Advice

In 2020, the National Press Club Journalism Institute asked me to offer some advice to young journalists starting out in the field. Here’s what I wrote.

Above all else, work to the highest possible standard, always: Protect your work and your work will protect you. ~ Be professional: File your copy on time, to word count. ~ Park downhill at the end of the day, leaving a sentence or paragraph or piece unfinished so you don’t wake to an empty screen. ~ Cherish good editors: Don’t be precious about your words, and find the people who make your words better. ~ Actively deconstruct the work of good journalists in an attempt to decipher and reverse-engineer what makes their writing sing. ~ Pay attention to structure, and learn how to report well; remember that most writing problems are actually structuring problems, and most structuring problems are actually reporting problems. ~ Embrace nuance, and convey uncertainty. Ignore easy answers in search for deeper truths, but don’t fall prey to cheap contrarianism. ~ Recognize that you will often know relatively little about what you’re writing about, so be humble, and learn interview techniques that will delineate, probe, and stretch the limits of your own knowledge. ~ Be accurate and nuanced, but know when to let a piece go and move on to the next thing. ~ Note that it is better to be right than to be first, but it’s nice to be both. ~ Remember that you’re not writing to impress your sources or other journalists; you’re writing to help your readers make sense of the world. Take that responsibility seriously; view journalism as a profession and a craft whose standards you must uphold. ~ Prize thoughtfulness over salaciousness, depth over volume, light over heat. When you make mistakes, correct them quickly and transparently. ~ Remember that women exist, that minorities exist, that disabled and queer and trans people exist; interview them, tell their stories, and don’t do what the majority of journalists do which is to disproportionately give voice to loud white men. ~ Judge your peers for the quality of their work, rather than judging their work based on who they are; aim to be judged according to the same standard. ~ Give your loyalty to people and not to institutions; the former probably care about you and the latter probably do not. ~ Be extremely mindful about how you use social media, reaping in all its benefits as a reporting tool while skirting around its pitfalls as an emotional void. ~ Be cautious about all the advice you receive, including this, recognizing that everyone is speaking to you from some combination of luck and privilege. ~ Recognize your own luck and privilege, and work to uplift others around you. ~ Accrue social capital so you can spend it on people. ~ Be bold. Be fearless. Be kind. Be kind to yourself. ~

And here it is in poster format: