Draft Four: Be a verb, not a noun

Living and navigating between boundaries.

Monday night, a hotel conference room outside the Bucharest city center – standard chairs & carpeting, terrible lighting. My spot was towards the back wall, facing two semicircles of chairs, where about twenty NGO leaders sat. They all worked in social services, serving vulnerable groups from youth at risk, to people with disabilities, to migrants.

I came for an off the record conversation about their relationship with the media. They didn’t need much prodding – a woman said she was done giving her time to journalists who get it wrong, don’t understand systems, and make her look like “an idiot” in their reports. The others weren’t far behind: journalists re-traumatize the populations the NGOs serve, they are careless, don’t mention the organizations’ name, and some even demand money in exchange for coverage (supposedly because journalists are poor). One said he was done with the press – they’ll make their own podcast.

They were right.

I could stand there and defend my trade, play the expert, mansplain the importance of journalism to democracy, maybe scold them for not paying for news. But listening was a better way to understand the problems they were facing, accepting their stance, and seeing if we can navigate our way out from where they were, not from where I think thought they should be.

We took a picture at the end and ate apples. Apparently, we did well together.

*

I have to confess something upfront: in my self-righteous moments over the past year I would play the victim to my friends and tell them the main reason it was hard to find a job – as opposed to project hopping – was because nobody understands what I do, or what I can do. (Sitting with NGOs for hours being among my superpowers). The wonderful NGO folks didn’t exactly get it, either. I didn’t work in a newsroom, but I’m associated with some. I teach at the university, write, but for myself, and was there with them as both a guest, a moderator, as well as some kind of trainer and coach. Some kind of “jack of all trades, master of none”, but it wasn’t awful.

*

Answering the question “what do you do?” has been tougher for me as the year has gone on.

People look for nouns: I’m a reporter for, an editor at, the manager of, a teacher at, a consultant for. But what I’d rather supply are verbs: I listen, connect the dots, suggest, re-arrange, ask, write, organize, streamline, challenge, question, change.

Let me illustrate this dilemma with snapshots from this week.

It started with editing a story and guiding a reporter through its next steps. Then came the NGO meeting. On Tuesday I interviewed two feminist activists about sexual harassment in universities (last letter’s topic), as well as a philosophy professor about the value of codes of ethics.

Part of my conversation with him was about how we’ve been spending the better part of recent history breaking things down into components, defining more and more specialized units (or jobs) in society, until we got to a point where fewer and fewer people are working at the intersections of them. He is, himself, a philosopher, a teacher of the ethics of technology, and a poet. (See how reductive nouns are?).

Tuesday night ended with a class on operations and then going with my friend Carla to see a Delia concert – Delia being a huge Romanian popstar who also travels easily between worlds. (The show was disappointing to the point of being heartbreaking – mostly because it was a blatant ode to her sponsor, Coca Cola, but that story – about selling your whole self to brands – is for a different time).

On Wednesday I returned to the badly lit hotel and another session with NGOs on how media helps or gets in the way of social issues. This time I was alongside social media superstar Silviu Istrate, also known as Faiăr, a Twitch-streamer turned Gen Z icon. My students love him – he was our most requested guest two years in a row. They call him a journalist, although he goes through great pains to say he isn’t one, although he arguably has a similar type of impact on the world. What he does wonderfully is bring the relevant (but abstract) topics of the day to an audience of 20-year-olds. (He was at the NGO forum to talk about taking on the gambling and sports betting industries).

Silviu Istrate speaking to my students earlier this month. Largest attendance this semester.

After that session I rushed to class at the Journalism school – we talked about focusing stories and ran through an exercise where everyone summarized their profiles in progress in 10 words or less.

Then I returned to the office where we hosted a wine and pie dinner for a dozen young journalists from different outlets. We talked about editing as coaching (rather than fixing, which is what most of them get), and I got home after 11pm and much conversation about the future of our business model, the place of young people in newsrooms, and so on.

