Journalism Wednesday: The Final Edition?

Pay for what you read! (But not META-SPIEL, I couldn't charge for this.)

In high school, sophomore year, we had a class called… Career Orientation? The whole class is kind of a black box in my mind. It was a required class, I remember who taught it, I kind of think there were some of those weird aptitude tests (“You like working with pencils!” “You like working with feet!” etc.)… and that’s all I can remember really. Except, our big assignment was to shadow a real worker, and write about it, and I remember that.

I shadowed the sports editor of the Rockford Register Star. (Apologies, sir, your name eludes me as of the current writing.) I absolutely could have seen myself doing work like that. I could still see myself doing work like that, if, you know, work like that still existed.

Well, things happen, and don’t happen, right? I chose a college based on things other than the specific academic programs it had. Once I was there, the programs that spoke to me were history and political science. But there was no journalism program there anyway. This was, sad to say, probably a very good thing for me, given the current state of journalism.

The bug was always there, though. Always.

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I did eventually wind up with a toe in journalism, thanks to Gapers Block (RIP). And with that toe I’ve walked (but not often, it’s not good form to walk in 16 inch softball) and rolled (I actually broke 200 once!) my way into “media spaces”. I’ve come to think of myself as having a particular role in the media ecosystem. I think the closest word for this role is “advocate”.

It’s from this context that in 2016 I came up with Journalism Wednesday.

My observation at the time was that journalism was in deep trouble, and was sorely needing external advocacy. Journalists and media entities were not being paid commensurate with the quality and importance of their work, and then above and beyond that, they were under attack from the right wing.

The idea then was to talk up journalism - and especially to talk up the idea that journalistic output is a product that people should be paying for. My thinking on this is definitely related to my thinking about music. Music is art, and there is discomfort about talking about it as product, but it is undoubtedly something produced, and the contributions of musicians to the betterment of the world as a whole far outweigh the contributions of hedge fund managers (or whatever other profession you might want to put there.) I see journalists much the same way that I see musicians. (As an aside, I actually see athletes in a similar light… but that is a discussion for a later time.)

And so today is the seventh Journalism Wednesday, the day of the year when I’ve encouraged people to buy magazines, subscribe to local papers, subscribe to Substacks, you name it. I thought having this be its own day following Black Friday (groan), Cyber Monday (wut), and Giving Tuesday (ok) seemed like a lot of fun. And people did take to the idea the first couple of years! And I did a lot more with it - journalism curation on a weekly basis over Facebook, for example.

But this, I believe, will be the last year of Journalism Wednesday.

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Journalism Wednesday as an “event” has largely taken place on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter, mostly, because the point has been to try and go a little viral. Well, Facebook is a wreck, and Twitter is a major wreck right now. I don’t want to run “events” off of those sites anymore. Even if I did, the reach is increasingly limited. (As an aside, I’m on Mastodon, but not in any visible way. I’m not really sure what to do with it, but am open to suggestions.)

I think a bigger issue though is that I just don’t have a lot of specific things to advocate for, and the handful of institutions which I might want to prioritize are mostly nonprofits and participate in Giving Tuesday as is. And then there it this, maybe the biggest point of all, borrowed from a friend’s observation: So many of us are already subscribed to more things than we can keep up with anyway.

So rather than pretending that I’ve created something huge that will finally go viral one day, then, I think it’s time to retire the “event”, and maybe just pare down Journalism Wednesday to, well, an annual META-SPIEL update, with some recommendations, with some observations, etc.

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I don’t subscribe to a lot of print materials at this point. But I do get these:

Smithsonian Magazine. This is really good, 10 times a year. It was a gift that at first just started showing up unannounced. It was a very good gift though!

Rethinking Schools. A strong social justice oriented magazine on schools today. A whole lot about giving voice to students of color, students of different orientations, etc. I don’t read anything else quite like this. Strongly recommended for educators, even if you might not agree with everything in it, you’re getting a well-written viewpoint that I don’t see very accessible elsewhere.

Preservation. This is the magazine from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There’s always something good in this.

Riverside-Brookfield Landmark. Weekly local paper. I think it’s well-done for what it is.

Desplaines Valley News. Different weekly local paper, covers a larger area. It’s got kind of an old-school conservative bent to it. They like to publish articles abount small towns hiring police officers. But since the paper has a circulation area including Bridgeview they have someone who covers the Chicago Red Stars, which is cool.

Ballot Access News. Still comes out monthly. Still excellent at what it is. I guess it’s most properly called a newsletter. Always the latest in federal and state cases about ballot access, nevermind that none of the third parties are coherent these days.

Chicago Reader. The venerable institution, now publishing in print every other week, though if I’m being honest, it keeps feeling less and less relevant. It’s a topic worthy of a discussion in and of itself… I don’t know if it says more about the Reader or it says more about me.

I also get a few daily or weekdaily morning news or specialty news updates:

The Guardian. It’s my go-to for basic national and international news and has been for a while. I have an annual Guardian online subscription.

POLITICO Illinois Playbook. Consistently well-curated compendium of Illinois political news by long-time Chicago political writer Shia Kapos. So good I kind of don’t much need a secondary source for this.

