I think Clare Malone and The New Yorker have published a critically important coherent report on what is happening in the media. The media you grew up with, and read, listened to, and watched is dying, and fact-based journalism is disappearing. Replaced by misinformation, biased reporting, and AI. I have been doing SR since 1991, because as long ago as that I was finding fact-based journalism to be harder and harder to find. I have done SR ever since funding it myself with your help, and it is getting ever more expensive to do it. Thankfully, when my computer was recently attacked by MAGAts to stop me from doing SR, and the repair costs became an issue, a number of you stepped forward and helped out, for which I am deeply appreciative, as I told you. I think the need to keep doing SR has never been greater and let me ask a favor of you. If you like and read SR regularly would you recommend it to a few friends? Culture is the creation of collective individual choices, and we, you and me, need to get as many people as we can involved with facts and in support of wellbeing.
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; Source photographs from Alamy / Getty
My first job in media was as an assistant at The American Prospect, a small political magazine in Washington, D.C., that offered a promising foothold in journalism. I helped with the print order, mailed checks to writers—after receiving lots of e-mails asking, politely, Where is my money?—and ran the intern program. This last responsibility allowed me a small joy: every couple of weeks, a respected journalist would come into the office for a brown-bag lunch in our conference room, giving our most recent group of twentysomethings a chance to ask for practical advice about “making it.” One man told us to embrace a kind of youthful workaholism, before we became encumbered by kids and families. An investigative reporter implored us to file our taxes and to keep our personal lives in order—never give the rich and powerful a way to undercut your journalism. But perhaps the most memorable piece of advice was from a late-career writer who didn’t mince words. You want to make it in journalism, […]
