A conversation with David Eads about leaving journalism

The introduction to this conversation and the beginning of it are published in NewsFix #62. For those of you joining from over there, the grey divider line a few grafs down will clue you into where to pick up your reading.

News Fix: In your own professional journey, you're coming up against some of the same tensions that we have in the field overall, which is a real reluctance to be able to reimagine ourselves. What is it about journalism that keeps us from being able to kind of move into the future?

David Eads: One time I heard Aaron Williams say, “You can't fight the fire from inside the burning building,” and I think it’s also true that you can't figure out where the fire is coming from.  

I think that some organizations where I’ve worked have been captured by people who were conservative in the sense that they don’t want things to change. And staff that are very conservative. 

I don't know. I have a lot of observations, but maybe not a lot of analysis. I was telling somebody who I was working with, “Part of what we are going to have to do is tune our content to surface in the AI answers.” And I think this is cool because we’re a nonprofit, and if thousands of people see our answer to this question in an LLM query, we’ve done a good job. And they replied, “Well, I didn't get into this field for my work to be regurgitated by an LLM.” And it's, like, you took the job of somebody who said, “I didn't get into this field to post on Twitter every day.” That's remarkable to me that hardly a generation later people my age who brought the internet to newsrooms are now, like, “Oh, but now that a computer can talk. We've gone too far.”  

NF: That's interesting.

DE: It is remarkable to me, you know? It's just kind of like, oh, “The AI's so bad for the world.” So were cellphones, and so was social media, and we all enthusiastically helped create that world. 

NF: You seem to be able to consistently embrace new ideas. And Immigration Daybook strikes this real balance between being forward-thinking and not just using AI as a tool but really increasing your capacity to create a totally different product. First of all, how do you have time to do that?

DE: It's subsidized by the freelance work. Which is inconsistent, and it can be very stressful. But generally it pays pretty well. But also, part of our goal is to do stuff that's not crazy hard. 

You know, we've got this 287g thing (editor's note: 287g is a law that allows local police departments to sign agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Eads and Tory Lysik built a tool to track every agreement), and it looks really fancy, and it's really cool.

But it kind of runs itself. I get a ping when ICE has new data; it uploads the videos to Instagram and YouTube. The Immigration Daybook is 90 minutes a day. I mean, there was a lot of work to create the structure that feeds it and to tune the AI systems to do it. But I spend an hour at night and then half an hour, or an hour, in the morning.

Working in these investigative newsrooms—you run at the story, and you work 80 hours a week, and then you publish the big thing—and you hope that it hits. I'm so not interested in that. I'm so much more interested in projects that start pretty funky and pretty small and pretty lightweight. If people are asking for a server where they can chat with the data, I can do that. 

NF: Your relationship to reporting and information seems to be seems to be changing a lot in terms of how much power you think it has, and how much you think you have to be involved to make it powerful. I find this to be true for me, too. We can get stuck in thinking we’re more important than we are, but striking the right balance is hard. And so is making something to be used and not just consumed.

DE: Even the word “consumption,” right? To destroy, to use up. I don't want to use up somebody's attention. At the very least, I want them to spend some time with the work and get a bigger view or a deeper understanding. And I feel that same way about my own time. So I'd like to work in cybersecurity and do this other work on the side.

Because in newsrooms you can argue endlessly just about how a particular feature should look. And I think that's also maybe part of the answer to, like, how do I have the time? I don't have anybody to argue with. So I can try to work in cybersecurity and do this work on the side.

NF: Immigration Daybook is great. It has so much information but is so well curated. It’s not full of good news, but it is less overwhelming than any other presentation I could imagine. It does feel more actionable. How has reception of been? Are people using it? Are you getting good feedback about it? 

DE: I'm getting really good feedback. But the reception's been interesting. The open rate and the click-through rate are insane, but the subscriber number is still small. My blog thinky-thing has more subscribers, which has been a little frustrating. Is it the wrong product? Have I not found the right audience? It's probably a combination.

I’ve been spending money boosting posts on Facebook and Instagram. The Instagram posts do really well and my cost per click is lower than average. They convert at a higher rate. So that’s good, but also for the web product there is a middle-aged and older, Spanish-speaking, predominantly women audience concentrated in big cities. They engage highly, they come back, I don't know anything else about them, and they don't subscribe. I know what I do because I pay for the analytics. I want to understand that.

NF: You definitely have not turned off that part of your brain, both the journalist and the product person part. 

DE: Not at all.  

NF: You're so comfortable and transparent about how you use even quickly changing tech. And I think you're not just comfortable, but you're comforting. How do you do that? Is it just because of your fluency with the AI tools?

DE: What was the Nieman prediction last year that wasn’t even a prediction? It was just, “Learn to use your damn computer.”  

