When 2023 started, I decided not to worry too much about the next chapter of my professional life. I’d look around, pay attention to what sparks my interest, try a few different things to pay the bills, build on the energy. But I did place a marker in time – not for figuring it all out, but maybe to see some seeds sprout.
Mid-August.
It was a symbolic and corny decision, with a simple backstory. On August 8, 2003, I flew from Bucharest all the way to St. Louis, then caught a ride to Columbia, Missouri, to start a master’s in journalism, arguably the two most transformative years of my life.
A decade later, on August 10, 2013, I flew from Bucharest to Boston, for what turned out to be a restorative year of studying and reflecting at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
Wouldn’t it be nice, I said to myself earlier this year, if August was once more the first step of an adventure with the potential to change everything?
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Last week I wrote about failure, and it seemed like an appropriate moment to do so. But then, as the weekend neared, a few things clicked into place, and I said “yes” to attending CUNY’s Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership.
It means I’ll go back to school, for a full academic year, to learn more about changing journalism business models, building product strategy, managing innovation in newsrooms, and leading creative teams. (No, I’m not leaving Bucharest. The program is remote, and we’ll meet on Slack and Zoom, because participants are working full time, but it does include three week-long New York residencies, the first of which is coming up in two weeks).
I’m simultaneously excited, terrified, and feel really really lucky.
In this letter, I’ll go through the latter two, as the excitement part has to do with what made me apply, which I’ve written about. On top of this, I promise to write about my first week in the program (and my first classes) for the September 10 letter.
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Let’s start with the “terrified” part.
When I got turned down for a Reuters fellowship in the spring, I felt rejected, and I asked myself plenty of questions about my worth and skills. When I sent in my materials to CUNY, I was just as worried.
I’ve known for a few weeks that I was accepted, but I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate because I didn’t know how much of the cost the program could cover. When that info came, it was less than half of the cost. I froze for a day or two, felt like a failure for not having saved money to be able to afford it, then sulked at the larger failure of the systems that make some opportunities hard to access from this part of the world. I also did the math: I needed to cover the equivalent of one-year salary (as it stood when we closed DoR).
I was reacting from a position of both difficulty and privilege, and this is important to remember: setbacks hit differently and we have different coping mechanisms and access to resources.
It took me a few days to gather my thoughts and answer a few questions, the most important of which was “why did I want to attend?”. If it was just about status and ego, then I should back out. But it wasn’t: I can envision my joy at learning and meeting people, but also the structures I can create that would hopefully be of use to others. I’m at my best when I’m learning and applying new ideas and frameworks, and this is a unique opportunity to do that.
The truth is that such a program comes with baked in discomfort. It confronts my limits, it sharpens the voice of my inner critic (“who made you a news leader and innovator?”), and it pushes me to make a financial commitment that, as of yet, I can’t back up.
I have heard my inner critic before: he’s a terrible bastard, and we’ve tried to co-exist for years. He’s made me sabotage myself, he’s turned me into a coward a few times, he’s pushed me to play the victim. But I’ve become better at handling him. He’s become milder in the past decade, as he realized he’ll always have a place to stay (and my ear). I’ll let him speak, let him keep me up at night occasionally, but most often than not, I’ll ignore him, suck it up and make the decision, try the thing, send the email. He wins sometimes – especially when I’m tired or when real life tragedy piles up. That’s when he pulls out his favorite sign, the one saying “I told you so”.
Jokes aside, I always tell younger people who say they want to get rid of all fears and anxieties that it’s an ambitious goal. But what if you don’t succeed? Does that mean you won’t do any of the things you dream of? That hurdle might prove impossible to clear. What if you found ways to negotiate with your fears and anxieties, lower their voice, make peace with them? It’s not a recipe; it’s what has worked for me. If I got anything done, it’s not because I rid myself of any fears, but because I’ve let them walk beside me, and sprinted away often enough so they’d be left behind.
While I’m deeply humbled to be in the program, I also believe I belong. The inner critic has resigned himself that I’ll write this sentence despite his loud protests.
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That still leaves the very tangible issue of money. The reason I was able to say “yes” is because the school has offered a generous payment plan: monthly installments running through next spring. If I had to pay it all now, I couldn’t do it. So, I made it future me’s problem, and it’ll be a tough one to solve, as I’ve depleted my savings this year with travelling and renovating an apartment.
I don’t know what I’ll do yet. My family has loaned me some money, I have some training work scheduled for September, and I have to make a plan to earn the rest.
Monetizing these letters is not on the list, although many of you were gracious to suggest they’re worth paying for. That’s not their point. What’s more likely is that on top of my existing project commitments (consulting, judging, teaching), I’ll try to come up with some workshops – less sessions where I pretend I can teach writing (I can’t), but ideally sessions where we unpack stuckness you might be facing with creative / journalism projects. (I actually make for a decent editor).
I’ll let you know when I plan something. And if you have any other ideas, I’m here.
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Now, the “luck” part.
Do I deserve to be part of such a program? Yes. Did I work to get here? Yes. Did it also require thousands of points of luck across the four decades of my life? Hell yeah.
I work a lot. I’ve often been the hardest worker on a project or in a team. It’s something I inherited from my parents. But that doesn’t mean much. Many other people work hard. Many work harder. Many certainly do harder work. And yet not all get similar rewards.
“Meritocracy” is powerful myth, and it’s an insidious one. A few summers ago, I read political philosopher Michael Sandel’s powerful The Tyranny of Merit, and came away with an enriched sense of what merit is and isn’t. Sandel argues that meritocracy – a belief system in which individuals are rewarded based on their skills, talents, and achievements –, has led to societal divisions and challenges. Yes, it’s praised for being fair and just, but it has inadvertently contributed to inequality, polarization, and a sense of unfairness.
