Humiliation ritual

Losing something at the Washington Post.

As waves of agonizing “I got hit” notices flood my LinkedIn feed from accomplished journalists, colleagues, friends at the Washington Post, I’m sitting over my morning coffee in Los Angeles before work, finishing Megan Greenwell’s book on private equity, “Bad Company.” Megan does this thing in her book I like. She alternates between writing naturalistically about her subjects as human beings, how they live and work, what they love to do, who they care for. Then she toggles to writing about the invasion of finance into their lives, abstract streams of revenue opportunities weaving around pyramids of debt obligations, corporate consolidations and their disintegrations. The contrast between the needs of people and needs of profit is the whole story. There’s something about modern business that’s foreign to human living, though we’ve all mostly gotten used to it by now. It’s still unnatural to us on some gut biological level, and there are moments where the alienation is a little more visible than normal, like how Malcolm Harris described capitalism hitting indigenous California without having evolved out of feudalism first “like a meteor, alien tendrils surging out of the crash site.” Losing a good newspaper job is another one of those moments, like losing a relationship or a calling, like stopping a great song halfway through the chorus. But unlike the story with private equity, which is a war of humans versus spreadsheets — you need a calculator and a lawyer to understand what’s really happening — billionaire media owners are in the uncanny valley of any company’s story of profits and losses, pure personification amid the numerical reality of “business headwinds.” It’s confusing to see a Jeff Bezos or Patrick Soon-Shiong standing by the power outlet, cord in hand, explaining that he unplugged the juke box because the electricity bill got too high. But everybody was having such a good time.

There’s other work out there, of course. One of the things that’s tough to internalize while inside a newsroom is that journalists really bundle together a diverse set of skills, and some journalists like some of those skills more than others: researching things, explaining things, talking to people. You can do some of these things in other jobs! It’s just a lot more fun when you get to combine all these things with telling the truth and serving the public, with the newsroom as a protective environment. There’s still a future for media-making out there, but it’s just weirder and involves most of the survivors being either a lot more hobbyist or a lot more business-minded, eye on the budget, looking for revenue or new funders, sensors scanning for dollars across a forbidding alien landscape. Put on your moon suit first. The atmosphere is not fully fit for breathing.