Strange Bedfellows Department

I don't say this very often, but I agree with Tim Graham. Journalisming isn't very hard. For Matt Bai to compare it to practicing medicine in the ER is a little...unseemly. At its most basic level, being a journalist is rather trivial -- particularly in the Bai school of thought, where you write down what somebody said and then think up some clever imagery for the way their eyebrows wiggle while they talk. Indeed, it's because writing and journalisming are pretty easy that I hardly think of them as my job, and have trouble understanding those who do. Too often, I think, journalists conceive of their duties as paying proper respect to a set of techniques that comprise some Platonic Good known as Journalism. Under this rubric, the relevant metrics are really about how many opposing quotes you've got, and whether you're the first with the story, and how your lede looks, and a variety of other things that render your responsibilities technical, rather than informative or ideological, in nature. It's rather reductive, and doesn't encourage, in my opinion, a very strong product.

As I see my job, I'm paid to spend a fair amount of time learning about policy, reading think tank reports, talking to experts, studying academic research, and better understanding important events, so that I can then deploy this other tool in my box -- writing -- to correctly explain, contextualize, and evaluate the world for my readers. My ultimate responsibility is to my readers and the country's larger political dialogue -- it's the impact I have, not the product I turn out, that measures my success. And under that rubric, the Journalism Gods just aren't an important constituency.