Op-Eds At the End of the World

An emotional response to a dying craft

Jeff Bezos reached into the heart of the Washington Post opinion page and crushed whatever was left of its life today in a letter that deserves a close read but that I frankly don’t have time to do.

One reason I don’t post much here is that I’ve still been trying to put together a living doing what I’ve done for over twenty years now: writing opinion pieces for outlets that give a shit enough to develop them, to be somewhat choosy about the quality, to value the back-and-forth of an edit.

You may know me as someone who’s battered against established journalism from the outside. I became famous as an outsider to the Washington scene. I’ve long worked at independent or upstart outlets. But I mocked the institutions from a position of wanting them to be better. I grew up loving The New York Times, the Washington Post, and, yes, Rolling Stone and The Nation—because they all took democracy seriously enough to support critical journalism of power.

While I scraped together a living writing from the outside, I appreciated and even envied those who could count on the luxury of a newsroom and health insurance to do similar work. When I got positions that offered that, I believe I took full advantage of them. The hustle of independence is actually a pretty bad position to create from—at least for me.

So I’ve held out hope that I’d find a perch to sing from, even if it meant taking money from someone I didn’t respect. That’s one reason I’m here on Substack: I held my nose and chose to participate in a questionable platform because I don’t have the bandwidth to manage an even slightly more complicated one. In my ideal world, someone else handles my admin and distribution and advertising—as challenging as it has been in recent years to get someone to do it.

Bezos’s announcement is not entirely a surprise and it’s hardly the worst thing to happen in the past five weeks (FIVE WEEKS), but it’s hit me particularly hard this morning. It feels like the end of my hopes for security; it feels like the crash of a hundred other careers that have been more well-positioned in the ecosystem than mine. Part of me welcomes the newly disenfranchised to the trenches. Another part of me knows that newsletters can’t save us. Scrappy independent outlets will inspire, but it really does take the might of a dominant outlet to take down a presidency—outsiders might break stories, but CNN, The Washington Post, and The Times are how those stories break through.

You might think this is just the op-ed section. It’s not. It’s the beginning.

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this if you didn’t already know.

I feel hopeless this morning, and the only thing I can tell myself is that hopelessness is part of the process of getting back to hope. I don’t know what comes next, but I know that pretending this isn’t happening won’t help.

This opinion could have used an editor. It’s nice to get it to you in a hurry, but I’m going to miss mainstream media, and I think you will, too.

PS: Lol, you can choose to support this scattershot newsletter, or you can become a patron of my more regularly-produced podcasts (mental health + politics or scifi + politics). Honestly, I’d prefer you support the podcasts—enough cash coming through those allows me to do all kinds of work. Also, I have editors and partners there.