Draft Four: When the money is gone, then what?

The world is both a graveyard and a construction site.

A lot of recent talk in independent media has been around the gutting of USAID funds, which impacted journalists in about 1,000 newsrooms and civil society organizations, in more than 30 countries around the globe. It started as a three-months-long pause for review, but I doubt the funding will resume. The media funding aspect of USAID is just one part though – what we’re witnessing is Elon Musk wrecking an organization more than 60 years old, one that backed essential projects: from famine detection, to fixing energy scarcity, to preventing child-trafficking.

But let’s stick with journalism for a while. In Moldova there was a strong USAID presence in the media sphere, which I myself benefited from on a couple of occasions when I went there to do trainings. For example, Moldova.org, a small storytelling-oriented newsroom very dear to me, had the majority of their grant funding through these projects. (Help them bounce back!)

In Romania, USAID ended its official mission in 2007, when we joined the EU. And there was little American money for journalism here for more than a decade after; I know because we looked for it through the 2010s. (Journalism adjacent funding for civil society organizations was more prevalent). But then COVID hit, the war in Ukraine started, and suddenly there were journalism grants given through USAID intermediary organizations, and many news upstarts – especially small to medium ones – lined up for one. We’re not talking Moldova-level dependency, but enough to cover a chunk of the salaries and other costs. That money is now gone.

And it’s likely not coming back, says my friend Peter Erdelyi in Hungary. Peter writes the amazing Media Finance Monitor and he has put the cuts in the context of a funding environment where relying on any one solution puts an organization on the line. Plus, a perfect storm is gathering: Trump-style nationalistic inward turning, growing autocratic tendencies and media capture, insufficient skills to develop more varied and complimentary business models, and a consumption shift towards personality-driven information delivery. (Meaning we’d rather believe Influencer Maria than a newsroom of 12 people devoted to the public interest).

The risks are obvious. Here’s Peter again:

A generation of journalists who built something from nothing in the 2010s, who weathered authoritarian pressure and market collapse, who learned to write grant applications in their second or third language – they're now facing a choice not between comfort and mission, but between basic financial security and the work they've dedicated their lives to.

One could see such a reckoning coming, and it’s here.

Let me add another piece to this, one about identity. In the past few days I’ve seen numerous colleagues post walls of text about the importance of independent journalism, about how transparency of funding has always been a core belief, about how it’s grants that have made important investigative work possible, and so on. They were simultaneously fundraising calls, a defense of personal integrity, and a nostalgic-sounding plea for the worth of the work.

The social media comments to these show that, generally, people’s support for journalism is not based on trust or a thoughtful review of the work, but on tribal adherence. And many commenters are now ecstatic to see funding withdrawn and newsrooms pondering closing – especially those they deem “foreign agents” spreading “progressive propaganda” or the “woke-mind virus” or whatever.

(There is a large part of this story that is our fault – we’ve largely brought this irrelevance onto ourselves, often through neglecting the needs of our public. I’ve written plenty about that here and recently my friend Patrick Boehler touched on it brilliantly – design for audience relevance, not for your perceived social significance.)

I never believed people understood or cared about how the basics of journalism function, especially the work of gathering and synthesizing information. And for years we didn’t bother showing our process. Which is why I remain a believer that transparency of process, funding, values is vital, but not a miracle cure this late in the game.

For years I’ve seen people of all ideologies and walks of life mistrust work based on subjective interpretations stemming from personal backgrounds, taste, or allegiance. I never thought that as a journalist I was the enemy (now it’s different), but I did understand we were lucky to be tolerated.

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My mother spent most of her last month alive, in bed, some of it connected to an oxygen tank that looked like a missile that crashed through the bedroom window. She didn’t move much because of the cancer ravaging her lungs, so she laid under the covers, often watching TV. In those last few weeks, I often sat with her. The big story back then, in early 2007, was the potential impeachment, by Parliament, of then president Traian Băsescu. The charges and details matter less, because the script in such stories is familiar to all of us. Some of the media painted him as the villain we need to defeat, some of it as the hero we needed to save.

If my mother had any political leanings, I don’t think they were ever clear to me – but she kind of wanted for this man to stay president. Or at least she didn’t like how television hosts and their guests were bending over backwards to come up with reasons to push him out. She watched both TV networks that cheered for him, as well as TV networks plotting his downfall – and it’s the latter that seemed to bring her down. One night, she turned off the TV, dizzy from the morphine and sleeping pills, mumbling incoherently. She was saying something about journalists being crap or doing crap work or something of that nature. Then, she capped it off with this: “That’s how all of you are”.

