Newspreneurship Is Not Necessarily Journalism

From the Poetry Foundation

I have been thinking today about Whitman’s noiseless patient spider, how writers also want their words to catch hold somewhere, to anchor into someone.

It is hard to read Whitman’s poem and imagine “likes,” a viral post on Notes, or even the instant $100K that a new Substacker purportedly earned as bridges between the world and the soul. As sacred as our connection is with readers, it’s not a gossamer thread that binds us in a comment thread or a Stripe transaction. Soulfulness requires much more than that.

As

Martha Nichols

wrote last week, marketing activates a fundamentally different mindset from writing and often obscures the “unconscious material that fuels [our] best work.” There will always be those for whom unconscious material is automatically profitable, just as high school popularity comes as naturally as breathing to a fortunate few. For them, staying true to the self is indeed the way to wealth. For the rest of us, marketing and creating will always be competing priorities, and serving one will necessarily compromise the other.

While these questions are private concerns for artists, they carry significant stakes for all of us in the age of newspreneurship. With the collapse of legacy media, more and more journalists are hanging out their own shingles, ditching the corporate confines of the New York Times, as

Paul Krugman

recently did, or the morally bankrupt Washington Post, as

Jennifer Rubin

and

Norman Eisen

did to launch

The Contrarian

. Other successful examples include

Ken Klippenstein

,

Sharon McMahon

,

Steve Schmidt

,

Nate Silver

,

Robert Reich

,

Joyce Vance

, and

Chris Cillizza

, to name but a few. For some, the idea is to remain a solo practitioner. For others, the goal is to build a new media company like Bari Weiss’s

The Free Press

or Yascha Mounk’s

Persuasion

.

It’s hard to argue with the reasons why journalists are fleeing the traditional institutions that launched their careers. In fact, their reasons are nearly identical to those academics give for leaving higher ed. Corporate culture pushes journalists to their moral limits by prioritizing profits over craft or directly quashing free speech. Krugman’s “Departing the New York Times” resonates with my comparison of corporate leadership in higher ed to Communist-occupied Czechoslovakia. Teachers everywhere have been saying what Krugman does: “I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine.”

If truth-telling no longer constitutes the core of the legacy enterprise, then the motivation to take one’s truth-telling elsewhere makes perfect sense. However, we should not deceive ourselves by thinking that reporting itself is unaffected by this pivot or that subsequent changes (such as freedom from “editorial damage” and the license to use flourishes that Strunk & White would smack down) can only be improvements. In fact, there are serious reasons to wonder whether the profit motive shapes the news we get from solo practitioners just as much as it has already strangled many voices in legacy outlets. If this is so, then the ethical imperative to leave legacy media is undercut by the ethical conundrums that one-reporter-shops must face — so long as those ethical concerns are ignored.

One of my most significant responsibilities as a professor was teaching information literacy to first-year students. For many years this included some explanation of why Wikipedia was not equivalent to The New York Times or to peer-reviewed journals, along with basic guidelines for diversifying evidence and making good faith attempts to incorporate opposing views. I often joked that I was fighting BrainyQuote.com Syndrome, in which a token quotation, cherry picked from the web, serves as the only illustration of an argument. A librarian friend taught me a valuable heuristic, the SMELL test, by which students might evaluate a source’s integrity. We began by evaluating the Source itself, including all the implications that might come with a .com, .gov, .edu, or .org domain and the full range of print forms. Next came Motivation, Evidence, Logic, and any information that might have been Left Out.

We had some lively debates over the years about how much clickbait had compromised the reliability of legacy media. If you knew that a CNN headline activated your amygdala rather than your neocortex, sparking anger or shock instead of a more mature curiosity, how much could you trust the copy that followed? The more Gannett colonized newspapers, the more obvious it was that profit drove the enterprise, not the news. If you had to swat down a dozen pop-up ads just to read an article online, or if the page refreshed when you were halfway down and kicked you back to the top, it was clear that you, the reader, had become the product and that the news was simply a pretext for ensnaring your attention. Local newspapers have been dying this slow death for twenty years as my Iowa friends

Kyle Munson

,

Robert Leonard

, and

Art Cullen

know.

Institutions matter a great deal in the SMELL test. If a writer can show a structure of accountability for their truth-telling, if they must run a gauntlet of editors and fact checkers to see print, that means something. Jack Kelley’s own colleagues at USA Today blew the whistle on his fabricated sources. The same was true for Jayson Blair: the Times investigated their own reporter. The New Republic subjected Stephen Glass to the same unflinching gaze. Gatekeeping like that guards the public trust.