How? A few thoughts:
“Winners must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work.”
Implicitly those less successful (or those who are poor) must not be trying hard enough.
Meritocracy leads to a technocratic class enamored with itself and its ideas, who then act less from a place of solidarity, and more from one of condescension. (Yes, I am thinking of the failure of a whole range of people who have entered Romanian politics in the past decade to show humility and care.)
Meritocracy can lead to concentration of power and the rise of an elite class – which then paves the way for surges of populists and reactionaries. (See modern ring wing movements).
Sandel goes on to argue we should stop regarding meritocracy as a “winners deserve their wins” because it leads us to understanding “common good” and democracy as projects of maximizing individual interests. It would mean that people who succeed deserve what they have, while people who don’t succeed, do not. But we already know there is no equality of opportunity, and we certainly struggle with sacrifice and solidarity.
“The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project. For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient.”
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I hope you read the book as it’s a provocative take, especially when you live in a nation of failed systems like Romania, where meritocracy does indeed sounds eons better than cronyism, or the elevation of “leave it as it is” as a standard for good work: you see it everywhere, from policy making, to construction, to writing.
Chance has played an outsized role in my life. From the start I probably had better opportunities than many of my class mates, because both my parents had been the ones that broke the cycle of generational poverty. My grandparents were maids, secretaries, railway employees and construction workers. My father and mother were the first to go to college, and they became doctors. I was first of all lucky they didn’t push me to follow in their path.
When I think back to my first journalistic endeavor, the high school newspaper, it happened because my dad gave me and my friends Ciprian the idea to do a summer camp bulletin board at the end of our freshman year. We would stay up and night and write on it and tack it to the window of the canteen. One day, an older colleague, Ioana, said: “You should start a school paper when we return”.
We did. But what if my dad didn’t push us, or if Ioana didn’t say anything?
When I was in journalism school in Bucharest, I spent a whole year at the Center for Independent Journalism in a pilot program that extracted 13 students from the 3rd year for an alternative schooling experience: we would be taught by working American journalists who were Fulbright and Knight fellows in the region, make a newspaper (it was called The Bullet; I designed the logo), and learn by doing.
Being the first generation in that program was serendipity. It’s what made me decide I wanted to study journalism in the US. It’s why twenty years ago I made that trip to Missouri, and it’s because of the professors in it that I was able to have an application strong enough to receive a full scholarship. Otherwise, not even my supportive parents could have helped me.
Then it was chance that after my master’s I worked for a year with two iconic figures, Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, and it was mad crazy luck that during that year they worked on the second edition of The Elements of Journalism, which meant I got to do reporting and I got to write for one of the most important books of our profession.
Not to mention DoR. We’ve told this story so many times, it’s become folklore: DoR was born because a group of frustrated and complaining-prove journalists (yes, that’s how we roll in this business) got drunk one night and convinced one another they could assemble a better magazine than the ones the commercial press was publishing.
But there’s an even bigger element of chance to that story: that night of drinking came after a design talk by Raymond Bobar, later our co-founding art director. Ray was initially supposed to deliver that talk two weeks before, when half of us who eventually attended it were out of town. But the day of the talk, the power went out in the venue. The organizers rescheduled Ray’s talk. A bunch of us attended. Then we went to a pub in the Old Town to drink. The rest is history.
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I don’t believe there is success without chance, and I also don’t believe chance alone can guarantee success. When students ask me if they should apply for jobs, or if they should apply to study abroad, or if they should pitch or story or send reminders I always say: do it.
The coach of our high school soccer team – which wasn’t very successful – didn’t have much wisdom to impart, but he kept repeating: “Take a shot on goal. Something might go in.” It’s ridiculous, but there’s some truth to it. I’m a bigger fan of how hockey great Wayne Gretzky put it: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”.
If you play, you have a chance.
But you have to play.
And you have to have a chance to play.
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This is my hope for myself (and for us). That we play. That we give our best. That we are able to appreciate our own efforts. That we acknowledge how lucky we are and how lucky we might have been over the years. That we say thank you to the people who gave us chances. That we are grateful for those still rooting for us. That we pay it forward, that we do things for others without them asking for it, that we coach them to play, that we create “chances”, and that, if possible, we engineer such serendipity for as many people as we can.
SIDE DISHES
Some never had a chance. This includes a half million of Romanian children that we abandoned in the past half a century. Muzeul Abandonului chronicles this national trauma, now with a pop-up exhibition as well, which will be open in Piața Amzei until September 7 (Go!). My former Ana Maria Ciobanu also made a serial podcast for the Museum. Last year she also wrote this story about the trauma of international adoptions (in English).
The Women’s World Cup ends today. Here is a great piece on what it means that the US isn’t winning it. Or that Spain is in the final even though it’s a team divided. Or on how the Matildas are everywhere.
Speaking of elites – music festivals have certainly seem to have begun catering to them. This is a great opinion piece on the current mall-like feeling of festivals in Romania. (But also abroad).
The National put out two new songs this week; this one is Alphabet City.
I saw Mumford and Sons at Sziget in Budapest last Sunday – one of just a handful of shows they are playing this year, after not touring since 2019. It was magical. And, for obvious reasons, The Cave hits particularly hard this year.
Absolutely love it:) these august months 10 years apart, the chance encounters, the opportunities and the hard work that led you here! Congratulations!