I hadn’t even turned 26, my whole experience up to that point had been in newspapers – you know: dead trees with ink on them –, and I was lumped in with amoral TV hosts that were more circus clowns that reporters. Maybe it was the sleeping pills, or maybe in her foggy state she didn’t talk about journalists. Still, I will never forget those words, and I always remember them when I see my colleagues hold forth about the virtuousness of our work, compared to the really bad journalists.

Many of my colleagues are right. They are, in theory, doing the work democracies need. But people like my mother can’t evaluate who is right when everyone is pontificating and playing the victim – it’s not their job. And our job is not to lecture them, but to serve them. And even so, they might still think you’re American propaganda, or a secret service plant, or a Soros-acolyte, or what have you.

Right now we’ve been dealt a shitty hand: no allies, no trust, no money, no vision to innovate or serve better. That sounds like a recipe for irrelevance. Or true freedom to try different approaches.

„The world is both a graveyard and a construction site”, writes film critic Andrei Gorzo in his spellbinding memoir about understanding his father by way of novelist Graham Greene. We pass through both, day after day after day.

Snapped this surreptitiously at the Prado in Madrid; its by Sigmar Polke and it says: To see things as they are.

“While Spain was voting I was checking my e-mail”, is one of my favorite lines from Ben Lerner’s amazing Leaving the Atocha Station. The book was published in 2011, and it’s about a young American poet in Madrid growing up, and trying to make sense of his role in a world lost in translation, and a city reeling from the train bombings of 2004.

I re-read it just last week, while on vacation in Madrid, and felt some of the protagonist’s angst. All of the signs of the apocalypse above – and more! – were happening while I was gawking at 500-year-old paintings in the Prado (like Lerner’s Adam did), trying to discern whether I’m having an aesthetic experience or not, and feeling guilty for trying to do that while my profession is being squeezed.

I realize the degree of self-indulgence and privilege involved in this kind of guilt, but it’s also a form of defense against the savior complex that perks up in times of crisis, something journalists often give in to. Many talented colleagues in their early thirties are walking out, while others bemoan that all is lost in the world without journalism as they understand it. Maybe it is. Maybe it won’t be. And maybe it’ll be lost even with journalism in it.

I love that Lerner’s Adam doesn’t believe his poetry will change the world – on the contrary.

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it.

I’m saying all this because it might get worse, or more contentious, maybe even more violent. “We’re all imperfect people doing imperfect work”, journalist Ed Yong wrote recently in his newsletter. “Just thoughtfully choose one local thing and do it.”

I am no longer in a newsroom, but I still work with journalists, and still believe in the craft of storytelling. For the moment, I don’t think defending journalism with a capital J is the best use of my time – I picked working on small things a few people said they needed, and even trusted, and might pay for. It keeps me sane in the chaos, and it’s the only advice I can offer: pick your thing, and do it well.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Andrei Gorzo’s beautiful memoir is called Ce am învățat de la Graham Greene (What I Learned from Graham Greene). If you’re in Romania, rush to a bookstore and get it. Today. Andrei adamantly writes against his family memoir as a form of healing, but I don’t think he’ll mind if that’s the effect it had on this reader.

2. “You don’t get a prize for accuracy, you get a prize for intention”, says Cal Newport about his time-blocking productivity method, which is something I also turn to when overwhelmed at work.

3. I came across Newport’s video in Adam Thomas’ wonderful newsletter Theory of Change (this one is a recent example), which devotes every issue to a framework of management, productivity, thinking etc. It’s a joy, it’s short, and it’s a reminder that doing things with intention is still a choice for many.

4. I also want to make a direct plea for you to check out Peter’s newsletter – it’s not just a chronicle of media funding, and a resource of funding opportunities: it’s also a reminder that we don’t deserve money just because we call ourselves journalists, and that there’s plenty we can still do to earn it.

5. Another thing I did in Madrid was go to the movies – specifically to the awesome theater-bar Sala Equis. And I saw Anora. Maybe I’m the only one this late to it, but oh my God try and see it as quickly as possible – I promise it’ll be a rare uplifting experience.

6. The Overton window is wide-open for people calling for the destruction of institutions, writes my friend Natalia Antelava. What' will that mean for us?