Do Journalists Need to Be Brands?

From a story on espiers.medium.com by Elizabeth Spiers headlined “Do Journalists Need to Be Brands?”:

This week’s intra-mural media kerfluffle revolves around backlash to the idea that journalists need to be brands themselves — apart from the institutions they work for. It was precipitated by an article in Insider about The New York Times and retention problems potentially caused by the Times’ approach to outside projects.

At the center of this conversation on Twitter were two high-profile Times journalists, Maggie Haberman, and Taylor Lorenz, the latter of whom recently left the Times for The Washington Post. The short version of what happened is that Lorenz pointed to the Insider article (in which she is quoted) and affirmed that it’s important for younger journalists especially to develop themselves as brands and Haberman responded by accusing Lorenz of attention-seeking, and a host of other established journalists chimed in with whatever the Tweet equivalent is of a vomit emoji, mostly triggered by the word “brand” but also by the dynamic at play between Lorenz and Haberman.

Some Inside Baseball, for Context

This is all very inside-baseball, but frankly, if you’re reading an article titled, “Do Journalists Need Be Brands?” you’re the kind of person already has strong opinions on the topic and knows who both Haberman and Lorenz are, so I’m just going to unapologetically lean into media navel-gazing here. And I’m going to take a side: I believe Lorenz is correct, and Haberman’s repulsion by this idea is partly a function of the fact that despite having a high-profile book deal and a constant stream of TV appearances, she believes that she is not branding herself, and that her work is just doing all of this on its own. She also has no idea what it’s like to face the kind of job insecurity people Lorenz’s age do, and barring some Jayson Blair-level scandal will never ever be fired or laid off by the Times. She is also well paid, which is not true of everyone who works at the Times, especially on the editorial side.

This is also a function of how both of them got to the Times in the first place and how they view their own successes. Haberman’s father is legendary Times journalist Clyde Haberman, and her mother is a high profile PR person who is well connected in media herself. Haberman is an award winning journalist whose abilities might be extraordinary, but we don’t know if her trajectory would have been different if she had to knock on the front door with an unsolicited resume — and neither does she.

Lorenz did not grow up without privilege (Greenwich, Connecticut is not Slapout, Alabama**) but she moved into journalism from a digital background that wasn’t journalism, and does not have the typical trajectory of a Times journalist, or the Ivy League credentials they say are not important but they absolutely pay attention to. Ergo, Lorenz was regarded as a bit of an outsider internally, and some people tend to be dismissive of young women who cover beats they regard as lesser.

Ironically, this is also part of why Lorenz’s profile rose so quickly. She covered web culture, but that often overlapped with tech culture, and tech coverage generally. As a function of that, she was targeted by a high profile tech CEO and VC, Balaji Srinivasan, and that resulted in waves of harassment and nonsense for Lorenz because Srinivasan was able to mobilize a bunch of neoreactionary dudebros who resent the fact that journalists have the temerity to criticize Silicon Valley at all. And he targeted her intentionally, because she’s young, because she’s a woman, and because she wrote for Styles, which meant that he could portray her as essentially unserious. He thought she was more vulnerable to this kind of attack than, say, Kara Swisher, who reports on tech qua tech, and who would have eaten him for lunch (and has, on several occasions).

When this happened, I do not believe people like Haberman inside the Times, understood what was going on. They just saw Lorenz all over the Internet, on TV, being increasingly recognized as one of the faces of The New York Times. Lorenz was accused of drawing attention to herself and when she pushed back on the harassment, was told that she couldn’t take criticism. But what Lorenz was getting wasn’t criticism. Attempting to doxx a journalist and texting them rape threats might be a critique of sorts, but let’s not pretend it’s legitimate discourse, or that Lorenz is thin-skinned to be disturbed by it. But the internal perception, as I understand it, is that Lorenz had not earned the right to all of this attention, even if she was not asking for it.

This is ridiculous, of course. The attention economy is not something you can control, or insert yourself into, willfully, any time you want. Nor can you really take yourself out of it, if people are determined to talk about you. And Lorenz has unique occupational hazard in that she has to be extremely online, because web culture is her actual beat.

But This Is Not Unique to The Times

So some of this is about Lorenz and Haberman specifically, but this kind of dynamic is not unique to the Times. It happens at every large legacy institution where there are two classes of journalists: the ones who have tenure, and the ones who don’t. The tenured lifers think they don’t need to brand build — even though they do, every day — because they know they’re protected by their institutions. They can afford to roll their eyes at the idea and behave as it’s gauche to promote your own work for two reasons: they don’t believe they’ll ever need to operate outside of their institutions because they have job security, and they also take for granted the army of colleagues they have that promote their work for them. Haberman doesn’t have to be extremely online all the time (though she is, at least on Twitter) because she has a team of audience people who promote her work on social media, a team of circulation professionals who work to expand the paper’s (and by extension her) reach, people in the comms department who help with things like TV booking. She has to do less work to brand herself because other people do it.