Thursday morning I was with Recorder, arguably the hottest Romanian newsroom of the past few years. Their video investigations top YouTube trending charts and push past 1 million views in a matter of days, and I’ve been spending an average of 3-4 days a month with them this year, supporting their management and business development initiatives. Sometimes we joke that I’m like a therapist for the leadership team, but what I actually do is less glam: usually cheer them on to take non-editorial projects past the finish line (like their most recent survey – did you fill it out?)

Then I had an interview with another activist, a call about a panel on media innovation I’ll be on in Budapest (for which the imposter syndrome is kicking up a dust cloud), and the day ended with an apartment building meeting – one in which everyone bitched about something (mostly our trash bins being stolen AGAIN!), and no real decisions were taken. (I did convert those hours into 5-6 action items due over the next month).

And then, one last weekday, where I stopped by the Google offices for a morning coffee, visited with Recorder again, and then spent the afternoon with a lovely crew of Gen Z journalists and creators who are still in the storming phase of working together to make a documentary about their generation. My job in the group? To pull ideas out of them, keep the conversation constructive, and then push them further.

My point here is not about that I’m doing too much – although yes, I overcommitted, and please, don’t book yourself like this too often. The body will say “no” – mine is doing that today.

My point is rather about the impossibility of telling people what I am. Seems like I’m a guy in meetings large and small, who sometimes listens, sometimes speaks, and then hopes things happen.

*

Are you one of these people? Seemingly in many different places, and having trouble finding the right noun? Are you crossing disciplines to the dismay of your peers? Have your friends told you they don’t get how your interests combine?

Welcome.

It turns out we have a tribe. And a name – at least I’m agitating for one: The interstitionaries. And we have a high priestess, my friend Jenn Brandel, whom I mentioned many times this year, an innovator working at the intersection of journalism, civic spaces, technology and the likes. Jenn recently published a combo essay-radio piece about people like us, and we get a fancy pep talk:

“We do not function well with rigid job descriptions or within organizations. We’re misfits who work on a systems level, transcending any one function and making no sense in a world that wants to explain and contain everything into discrete categories. It’s hard for us to sum ourselves up on LinkedIn or at a dinner party. Whereas job titles are nouns, we’re verbs.”

*

Jenn’s recent piece jumps off from a recent medical discovery – the interstitium, an organ, or a system, or a network – that for years scientists believed it wasn’t anything but dried out collagen. But a few years back, a group of scientists saw something new in live tissue: not the dead wall visible under the traditional microscope, and more of a sponge that is very much alive:

“[A microscope] that snakes into the body through one of two holes (pie- or butt-), now enables us to see and study living tissue inside a breathing body with a beating heart. And once this special endoscope shone its light just below the skin into the collagen layer, it revealed something much more like a sponge than a wall, with fluid rushing between a fractal, honeycombed network. 

It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered. It’s also a conduit for cancer spread.”

This is mind blowing: an organ that we missed, present throughout the body, that moves more fluid than the vascular system, that is also partly responsible for metastases.

The radio version of this story, which Jenn reported alongside another curious person with multiple interests – Lulu Miller of Radiolab – goes in deeper into the science of the interstitium, but also interrogates the limits of our knowledge. Turns out that one theory is that while Western science didn’t know about the interstitium, Eastern medicine (think acupuncture) had long figured out there must be something that explained acupuncture meridians (it might be the interstitium network, actually).

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Neil Theise, one of the people who got interested in the interstitium, is a pathologist who also works at the intersection of science and spirituality, and who published a book this year called Notes on Complexity. In the Radiolab piece he gets emotional when quoting from a Zen master who used to say that “in the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities, in the mind of the expert there are few”.

*

The benefits and drawbacks to that are obvious.

Expertise leads to efficiency, to simplification, to action. But it also leads to dogma, blindsides, and a lack of curiosity. I know many journalists who would have walked into a room with NGOs and lectured them on what they should know about what journalist is and isn’t. I have seen colleagues talk about in terms of “right” and “wrong” about other colleagues; newsrooms so enamored with their view of the world that the moment others do something different, they brand it as “bad” or “not journalism”; students so disinterested in listening to one another that you can see them waiting to reply with a litany “no”s.

