News with Nuance: SPECIAL EDITION

Last rites for legacy American media organizations ...

So many times I’ve wished I wasn’t scheduled to write a News post to you this week, even as I’ve been obsessively reading news and losing sleep and refreshing Twitter (I mean X) and finding myself staring off blankly into the distance, filled with so many words and no way to coherently say them in a way that would sufficiently express the crisis at hand.

Maybe a long, guttural, primal scream would have been preferable to this newsletter, but I feel like people have actually tried that, recently, and while cathartic, it didn’t seem to bring about any measurable change.

It’s not really that I think anything I write in this newsletter will reshape American media, either; the disease has progressed past the point of treatment or cure, and we know that like most journalists themselves, American journalism doesn’t have quality health insurance, so there will be no hospice care and no opioid medication to ease our minds - just unremitting pain and suffering and potentially a total collapse of democracy.

I do know that this week marked a real turning point for me when it comes to my own engagement and approach to American media and journalism, something that has probably been coming for a while, a truth I just hadn’t been willing to admit about the state of the news and my own role as a journalist in the midst of it.

But it’s time. It’s past time. And I think I owe it to you all to offer an explanation.

This week I canceled my last remaining paid subscriptions to major national media outlets.

I’ve been a faithful subscriber to the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post for more than a decade, reading their newsletters and World pages for at least five days a week every single day without fail, and typically sharing lots of their stories within this very newsletter.

To be honest, it feels a little bit like a breakup - and an existential change that I’ve resisted for a long time.

First, let me explain how highly I valued these publications and the writers they employed. I first fell in love with the L.A. Times’ WORLD newsletter during the Arab Spring in January 2010. I had just finished my first semester of seminary after leaving a full-time job as a hockey beat reporter for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News. Ironically, I didn’t read a lot of other newspapers while working as a beat reporter. The job was so consuming that I everything I read related to hockey. I had Google Alerts set up for players, coaches, and prospects, and the HockeyDB database was one of my most frequently visited sites.

Sportswriting was in many ways my first love, and I’d had a pretty charmed experience: covering the Super Bowl in 2009, winning state and even some national awards for feature writing and game stories. I got my first big break by being published in Sports Illustrated in 2007 at age 21, where I famously got paid my highest-ever rate of $2/word, never to be matched again. For comparison’s sake, lots of authors today earn less than 5 cents/word for initial academic book advances, if they get an advance at all.

Sports Illustrated functionally died last week: its publisher lost their license and made plans to lay off the entire staff, on the heels of a scandal in which SI apparently created fake writer profiles on social media to promote stories written by AI.

To be clear, my official author bio still leads with the legacy media organizations where I’ve written in the past, including SI.

What does that mean when SI no longer exists? Am I still credible?

How will we know who to trust and believe?

Back to the L.A. Times. It was only 14 years ago, but in 2010 the L.A. Times had teams of reporters and bureaus all over the world, fully staffed. Their coverage of the Arab Spring was led by intrepid, experienced, immensely talented reporters like Jeffrey Fleishman and Laura King.

To be honest, I think both Fleishman and King still work at the L.A. Times today, but I’m not sure. Neither of them post much on social media. They were lucky enough to be born and entrenched in their journalism careers before the implosion of national media. They carved out real careers and were valued for their expertise. They both seem to write maybe 3-4 longer-form pieces a month. I think they’ve both written books and do speaking engagements, as well as some editing. It seems like a really nice gig if you can get it. A gig that’s virtually impossible for most millennial and Gen Z journalists. A gig I finally gave up ever having this week, though it had been a longtime dream of mine.

I loved that L.A. Times WORLD newsletter. I read it faithfully every single day, until it was discontinued a few years ago. But I liked the coverage so much, especially the writing of then-correspondent Nabih Bulos, that I waded through the World & Nation homepage every day anyway. When we moved to Northern California in 2012, and then Southern California in 2015, I kept reading the L.A. Times, expanding my reading to their L.A. Times Today newsletter. I got acquainted with more of the columnists and reporters. I liked it so much that I kept reading and subscribing to the L.A. Times right up until this past week, even though we moved back to Minnesota from California in 2017, seven long years ago.