Not only does traditional media apply a “trust but verify” standard to their own reporting, they partner with journalism schools for apprenticeships. Coming of age as a journalist means meeting the standards of teachers and then mentors, mastering the fundamentals of craft and building trust before earning a byline. There might be annoyances and inefficiencies built into this system, maybe even a paternalistic vibe, but the idea is to forge a set of shared values that privilege truth and the public good above all else. Done right, these values remain consistent around the world.

I use the present tense hopefully, knowing that the above is no more true for many media outlets today than it is for universities. If it were, Krugman wouldn’t have left the Times.

Yet the American Press Association still follows this mission statement:

The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society. This encompasses myriad roles helping define community, creating common language and common knowledge, identifying a community’s goals, heroes and villains, and pushing people beyond complacency. This purpose also involves other requirements, such as

• being entertaining,

• serving as watchdog,

• offering voice to the voiceless.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel also list nine pillars of journalism in their book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. These principles are shared by journalists around the world:

1. Journalism's first obligation is to tell the truth.

2. Journalism's first loyalty is to its citizens.

3. The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.

4. Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover.

5. Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power.

6. Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and comment.

7. Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant.

8. Journalists should keep the news in proportion and make it comprehensive.

9. Journalists have an obligation to personal conscience.

There is an excellent chance that Jennifer Rubenstein, Steve Schmidt, and Paul Krugman remain true to these principles as newspreneurs because they have been permanently shaped by their long apprenticeships to the craft. The institutional past lives on in them. But there is no denying that the nature of the enterprise fundamentally changes when they receive direct payments from their readers. How can it be that their first loyalty is to citizens and not to themselves? Have they built disciplines of verification into their Substack stream and explained those checks and balances to readers? If two newspreneurs join forces, say, in a podcast interview reserved for paying subscribers, how independent are they from those they cover?

Put another way: every newspreneur should have to demonstrate by more than just their raw follower count why they ought to be considered a reliable source in a first-year college student’s bibliography. It is not enough to simply say, as “The Contrarian” does, that it is “unflinching, unapologetic, and unwavering in its commitment to truth-telling.” There is no shared understanding of this language anymore. One person’s unflinching, unapologetic truth-telling is another person’s treasonous assault on the Capitol. There seems to be an abiding trust that goodness will shake out in the end, cream will rise, and truth will drown out the trolls. This seems inexpressibly naive, like Facebook’s lack of a meaningful plan to check the baser instincts in human nature, even though the platform itself requires users to behave like its reclusive and passive aggressive founder.¹

Perhaps some journalists have always been just as enamored of their own star in its ascendancy as they have been with the core of their craft. And perhaps some have been better at covering their tracks than the notorious fabulists have been. The Wire raised many of these questions in its fifth season, pointedly juxtaposing the Pulitzer-addled editors who directly enable fabulism to juke their ratings with the old-school editor who has worked his way up through the ranks. This series of clips captures the fundamental tension between reporting on the “Dickensian aspect” of homelessness and actual truth-telling. Who can now protect us from the Scott Templetons of newspreneurship?

The civic thrust of institutional journalism and public education draw from a similar democratic root. The idea is for the institution to handle the money matters, freeing the teacher or the reporter from conflicts of interest. The corporate influences in higher ed have thoroughly compromised teaching in this way by explicitly encouraging professors to advertise their own courses, sometimes by posting flyers around campus. For humanities professors, the natural way to do this is to add “film” to a course title to make it seem less rigorous or to add human interest, such as zombies or monsters, to what is otherwise a British literature survey. The literary tradition itself can’t stand alone – it must have a gimmick to drive enrollment. Instead of “publish or perish” it’s now “promote or perish.”

But as a teacher, I felt that my allegiance was to literature itself, not to student-consumers, just as journalists have, for generations, accepted that truth-telling justifies all manner of personal sacrifices and institutional expenditures. The moment a cost-benefit calculus enters the equation, the motivations shift. Perhaps the most urgent concern now is what kinds of truth-telling newspreneurs might have done when they weren’t on the hook personally for profitability, but will now leave out because they know it won’t burnish their brand or drive traffic. In many cases we might never know what is deliberately withheld from us, but the mere possibility makes my information literacy antennae tingle.

The SMELL test still offers the essential set of questions to be asking during a time of major disruption in news media. Clickbait evolved from Rush Limbaugh’s shock jock method and the echo chambers that hardened on cable TV. Our new frontier of independent and unfiltered voices owes more to this family tree than to the historical pillars of journalism. Consequently, the burden of proof rests on every newspreneur to not only acknowledge themselves as such (it is gaslighting to pretend otherwise), but also to show that their model prioritizes the public good over profits.

