The State of Journalism, According to Some of the People Actually Doing It
What I've learned from interviewing journalists for Depth Perception.
I've been laid up with COVID this week, which has given me plenty of time to think about all the things I should be writing about but can't quite muster the energy for. You know how it is when you're sick: your brain feels like it's wrapped in cotton, but you're also weirdly restless and need something to occupy your mind that doesn't require too much heavy lifting.
So instead of trying to tackle whatever fresh media nonsense has emerged in the past few days, I figured this would be a good time to tell you about something else I've been working on that you might find interesting.
For the past couple of years, I've been co-writing another (free) newsletter called Depth Perception. It's published by Long Lead, and it's essentially a newsletter about journalism for journalists (and for anyone interested in how the sausage gets made). We dig into the best longform reporting, interview the people behind big investigations, and try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic industry.
One of my favorite parts of working on Depth Perception has been getting to interview journalists about their work, their process, and what they're seeing in the industry right now. These conversations have given me insights that I don't think I would have gotten anywhere else, and some of the quotes that have come out of them have really stuck with me.
Since I'm stuck on the couch anyway, I thought I'd share a few of the most memorable exchanges from recent interviews...
The clicks problem is real, and it's getting worse.
Jeff Pearlman, the legendary sports journalist behind that infamous 1999 John Rocker interview, put it bluntly when I asked him about changes in the industry: "We're just looking for clicks. Something has snapped in us in that regard… I do feel like we have replaced telling a story because it's good and interesting and maybe useful with what is going to get us the most clicks so our publication or website or TikTok feed can keep flowing and generating dough."
This isn't exactly news to anyone who's been paying attention, but hearing it from someone with Pearlman's track record — someone who's built a second career on TikTok, no less — hits differently. The incentive structure is broken, and everyone knows it.
But some journalists are finding ways around it.
Judd Legum has built Popular Information into something genuinely consequential by taking a different approach. When I asked him about that, he was clear about his mission: "Accountability journalism to me means identifying people or organizations that have a significant amount of power and then trying to hold them accountable for things that they are doing, either by uncovering those things or highlighting those things."
What makes Legum's approach work is that he's not chasing clicks — he's chasing results. And crucially, he makes his reporting free to read: "If you're going to hold people accountable, you really want as many people as possible to know about what those powerful people are doing."
This is the opposite of the paywall-everything approach that most outlets have adopted, and it's working. Legum's investigations have sparked real corporate policy changes that have improved working conditions for hundreds of thousands of employees. That's what journalism can do when it's not optimized for engagement metrics.
The old coalitions don't make sense anymore.
Garrett Graff, who hosts the Long Shadow podcast, told me something that perfectly captures how much American politics has shifted. When he worked for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, "He was a Democrat. He was in the top tier of the presidential race that year and had an 'A' rating from the NRA that we were really proud of as a campaign, because even as late as the early 2000s, the endorsement from the NRA was actually quite helpful for Democrats in certain parts of the country."
That world — where a Democrat could proudly tout NRA support — feels ancient now. As Graff put it, "As one of the former NRA lobbyists says to us in one of the interviews for Long Shadow, guns have become a real religion. That change is in some ways pretty unrecognizable to me as a New Englander and Vermonter."
This captures something important about how quickly political coalitions can shift and how journalists have to constantly recalibrate their understanding of the landscape they're covering.
Everything is connected.
Jael Holzman covers climate policy for Heatmap, but she's also written about anti-trans legislation. When I asked her about parallels between these issues, her response was fascinating: "I find that the rise of the anti-renewable energy movement at a grassroots level in this country is at least somewhat correlated with the rise of the anti-trans movement and anti-vax movement, at least recently, and the connective tissues between those movements need to be best understood by anyone who wants to deal with those issues."
This is the kind of insight you get when journalists are allowed to follow threads across beats instead of staying in rigid silos. The same forces driving climate denial are often driving anti-trans sentiment, and recognizing those connections is crucial for understanding how these movements operate.
Sources still matter most.
Nile Cappello spent years investigating child influencer exploitation before she could publish her story about a group of them known as "the Squad." When she finally found sources willing to talk, she reflected on what that meant: "These kids all could have gone straight to social media with their stories, where they would've had full control of the narrative — and profited. Instead, I had to convince them to trust me to understand their stories and translate them in a way that would resonate with the biggest audience."
In an age when everyone has a platform, the value of journalism isn't just in having access to information — it's in having sources trust you to tell their stories responsibly and effectively.
Despite everything, journalists keep going.
Katie Drummond, who runs Wired's editorial operation, probably summed up the current moment best: "Journalists are a resilient bunch — they deal with way more adversity than they should have to, but they still get up every single day and get down to business. They just keep going. That gives me hope."
That resilience is being tested in new ways as powerful tech figures increasingly retaliate against critical coverage. But Drummond's approach is straightforward: "Right and wrong is a big one for me. If you do wrong, I want to find out, and then I want the world to know."
The work still matters.
For all the industry's problems, Jael Holzman reminded me why journalism remains essential: "What's a bigger story than the fate of the planet? I don't know one."
These conversations have reinforced something I already believed: the fundamental work of journalism — holding powerful people accountable, connecting dots others miss, building trust with sources, and telling important stories — remains as vital as ever. The business model is broken, the incentive structure is perverse, and powerful people are getting better at fighting back. But the journalists doing this work are finding ways to adapt and persist.
Maybe that's the most important thing I've learned from these interviews: in an industry that seems perpetually on the verge of collapse, the people actually doing the work refuse to give up. They keep getting up every day and getting down to business, because the stories they're telling matter too much to abandon.
Anyway, here’s hoping that I get over being sick and can get back to some more thought-intensive stuff soon.
Parker: Saw you quoted in the Reader re Dennis Rodman, that was fun and nice to see.
I hope that you get to feeling better very soon.