NF: Was that Joe Amiditis? 

DE: It was! I loved it! It was so good. (Editor's note: We both misremembered the title of this prediction. It was a more polite, “Please learn how to use your computer.”)

Because in journalism there is so much: “Oh, we need the editorial experience.” Man, the question is, can you drive the Ferrari that we now have?

I think something not enough people have figured out with AI in journalism, at least, is how to have it produce the thing you know how to do. I built up a lot of skills editing email newsletters pre-AI. So now I ask AI to write me a desk memo every day, and I just edit it the same way I did when a person was producing that for me. Covering the immigration stuff hurts my soul. But I picked it because I've gotten fairly fluent in Spanish, and this isn't unfamiliar territory subject-wise. I know what the traps are. And the AI makes the same mistakes the people I used to edit used to make. It's trained on vast corpuses of human acts, right? It's going to make the same mistakes. 

But also, I like what AI does for me. I like seeing the things I couldn’t see before. The people I edited weren’t reading Fox News or the right-wing outlets. They weren't reading the junk outlets. And I get that, because they are junk outlets. But the AI can spend time on it and can spot patterns. And the thing about Fox News is that DHS gives them a bunch of exclusives. And CBS seems to get numbers nobody else does, and then everybody else just follows them. You can see the way the government knows this and is playing the media.

NF: You have left the field but are still doing such journalistic work. Has the relationship to the information work changed for you, or is it just that you are not in an institutional newsroom anymore and have moved on professionally?  

DE: I'm struggling with that. Because part of me wants to leave the field entirely. It is dark to look at the U.S. immigration system every day. It takes a toll on my psyche and creates risks when I get across the border and other things. So I’m not entirely pleased to continue the journalistic work. And I also love it. So you just got into some of my deepest existential tensions. 

NF: I feel that too. I get so frustrated by journalism and by its like lack of ability to continue to evolve in ways that are service-oriented and to just get shit done. But I'm also so invested in its ideas of it and in the dissemination of reported and vetted information. I don't know of another field where it's about what other people want and where you're in service to them for like a variety of needs and it isn’t just focused on one campaign.

DE: I certainly feel, even in thinking about sort of what would be a pivot, that there are a lot of these companies that just do not excite me. I guess I could go be an engineer and turn the crank, but that’s probably not for me. I am interested in cybersecurity, and what I like about it is that it's incredibly practical. It’s protecting people. It scratches the same itch for me because it is a niche, but it is also everyday changing. 

It was so funny; I was talking to this one company, and I asked, “What is your typical day like?” and they said, “Well, we have a team meeting, and we discuss the headlines.” 

NF: Really? 

DE: Of course, right? Because they have to track what's happening, and that's the first thing they do every day: they talk about what happened in the news yesterday so they can respond to it. And I was like, "Wow," that was what my life was like.

NF: You're on the bubble; still doing journalistic work but not doing it professionally all the time. What would journalism have to be like as a field to want to come back in? 

DE: I don’t know. I mean, if you ask me today, a salary and a decent boss. But I think I would rather work someplace where it’s a better cultural fit. One thing that is core to my discomfort is that a lot of journalistic outlets, nonprofits, especially, have to do the dog-and-pony show with the funders to show they're embracing new technology. I don't know if I'm the dog or the pony, but I'm the guy that they trot out, and they’re like, “Innovation!” That kind of lip service bothers me.

And I want a discretionary budget that means something. 

NF: That's a good one.

DE: And a culture of product development and learning. As a data person, you’re often a defensive player. You have to hold standards to ensure rigor and accuracy, and if that's the case, I’ve got to be able to tell people, even my superiors, no.

NF: That's an interesting frame. I haven’t thought about that. That seems like a bad position to put somebody in who also really needs to be innovative. 

DE: There is probably a contradiction between the innovative side of it and the defensive side of it. Diplomacy takes a lot of energy and time.

NF: I think journalism has to be able to hold people who do the work that you do with your attitude, which is, like, kind of prickly, but still very good! In news you need somebody who's going to tell you stuff that you don't want to hear. That's the whole point. 

DE: Yeah, there is definitely that tension. I interviewed with a bunch of companies, and I talked to one cybersecurity company that was prickly, and they knew it. They valued it, and I liked that. How they see themselves and how they behave are consistent, and they are consistent with the thing that they’re doing.

NF: Well I do think your work is amazing. I'm really glad that you're still doing it, for now. 

DE: We'll see. I would be interested in selling Immigration Daybook to somebody who has the distribution and could take advantage of it. I think it has to be worth the money I’ve spent on it. It’s less than $1000 a month, but it's more than $500 I’m spending out of pocket right now. But I think it’s worth it.