I think Bulos still works for the L.A. Times, but I’m not sure. His last story posted Jan. 4, and his last post on X (formerly known as Twitter) was on Jan. 5. He would be a big loss. His bravery, courage, and intrepid coverage in war zones all over the world brought the stories of the world home to me. I know I’ve shared his work here with you, as I likely have Fleishman and King’s.

A few years ago, the L.A. Times was purchased by surgeon billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and around that same time it seems to me that the paper was making really positive changes. They had hired a whole slew of young, diverse new reporters and columnists. At a time when national columnists tended to be monolithic, relatively conservative white male boomers, the L.A. Times often offered a refreshing and unique perspective that matched the city itself. Pushing forward, new ideas, challenging the status quo. I have shared many of these writers, reporters, and columnists with you here.

This week, a few days after the demise of SI, the L.A. Times laid off 20 percent off its staff.

My feed on X has just been an unremitting stream of some of my favorite reporters and writers announcing their new unemployment. Overwhelmingly, they were young and non-white, and many of them were women.

It’s important to know that a lot of American media companies tend to hire younger reporters primarily because they are affordable. I know so many former newspaper writers, like myself, who basically aged out of journalism when we couldn’t afford it anymore.

In 2016 I was invited back to my alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, to serve on a panel with two of America’s top sportswriters, Wright Thompson and Seth Wickersham. During a pre-event social hour, I remember talking with some of my former professors. This was 10 years after I’d graduated from the J School, and my first job paid $21/hour, or about $44,000 a year. A year after I got that job, we had newspaper-wide layoffs and pay-cuts, in 2008.

In 2016, those journalism professors at one of America’s top journalism schools told me that their most-recent graduates were entering into a career field where they were unlikely to be offered full-time jobs as reporters at newspapers or major media outlets.

For the lucky few journalists who did get job offers and not unpaid internships or leave for advertising or PR, the job offers ranged from around $20,000-$25,000 a year, maybe $30,000 if they were lucky.

Often in major cities.

I couldn’t believe it. I should have. But I didn’t. I found it shocking and scary.

I add this to say that so many of these reporters and writers who were laid off this week were already busting their butts just to earn enough to barely afford their rent and potentially pay their student loans. Nobody goes into journalism for the money. It’s a passion project, a calling, something I understand as a person who traded my first calling to attend seminary and enter the ministry, another very lucrative and growing profession in the U.S. today, haha.

Besides the L.A. Times, I also regularly read and subscribed to the Washington Post for the past decade-plus. WaPo (as it’s known colloquially) was a big part of my personal writing story. In 2017 I wrote a viral article about the NFL kneeling protests for racial justice that was republished in the Washington Post. This led to my first appearances on TV and national radio, and likely helped me land my first book contract. I went on to publish two more pieces in the Washington Post. At the time, they were publishing a lot of freelancers. They had a small religion reporting staff, and part of their job was to commission pieces for a section called Acts of Faith, which is where my articles ran.

Reporters Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Julie Weil (then Zauzmer) gave me my first big freelancer breaks to publish in WaPo. The pay was terrible, $200 an article, but the exposure I got was very worth it - and I knew Pulliam Bailey and Weil had nothing to do with the pay rate. I loved working with them and appreciated what they did for me as I moved back into journalism after also being ordained as a Lutheran Pastor in Vegas, Chicago, California, and Minneapolis.

