice of journalism should it agree with him that actually writing their own stories is one of them.

Reply by email • Tip $1/month • Thank you for using RSS