I’ve written for the Times Opinion section several times recently and my personal experience with the Times has been wonderful, in part because there are so many people there invested in making sure that my work is good and that it gets seen. Inasmuch as I have a brand, they are making it better.

I wrote a piece about adoption and abortion recently, and after I got a deluge of right wing threats after Dr. Oz, Meghan McCain, Fox News, Ben Shapiro and the New York Post went to great lengths to portray me as would-be baby killer, they were supportive. The fact checker on the piece had to call my birth mom, Maria, and Maria burst into tears and talked to her at length about how devastated she was that we had missed years together. I learned this from Maria, not the fact-checker, who handled it with great sensitivity, and I don’t believe it’s technically part of her job to console distraught sources. But I appreciated it.

Part of the benefit of being at a large institution is that there are a lot of people invested in looking out for your work and you don’t have that as a freelancer.

But:

Taylor Lorenz Is Right

For normie journos, making sure you have a brand outside of your institution isn’t a matter of vanity, it’s a matter of practicality. The media industry is more volatile than it’s ever been, and job hopping is less about boredom and fickleness, than it is about waves of layoffs, the inability to secure raises high enough to meet cost-of-living requirements without switching jobs, and changing job requirements that add responsibilities without pay. There’s a reason why unionization is increasingly common at media outlets. These are not things the tenured class worries about.

This would seem to be common sense, but the word “brand” specifically appears to send people into paroxysms of revulsion. But all of the performative gagging looks silly when you just substitute a word journalists respect: reputation. Journalism is one of the few industries where your name is on your work, in public, all of the time. With the exception of The Economist, bylines exist at nearly every news outlet.

Now, I imagine the tenured folks would say, isn’t the byline enough? To which I would say, no it isn’t. Look at the size of your book deal and ask yourself if you would have that book deal if you were not promoted by your institution, individually, and if readers did not recognize your name. Probably not.

Which brings us to the issue of the Times (and again, other legacy institutions) and outside income. Sometimes people assume that prestige publications must pay well because they’re prestige publications. In my experience the opposite is true. In the Insider article, Times management says its pay is competitive, and maybe it is for superstar journos — you know, the ones who have brands — but most of the people I know who’ve gone to the Times have taken pay cuts. This is part of the reason why some of them want outside projects: they need the money.

This is true for a lot of people. When you see journalists writing books on the side and teaching or doing TV or podcast projects, it’s generally not because they’re attention seekers who need to be everywhere; it’s because it helps them pay the rent. So part of the conflict internally at the Times is about who is allowed to do that with no pushback internally, and who isn’t.

This is also happening in an environment where a lot of media companies are trying to claw back rights that generally belong to writers. The Wall Street Journal, for example, tried to get reporters to pay to use their own reporting in books they write. So normie journos are very aware that the scope of what they can do with their work could be shrinking and they have to fight to retain those rights.

What Does This Mean for Most Journalists?

I teach at NYU in the graduate school of journalism. My class is an intro course for Studio 20, which is a digital-first program run by Jay Rosen. Our students are heavily international, and not quite mid-career, but generally not straight from undergrad programs, either.

My class specifically is about innovation in media and students are required to conceptualize and develop a new media product, prototype it, and come up with a plan to make it sustainable. Not all of our students are writers, but many are.

So at the beginning of the program, Jay does an orientation session that differs every year, but he consistently says two things up front: you need a brand, and side projects are good. And we tell students this because we know they’re going into a crazy media market and they will have to fight their way into jobs.

This does not mean shouting ME ME ME on the Internet all the time; it means talking about your work regularly, being present where your audience lives, saying yes to opportunities, and being fluent in different media. Most importantly, it means not assuming that someone else is going to do it for you, because unless you’re already a tenured personality at a legacy media company, that’s not going to happen.

Freelancers understand this intuitively because they can’t survive without it. Over-reliance on one source of income is dangerous, and if people are not familiar with your byline, it is infinitely harder to get work.

Not having to do all of this is a privilege. If you don’t have to do it, you should probably be grateful— because it is a lot of work — and maybe write your audience development people a nice thank you note.

So I’m going to write a service-y list of minimum things you should be doing if you’re a journalist to build your brand — ahem, reputation — and will link back to it here. It’ll be the same advice that I give my students, and things I do myself. But no should feel bad about having to promote their work.

There’s a class element to all of this, too. I wrote about for (lol) The New York Times, here. There’s a kind of elitism that says it’s important to pretend that hard things come easy, and a disdain for people whose professional arcs carry the stench of effort. That’s the underlying sentiment of “the work speaks for itself”, because in this media landscape, it never does. And even the elites, the tenured people, promote themselves; they just affect the appearance of having not done so, and often rely on others to perform promotional functions they think are beneath them.

To which I say: good work, if you can get it! But most of us can’t, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.