Pulliam Bailey is no longer at the Post, having landed at the New York Times. Weil is, but she no longer works in the religion section. She has moved to a few different departments since then, now reporting on taxes. It can’t be easy to keep moving departments and taking on different roles, but that’s a common occurrence in today’s media landscape. In an industry that relies on source cultivation and relationships, constantly moving reporters around to different beats isn’t a good strategy for anyone. But it’s inevitable when layoffs continue to occur and people aren’t replaced. Those who didn’t get laid off end up absorbing several additional roles.

Sadly, both Pulliam Bailey and Weil experienced personal tragedies in the years after we’d worked together on my pieces. I mention this because so often, in dialogue about journalists and the news media in America, there’s a terrible dehumanization of the people who report the news. We forget the personal side.

I know this would even happen to me at times in the past few years in the dry desert of post-COVID freelance writing. More often than not, I’d send article pitches to editor inboxes and never, ever receive a reply, even if I’d worked with those editors in the past. This was obviously frustrating. I’d find myself resenting the people who still had full-time journalism jobs at major national outlets, something I’d never achieved. I’d imagined a gulf between them and myself.

I imagine that’s similar to the resentment many Americans feel toward a national media they don’t feel represents them. But those Americans should know that the majority of journalists aren’t elitists. They’re idealistic people called to report and write the truth. They’re often covering multiple jobs for little pay. They’re victims of the same system that many middle-class and poor Americans suffer in, too.

This doesn’t mean that some prominent national journalists and media figures aren’t in fact isolated from everyday American life by their wealth and privilege and proximity to power. Some are. They’re a distinct minority, and they too won’t be replaced when they retire.

What I came to know eventually, in conversation with other journalists and writers, was that every single one of us was drowning in our own unique way. Editors’ inboxes were inundated with unhinged emails. Journalists were given three, four, five different areas of responsibility. They were writers, videographers, SEO experts, social media wizards, editors, freelance piece commissioners. Everybody was scrambling, all the time. Layoffs loomed constantly. Managers heard every day from higher-ups that finances were bad. The papers kept losing money, though often no one in the newsroom had access to the actual finances. It was just a constant sense of fear.

I think some media outlets got a little bit of a respite, surprisingly, during COVID and its immediate aftermath, at least financially. A similar thing happened to those of us leading churches at the time. For a brief little window, we lived in a country whose government actually kind of supported workers and families. There were (short-lived) monthly child tax credit payments and PPP grants. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many newspapers started diversity hiring initiatives and attempted to tell better truths from a wider variety of perspectives.

Of course, that money is long gone now. While the American economy has generally rebounded from COVID and corrected its inflation, most workers have yet to notice. The billionaires who bought the L.A. Times and Washington Post <shockingly> had zero idea how to run a national news organization. They were used to massive profits. They had claimed to believe in the mission of American journalism, but paying shareholders is what was actually in their DNA. The bloodletting began anew, but this time it came to journalists who were already beaten down, beleaguered, and weary, in a post-Trump America.

Us elder millennials and kids of the 90s, those of us who were taught Watergate in high school, who grew up hearing the <thunk> of the daily newspaper on our driveway every suburban morning, we came into this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We figured we could just work and hustle-culture our way out of the problem. Take the photos and write the story? Sure! Post more on Twitter? Sure! Take a pay cut? Sure!

Just beyond the horizon glimmered our golden ticket: that elusive job as a foreign correspondent or national columnist or long-form feature writer. People do still have those jobs. Most of them didn’t get laid off last week. And I hate to say this, but most of them are either wealthy boomer white men or nepo babies whose parents were prominent journalists. Good luck if you aren’t either of those things. Good freaking luck, and remember that the exceptions to the contrary only prove the rule.

As a terrible example, the L.A. Times’ Jean Guerrero was the only Latina columnist on the opinion desk. I loved reading her work. She was laid off last week, along with most of the staff of the new L.A. Times initiative meant to reach Hispanic readers, De Los, and along with the sole reporter tasked with covering Los Angeles’ vast Asian American communities, Jeong Park.

