Journalism is a shitty career. It might be a worthwhile vocation

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The mass layoffs at the Washington Post last week mean plenty of people who work in and around journalism are once again questioning if they should invest so much of themselves in an industry so quick to disinvest from them.

I've been asking myself a question for the last year about the relationship between our jobs and our work that I'll now put to you.

Would anything change for us if we treated our journalism more explicitly as a vocation rather than a profession?

A vocation is a deeply rooted calling. I'm compressing centuries and oversimplifying here, but the idea of a vocation evolved from a narrow and explicitly Catholic view that only those people who worked exclusively in service to God and the church, like priests, had a vocation. And only those with vocations could be truly close to God. A more expansive view took hold during the protestant reformation when Martin Luther argued that farmers and blacksmiths could also be called closer to God through their work and service to their neighbors.

In the early 20th century, Max Weber separated the idea of vocation from God but not meaning. In a series of lectures, he pushed students to reject letting the outside world define the value of their work and said finding and creating that meaning turns work into a calling or vocation.

A job, profession, or career is about many things: need, money, chance, opportunity, the whims of employers, our constraints, or ambitions. We take, keep, and quit or lose jobs for lots of reasons.

A vocation is simpler. We can have more power here. The duties of my job might not be my decision, but how I make and maintain meaning through my work certainly is.

Plenty of us have been helped along the way to embracing work in news and journalism as a vocation by a pay scale and job security that would make any other interpretation irrational. But our work can also be a job, and one that it can be easy to lose patience with or faith in, or be too exhausted or financially depleted by.

This is where I think the vocational frame might be useful. What would we choose to keep as a vocation even if we lose or leave our jobs?

I think about teachers who, despite retirement, rarely pass up an opportunity to teach. Nurses who keep tabs on the health of people far outside their caseload, like my parent's neighbor Jill. Detroit Documenters who tune into meetings in their spare time just to make sure somebody is watching. Ministers who can't help but minister. Legal observers who volunteer to document retaliation against protesters at marches and more.

There are plenty of elements of my work I would be happy to leave behind. But I have been thinking more about those parts of my job I do because I feel called to them. Is there part of your work you most want to find your way back to, or not stray too far from? Does that work need to be done within journalism? How else might we create that same meaning and that same work outside this profession?

Please let me know what you think about this. I would love to know what parts of your work you find most meaningful and how you protect that to keep it alive.

An idea for healthier news habits

My students and I finished our little experiment to keep track of our information-seeking behavior for 24 hours. We set out to better understand what was driving us to scroll, google, read, listen, or watch, and then to rank our satisfaction with what we found.

It was great. I highly recommend trying it. I was more disciplined during the experiment (only checked TMZ twice!) but it wasn't just a fear of exposure that drove my behavior. The primary value of the exercise was having to think about why I was about to search for information. The drivers of the classes’ information seeking ranged from “habit” to “boredom” to “need” to “lonely.” Our satisfaction scores were highest when we had a need that could be met, especially with a Google search, and lowest when we let our emotions drive our information consumption and we ended up scrolling or being overwhelmed by news.

Now, with the help of Outlier's Dan Ignacio, we are more actively shaping our media consumption by putting the accounts, sites, news organizations, and creators we most want to hear from directly into an algorithm-free environment with RSS feed readers. We're trying to rely more on our feed readers this week and will see if our satisfaction with the information changes.

If you're interested in doing an experiment like this or using an RSS feeder but would need a primer, please let me know. I'd be happy to share.

An idea for community building

Would we have newsletters if we still wrote letters to each other?

A few weeks ago, two friends (you know who you are) and I carried on a full and robust conversation through sending, replying to, and forwarding newsletters to each other. It was weird, but cool.

When I got my weekly email from my favorite bakery in the neighborhood, I was still primed for connection. They always send out a newsletter with the items they are featuring and a little note. The baker wrote about how upset he was about ICE killing protesters, the violence this administration is willing to unleash, and some people's willingness to participate in that violence. He said he felt unsure about whether a weekly update about the sourdough available on Thursday was the right place for these thoughts. It was honest, vulnerable and not at all self-indulgent.

I thought about his newsletter as a letter, even though we don't know each other, and decided to write him a letter back. We had a beautiful interaction—in real life—because of it. I hope you will write somebody this week. A postcard (but put it in an envelope unless you want it to take literally weeks to be delivered), a letter, or even a note. This is my letter to you.

ICE all the way out, by the way.

Until next week, take care. And welcome to our new subscribers! This is very much a conversation; reach out with ideas, questions, feedback, and reading suggestions.