Chicago Public Square. More compact Chicago-centric news roundup from former Media Leaguer Charlie Meyerson. Charlie’s good people. I chip in for this one.

Midwest Energy News. This is the one where my wife advised me not to tell people about it. Oops, I just did. Summary of energy related news from around the Midwest, often having to do with pipelines and wind farms and schools adding solar panels and such. Highly recommended. There’s a national one too but I find the Midwest focus especially helpful. I’ll be chipping in for this one this year.

The Athletic. In terms of features and columns it’s easily the best sports side going. I follow the White Sox and Leicester at the same site, that’s pretty good. I have an annual subscription.

Then there are Substacks I pay for:

JoeBlogs by Joe Posnanski. Who doesn’t love Joe Posnanski at this point? He’s the best sportswriter going. Baseball is his specialty but you’re guaranteed a whole lot of other stuff. The man can’t help it, he just writes and writes and writes, far too much. It’s something to aspire to. Publishes multiple times a week.

The Long Game by Molly Knight. Molly is a long time baseball writer, based out of Los Angeles so you always get Dodgers stuff. She’s got an occasional podcast with Joe Posnanski and she’s always insightful, and it comes across in her writing as well. Publishes on kind of an irregular schedule.

BIG by Matt Stoller. Stoller’s beat is antitrust and monopoly. He’s excellent. He can get very technical, and I like that. Stoller is one of the few writers who is able to convincingly argue that the Biden Administration isn’t doing nearly enough but is nevertheless doing something. Publishes weekly, usually.

The Racket by Jonathan M. Katz. He’s a remarkably insightful political commentator, an experienced international journalist who is able to put a lot of details together, and one of the few people I see consistently, intelligently, coherently calling out the fascism in our midst. I recently finished his book The Big Truck That Went By about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Publishes weekly, usually.

Popular Information by Judd Legum. He’s been great for a while, hammering the same kind of beat, spotlighting how corporations say they’re all for equal rights and then give money to politicians who oppose equal rights, something I never see the mainstream media do unless they’re citing him. Publishes every weekday.

Numlock News by Walt Hickey. The best of the best. You learn all sorts of things from Walt’s pursuit of interesting stories and how there’s some kind of number behind them. He’s funny, optimistic, will actually respond to you on Twitter (for as long as it might continue to exist), I really can’t speak highly enough of his work. Publishes every weekday, and then a long form interview on Sundays usually with a journalist whose work he spotlighted earlier that week.

Also a few Substacks which either don’t take subscriptions or I get the free version:

Boondoggle by Pat Garofalo. His beat is mainly government subsidies and what a gigantic waste they are and how states have taken to not even telling people what corporations they’re giving away huge money to. Publishes weekly maybe?

Where’s Your Ed At by Ed Zitron. I’ve frequently mentioned Ed. He’s just so good. He rips apart crypto, he rips apart ridiculous managerial classes, he staunchly defends remote work and remote workers… I can’t help but think that if the Democratic Party simply modeled its politics around Ed’s rants that we’d all be so much better off.

EXTRACTIONS by Richard Buckner. Richard has been one of my favorite musicians for 25 years, and I can pretty much never tell what the hell he’s talking about.

The Mish by Hamish McNeilly. A while back I wanted to find someone who seemed kind of like me, who wrote about a weird assemblage of topics but in a completely different geographic locale. I found Hamish, an independent journalist operating out of Dunedin, New Zealand. I find it super interesting, and it helps that Hamish is a devotee of the Dunedin Sound, a bunch of Kiwi bands dating from the early ‘80s and forward who play a noisy pop-rock, including The Clean, Straitjacket Fits, and the 3Ds. For the record, if you want to get me an expensive gift, I will accept airfare to the South Island, where I can see Dunedin and Christchurch.

There’s other stuff I get from who knows where too. You can see though that a lot of stuff hits my inbox. There’s a reason why the Substack model makes so much sense to me - I prefer to read a lot of my stuff as email. Email is still the primary medium I rely upon, and I don’t see that changing.

I do want to say a word about Substacks and paying for them. It can seem a little odd to get an annual subscription for a weekly paper, and have it be cheaper than an annual subscription for a Substack written by just one person. But I think it’s part of an overall value proposition question we don’t always answer well. Does this writer provide $50 of value? Perhaps some of that value is not just the value to me but the value of knowing the writer can perpetuate what they are doing? If the answer is yes then it shouldn’t be about comparing it against a daily or weekly paper or whatever. The whole Journalism Wednesday concept is about whether or not we value the work that people do, whether or not we think professionals should be treated and paid that way.

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Overall then, a typically longwinded take on Journalism Wednesday, how the spirit is still valid, how we should still encourage one another to pay for the journalism we consume, but how the day itself, the “event” I’ve tried to make of it, is probably over. Maybe next year I’ll just devote another META-SPIEL to things I like about what’s happening in the world of journalism and leave it at that. But, maybe not. I’ll see what you all have to say.

For now: Subscribe to something! Pay for something you already read! Respect the work that goes in! Our need for quality journalism is no less today than it used to be, even if the form is morphing, even if the traditional form is just not what it was. Real journalism still helps keeps our government honest (even when it seems like that’s not possible) and it helps keep us honest too.