Doing It Together

 When I think back over the past 50 years, one of the most dramatic changes in journalism has been the way reporters have started working in teams. 

In school in the 60s, we were taught that the way it worked historically was that a series of great men -- and a few great women -- achieved journalistic success individually. Partnerships were rarely mentioned.

The big names were John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1912), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) ... and more recently Barbara Walters (1929-present) and Tom Wolfe (1931-present).

There were investigative reporters too, like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis in the early 20th century and then Jessica Mitford, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein in our time. (These are the famous ones, there were many others.) They too mostly worked alone.

Modern scholars credit the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones for establishing the non-profit model of investigative journalism.

So concentrating on those two organizations, which encapsulated so much of my own career, what's true its that we produced our muckraking reports in teams much more than as individuals. Maybe this was a Baby Boomer thing; after all, we were such a huge generation numerically that we rarely did anything in life completely alone.

Woodward & Bernstein are a tad older than our generation, but they certainly are the most famous co-authors in American journalism history. But they didn’t work together all that long, either.

Personally, I have published with many co-authors, both because I love working with collaborators and because we all uniquely bring different qualities to the partnership.

Some of us specialize in interviews, some in documents, some as investigators, some as writers or story-tellers. But what can be most valuable in a team is the ability to bring an unusual perspective on the story.

It’s not the kind of work that suits every temperament. People who get too easily frustrated and who give up easily tend to drop off teams. People who worry more about process than results rarely work out in these kinds of projects. Egos all too easily rear their ugly heads; competing egos are poisonous.

But for those of us who can stick it out, team stories yield most of the best journalism out there today.

Perhaps, when I work (intermittently) on a memoir of my career, the title of any such book ought to be: "We Did It Together."

Then again, it all depends what the meaning of the word "it" is.

[NOTE: I published a different version of this essay a year ago.]

***

The irony is hardly lost on any of the attendees to Biden’s two-day “democracy summit” this week that the U.S. is the country where the most serious recent threat to overthrow a major republic occurred.

Congress is investigating, of course, piling up evidence about what happened on January 6th, but the deeply partisan nature of the political process in the U.S. virtually guarantees its findings will have little credibility outside of Democratic Party circles. Republicans have sworn off any interest in finding out how close we came to a coup.

Meanwhile the threats to democracy here and overseas continue. Will the summit make a difference? IDK, but at least they are talking about it. 

And that is something because tyranny thrives in silence.

FRIDAY’S HEADLINES:

• President Joe Biden's "democracy summit" today with leaders of more than 100 nations puts the U.S. on display as the only major industrial power to undergo a modern threat to overthrow representative democracy. [HuffPost]

• The World’s Largest Democracy Is Failing — What the attacks against the journalist Rana Ayyub reveal about the state of India’s democracy (Atlantic)

• CDC chief says omicron mostly mild so far (AP)

• Omicron may require fourth vaccine dose, Pfizer says (WP)

• The number of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 reached 200 million amid a dispiriting holiday-season spike in cases and hospitalizations that has hit even New England, one of the most highly inoculated corners of the country. But in Vermont, for example, 90% of COVID-19 patients in intensive care were unvaccinated. [AP]

• Omicron’s Explosive Growth Is a Warning Sign (Atlantic)

• Omicron: WHO concerned rich countries could hoard vaccines (BBC)

• Long covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake (WP)

• Omicron is highly transmissible, researchers say (NHK)

• FDA authorizes Pfizer Covid booster for 16-, 17-year-olds (Politico)

• How will the world decide when the pandemic is over? (AP)

• Italy's antitrust watchdog said it had fined Amazon $1.28 billion for alleged abuse of market dominance, in one of the biggest penalties imposed on a U.S. tech giant in Europe. Global regulatory scrutiny of tech giants has been increasing after a string of scandals over privacy and misinformation, as well as complaints from some businesses that they abuse their market power. (Reuters)

• Schools Are Closing Classrooms on Fridays. Parents Are Furious. — Desperate to keep teachers, some districts have turned to remote teaching for one day a week — and sometimes more. Families have been left to find child care. (NYT)

• Schools Confront a Wave of Student Misbehavior, Driven by Months of Remote Learning (WSJ)

• An Arkansas state senator has filed a bill that goes even further than Texas' ban on abortion — this bill aims to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy, and would deputize private citizens to enforce the law. “What Texas has done is absolutely awesome,” state Sen. Jason Rapert (R) told news outlets in September after Texas passed its six-week ban. Florida and Ohio have similar measures pending. [HuffPost]

• Democrats Are Losing the Culture Wars (Atlantic)

• Republicans have been campaigning in battleground states to put local officials who oversee key election functions in the hands of party loyalists. In some counties in Georgia, the result has been the removal of several Black Democrats from these boards. (Reuters)

• Transgender people can’t be baptized unless they’ve ‘repented,’ Catholic diocese in Michigan says (WP)

• New York set to become largest U.S. city to enable non-citizen voting (Reuters)

• New US jobless claims fall to lowest level since 1969 (Financial Times)

• Some of the nation’s leading ocean and climate scientists are calling on the U.S. government to invest up to $1.3 billion in research on human interventions that could boost the oceans’ ability to suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide in the coming decades. Jolting seawater with electricity to make it less acidic and boost its ability to suck up carbon dioxide is one idea among several, some more radical than others. [HuffPost]

• A new European Union plan to improve conditions for the growing number of gig economy workers could mean millions more of them are classified as employees entitled to benefits, the latest setback for digital platforms that rely on independent contractors to deliver food and offer rides. (AP)

• Without access to charging stations, Black and Hispanic communities may be left behind in the era of electric vehicles (WP)

• A new poll finds major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats — The NPR/Marist survey has President Biden with a 42% approval rating. Americans also don't feel the direct payments or expanded child tax credits Democrats doled out helped them much. (NPR)

• The number of journalists worldwide who are behind bars reached a global high in 2021, according to a new report from the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, which says that 293 reporters were imprisoned as of December 1 this year. (Reuters)

• An Afghan village shrivels in worst drought in decades (AP)

• ‘A great suffering’: Starvation and the collapse of Afghan health care (Politico)

• New Zealand to ban smoking for next generation in bid to outlaw habit by 2025 (Guardian)

• What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast — Adverse early experiences can make young minds inflexible, while a carefree childhood has clear cognitive benefits. (WSJ)

• Where the Despairing Log On, and Learn Ways to Die — It has the trappings of popular social media, a young audience and explicit content on suicide that other sites don’t allow. It is linked to a long line of lives cut short. (NYT)

• Dinosaur Tracks Show the Fearsome Predators Had Usain Bolt Speed (WSJ)

• ‘You Know, If I Were You, I’d Go After Finland,’ Says Biden Trying To Dissuade Putin From Invading Ukraine (The Onion)

FRIDAY’S LYRICS

“I Shall Be Released”

By Bob Dylan

They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here

I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

They say every man needs protection
They say that every man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall

I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

Now, yonder stands a man in this lonely crowd
A man who swears he's not to blame
All day long I hear him shouting so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released