In the wake of all the assaults on American media in the past several years, especially in light of Trump and Fake News and war in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza, my response has been to lean in. Support journalists. Pay writers. Subscribe.

Maybe you think it’s the wrong choice to unsubscribe right now from places like the L.A. Times and the Washington Post. Let me explain a bit further.

I chose to unsubscribe from the L.A. Times and the Washington Post this week because I no longer believe that major American news media organizations, especially those owned by billionaires and beholden to shareholders, are capable of sustaining American journalism and American democracy at this perilous time.

Instead, over and over again, major news media organizations have proven that they only know how to reproduce the inherent inequalities and injustices of American society at-large. They continue to cover the 2024 Presidential election as a horse race, rather than a real threat to the continued existence of American democracy, and the succumbing of one of our national parties to a whole-scale authoritarian politician who will not accept an electoral loss without mass violence and upheaval.

So many of us keep SCREAMING about this and national media organizations keep laying off reporters who represent most the communities who will determine the 2024 election (communities of color, rural whites, poor whites, middle-class suburban women). National media organizations also continue to reproduce inequalities within newsrooms. Reporters are given strict rules about what they post on social media and told to limit their “personal” opinions. Meanwhile, national columnists constantly spout off on social media and do whatever they can to build their “personal brands.”

Anecdotally, I spent months in a hiring process with the major metro newspaper in my city last year. It ultimately ended, I believe, because I was “too opinionated” on social media and had too much of an online presence that they thought might cause backlash among conservative readership, even while I had written a book about Christian conservatives and had literally spent the past three years pastoring a congregation located in a county where 2/3 of the population voted for Trump in 2020. Conservatives trusted me to baptize their babies and preside at their family members’ funerals. They trusted me more than the journalists running the so-called “liberal” metro newspaper did.

There’s also the trepidation of so many editors and newsroom leaders about the ability of an ordained pastor to report fairly on the news, despite the huge need for American journalists to understand the role of religion and theology in today’s conservative movement. I mean, conservative and right-leaning outlets clearly have no such qualms. But I digress. That job wasn’t the right fit, and ultimately they made the right decision. Still, the process left me frustrated about the outdated thinking patterns of so many who lead newsrooms today, and the ways they serve as gatekeepers against addressing the very problems hindering the continued existence of national news media organizations today (an inability to connect with younger readers, and to have credibility with generations who were raised in the social media era).

I can no longer continue to pay money and platform and support news organizations who have proven again and again that they are not up to the task, and they will not support their writers and reporters.

Don’t get me started on the embarrassment that has been CNN in the past few years.

So what can you expect here from News with Nuance moving forward?

I have in no way, shape or form lessened my commitment to supporting American journalism and to sharing the news - with nuance. Instead of subscribing to national news organizations owned by billionaires, I will be shifting my money to subscribe to independent journalists and news organizations, like our local Minnesota Reformer, who are supported by non-profit organizations committed to the freedom of the press.

I also commit to continuing to subscribe to, uplift, and support writers and journalists right here on Substack, which isn’t perfect in any way but has been a lifeline out of the desert of pitching for so many of us. It has also connected me to all of you here at

I'm Listening

- which has been priceless and so life-giving for me in the past year and a half.

In the upcoming editions of News with Nuance, you can expect more of what you’ve had in the past. Two big featured articles on some of the week’s biggest stories, with a deeper explanation of the context, nuance, and human stories underneath the headlines. I’m not opposed to sharing stories from major national news outlets in this space, but I won’t be paying for subscriptions there any longer, and I will be seeking out more stories to share here that come from places that aren’t owned by billionaires.

You can also continue to expect the focus on Christian Nationalism and the threat it poses to American democracy, specifically as we approach the 2024 election and the expected return of Trump to the GOP ticket, with the prominent help of Christian Nationalist politicians and pastors. I’ll be continuing to work in deep concert with other writers and thinkers and researchers who know this world all-too-well, folks like

Diana Butler Bass

Brad Onishi

Robert P. Jones

and

Word&Way

and

Kristin Du Mez

and

Sarah Stankorb

and

American Idolatry

and so many others.