Not being open to possibilities is what’s making our societies dysfunctional and slow to innovate in an agitated world. The philosopher I talked to this week said something brilliant: you don’t need a rule to apply a rule. But we default to that mode of thinking because we can’t navigate complex spaces, so we try to norm everything, to infinity.

Norming is essential, yes, until you get into an in-between space, where I might lead nowhere.

Those terrifying in-between spaces in my line of work have to do with collaboration: when a reporter, and an illustrator, and an editor, and the social media person, and who knows whom else all need to work together. It’s when chaos ensues, because 8 out of 10 times everyone wants to bend the project to their will – sometimes that’s about ways of doing, about skills, about communicating a certain way, or about time spent. That leads to conflict that’s not productive because it doesn’t advance the reason we got there: to do new and special work.

*

When these collaborations work, it’s mostly because there was someone in the room who could translate for everyone, harmonize, and navigate the space in-between stakeholders. Like the interstitium in the body.

“I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy”, Jenn writers. “Most of these people I see doing this interstitionary work are women.” (I left that last sentence in there because it’s one of those generalizations that keeps proving true. It might be that women just have ego, and more desire for a better common outcome.)

This is the work I feel most energized by – connecting ideas or forms, bringing people together, or just sneaking into other kinds of systems to see things from a fresh perspective.

A year ago, as the last issue of DoR came out, we also staged a live journalism show (an interstitionary enterprise if there ever was one). What set this one show apart was that the bulk of it was made up of stories told on stage by lawyers, prosecutors, and judges. They talked about the limits of delivering justice, about being humble on the job, about what the bench teaches about decision making and so on. Next to them we had poets, performers, journalists, and musicians. For the people in the audience it was like they were served a surprise 12-course meal, with ingredients they never thought should be put together. The audience was just as mixed – as few audiences these days are. (Our partners from last year are putting on a new show again this year; let’s meet there on December 8).

These letters – you might have figure this out by now – are also a reflection of my tendency to blend things and ideas (someone recently showed me you can also blend Spotify playlists).

Of course I also fall into the trap of feeling I need to deliver one correct answer to the question of what I want to do, or who I want to be – there is a sense of security in that clarity. I am also terrified when going into situations where people wonder why I’m there – like when I trained scientists at the Polytechnic in Timișoara in storytelling earlier this year.

But then, we learn together, and see new paths.

It’s not all rosy – I do feel I need a job soon. More accurately put, I need to do less project hopping, and find a more secure footing from which to blend multiple ideas and interests. I am convinced no one will advertise it as such, nor will anyone create a “mix-and-match” role; that job crafting part is on me.

What I need (or need to find) is an organization that is not risk-averse, or dogmatic, or opposed to the idea of uncertainty. The Romanian news organizations I know or work with don’t quite fit this description – and it’s not about the work (the stories, I mean). It’s about how we understand the possibilities, how we deliver, how we challenge productively, and how we come together around the work.

Care, collaboration, curiosity, creativity, courage – that’s a tall order for any project, and I certainly couldn’t never deliver on all fronts when I led one. But if we have more orgs built like this, I do think we’d connect more dots, more ideas, more resources, more people. And give more interstitionaries places to thrive.

*

This goes for society at large. If we look at Romania’s story for the last thirty or so years, we can chart the idea that post-communism cronyism and corruption could be replaced by technocratic do-gooders or meritocracy. That’s a fantasy that fails to deliver because we expect the people and the systems they create to work flawlessly.

To do so, we do what Jenn says: “We divide knowledge into subjects, disciplines, majors, then sectors and industries and specific job titles.” And when this doesn’t work – and it most often doesn’t – we decide it was probably the fault of the person. So we kick them off the pedestal and try again.

But what if what we need is not more people with fixed expertise, but “more navigators skipping between these constructed categories to subvert and replace a perspective of separation that has reached its limits and logical conclusion”?