I want the journalists I follow to be seekers like Whitman’s spider, hard-boiled existentialists staring reality in the face, investigators like the Swedish detective Jan Egon Staaf who refused to let a double homicide go cold and solved the crime with the help of a genealogist 16 years later. That seems a fair standard to hold a teacher or reporter to if their employer has effectively taken money off the table and freed them up to focus on craft. But it is not a realistic metric for a newspreneur who monitors a dashboard filled with real-time data. The overwhelming motivation in that case is to think like a Trump or a Babbitt: ratings above reputation. Or perhaps to conflate the two: ratings are your reputation. What readers in pajamas want is the overriding concern, not what readers need or what the Republic requires.

Chris Cillizza pontificating from his home office is a far cry from Nellie Bly or even Sebastian Junger. Apples to oranges? Perhaps. But the ease with which a former star can simply set up shop on Substack raises doubts.

Seymour Hersh

strikes me as a journalist who puts in the work, a real gumshoe investigator. But when I first subscribed to his newsletter, every title came at me in all caps, like an ambulance siren. What might seem like an incidental formatting quirk to some struck me as akin to a glaring typo, illustrative of a lack of care or of the absence of the copyeditors, fact checkers, and designers that gave Hersh’s essays such heft in The New Yorker.

What Rev. John Hale says of theology in The Crucible is also true of digital media: the news ought to be a fortress, and no crack in a fortress can be considered small.

When journalism works in service of the public good, it is freely available to everyone in a public library.² A writer like Ken Klippenstein seems faithful to this principle, relying on a patronage model to support his reporting (as “The Contrarian” seems to do). But the vast majority of Hersh’s copy hides behind a paywall, requiring readers to pay roughly 1/3 of an annual New Yorker subscription for his reporting alone. Good for Hersh. Bad for the low-income citizen, who now also needs an internet connection and a digital device to access much of the news. A public library can reasonably keep up with major news publications. But a library cannot subscribe to every newspreneur. There is no virtual Substack rack to browse other than what’s already free.

Some say that gatekeeping only protects an arbitrarily-anointed elite. But in its finest form – such as an editorial team that takes the nine pillars of journalism seriously – gatekeeping elevates writers who have proven their reliability or mastery of craft. Colleagues at the Times might hold differing opinions respectfully. But Substack offers a platform where the most trusted reporters rub shoulders with scoundrels.

Take Shaun King, who boasts 336,000 subscribers to “The North Star.” King is an activist with a controversial history, including multiple allegations of fraud. The most notable public smackdown came from his one-time collaborator, DeRay Mckesson, who wrote of King’s alleged misuse of donated funds, that “the person who paints your house before he steals your car has still committed theft.” For a Jack Kelley or a Jayson Blair, such a question of character would trigger an in-house investigation. That works when the institution overshadows the individual. But King is a master of the Dickensian aspect. I, personally, cannot believe after following him for some years that King’s overarching motive for posting a photo of a Palestinian boy who starved to death above a paywalled post is simply “to help” (why the paywall? why is there no attribution for the photo?). But many readers trust King unequivocally. This, too, is what newspreneurship looks like. And it is what follows when information literacy falters.

How many whistleblowers would it take to stop a writer with 300K+ readers? Could it even be done or would the controversy simply allow such a figure to reap more profit? (To Substack’s benefit, too, let us not forget. If King makes $500K, Substack keeps $50K.)

Perhaps the more disturbing question is what happens when the apprenticeship for writers-in-training disappears, when there’s no one left to teach the nine pillars of journalism. What is to stop an aspiring writer from training a GPT to write in Krugman’s style instead of learning his technique the hard way? The institutions that live on in many senior writers are already moribund, not because they were fatally flawed from the start, but because they were infected by the profit motive that newspreneurs now claim sets them free.

It is sad to say so, but we simply cannot have it both ways. The SMELL test loses its integrity and reliable frameworks for information literacy collapse if there are no institutions whose raison d'être is sifting the wheat from the chaff and freeing the truth-tellers from the budget balancing. That is the freedom of speech we should defend. That is the gatekeeping we should be fighting to rebuild.

In the absence of meaningful curation, the responsibility falls upon every newspreneur to prove that they are just as reliable as the correspondents of old — even if they once counted themselves among that number.

Joshua Doležal

writes

The Recovering Academic

.

1. The Daily recently reported on the disturbing potential for PR firms to confuse a public narrative, such as in recent coverage of the flap between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are both masters of this tactic on a much larger scale. “Trust no one” is quite different in this respect from “trust but verify.”

2. I do not have space to address the privilege problem that Substack represents, nor have I investigated it thoroughly. But all the privilege-based sorting that happens with elite colleges happens here, too, and that affects the news more than we care to admit.