I’ll also lean further into the reporting of writers like

Heather Cox Richardson

, whose daily letter is always the first thing I read in the morning,

lyz

, who has been warning about these trends for years, and

Jo Piazza

, who is constantly breaking new ground when it comes to understanding the landscape of social media influencers and their impact on American culture and politics (an area sorely neglected and misunderstood by too many national news media outlets).

In short - News with Nuance isn’t going anywhere, and neither am I.

And - God willing - neither is the juggernaut and watchdog that has been American journalism, with American journalists serving in the best of times as the Fourth Estate, a block on authoritarian power and a guard dog for human rights, freedoms, and against atrocities, hatred, and violence.

We all have a huge task ahead of us in the weeks, months and years to come. This was a hard week. It’s a big change for me, not to spend hours a day reading the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. It feels like a major life shift, to no longer dream of that elusive columnist or feature writer job at a large national media outlet. But I also recognize that somehow I saw this coming. I left my newspaper job to attend seminary in 2009, after experiencing multiple rounds of layoffs and watching job postings at large outlets go unfulfilled. I have made choices to find ways to write and report anyway, and I’ve found places and people who’ve supported my writing. Being OK with that, and no longer chasing the dragon of a bygone media era, is a good thing for me. I just have to accept it and finally move on. I’m still a journalist. It just looks different than I thought I would. I’m so glad I’m still here. It feels like a miracle to make a living as a writer these days.

I’m grateful to all the journalists whose stories I’ve shared here.

I will still be reading and sharing your work.

But I will no longer stand for a media ecosystem that is cannibalizing its greatest assets.

We’ll be back Feb. 9 with your regularly scheduled edition of News with Nuance. In the mean time, who are your favorite writers and reporters? How can I support their journalism? Where else should I subscribe? We need to organize and we need to put our money behind journalism’s most courageous actors. The need is now.

If you’re a fellow writer or journalist reading this, keep reporting. Keep writing.

Our world depends on it.

Thanks for reading,

Angela

A Few Notes:

First, a huge THANK YOU to all subscribers. I get a little email notification every time someone signs up, and every time I get one, I feel joyful and honored that you want to spend part of your day with this community. I mean it when I say: “I’m listening,” to you as well, and please don’t hesitate to share with me your thoughts + ideas for what you’d like to read in this space.

To PAID SUBSCRIBERS: I am humbled and honored that you’ve chosen to spend part of your limited budget on this newsletter. To borrow words from another newsletter I love, you are directly funding freelance journalism with your subscription, and I have to thank you more than ever for your continued support. Our world’s media and journalism is in a state of crisis, with fewer and fewer billionaires in control of global news outlets, and journalists being either laid off or threatened with violence for their work every single day; with fewer and fewer newsroom positions paying a living wage. I pledge to you to steward your paid subscription faithfully + use it to support honest, hard-working, and LOCAL journalism. One of my goals in this first year is to open this newsletter to other journalists, and pay them a fair wage for their work.

THANK YOU for your support. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.

On free vs. paid-subscriber posts only: My plan right now is that the Friday + Sunday posts, focusing on news + spirituality, in that order, are available for subscribers only (I am going to continue sharing a sample, with a line where the paywall cuts off for our paid subscriber community). My plan is that the Tuesday blog-style posts will always be free, to enable as much access as possible, while creating a smaller and more intimate experience for paid subscribers, who are also able to comment and share in community in fuller ways.

Free Trial: Substack always offers a free week-long trial subscription to this newsletter, so you can get a taste of the Friday + Sunday posts and see if you’d like to subscribe!

If a paid subscription is a hardship for you, but you’d like access to the Friday + Sunday posts: PLEASE do not hesitate to reach out. I will be happy to provide a complimentary subscription for you.