#70: journalism as art, an exercise

recasting reporting as an approach to life

Good morning,

Last year, I took a workshop about what writers can learn from visual artist statements, in other words, how we can articulate why we create the work that we do.

Here is the gist:

“The point [of an artist’s statement] is to explain the work to someone who isn’t an art expert and help them acquire a greater appreciation for your art specifically and a perspective on how to look at art generally.” (source)

We were encouraged to look at our writing as a body of work rather than an assortment of stories and in one exercise, we were asked to curate the work that we would want young people to appreciate after our death. A big question.

As I wrap up my sixth month of maternity leave, I’ve been thinking about this workshop and playing around with how I might like to define my work to date and in the future. Whatever kind of art you create, it’s a useful exercise: trying to make sense out of your motivations and discoveries.

the magic school bus (source)

My history: journalism vs. research vs. art

For those who know me, you know that my path into journalism was one of awe and naivety, one that I later came to understand as a deep love for the accoutrements of journalism—the neat bundle of the newspaper and its otherworldly broadsheets, the reporter’s notebook, the structured approach to the world, the permission to call strangers and ask them their secrets, even the uniform, business but casual, inconspicuous but serious. I followed this love into a traditional, elite education: journalism school. I came out with more questions than answers about why we do journalism at all and I explored the idea of moving into academia to study media more generally.

On the good advice of mentors who understood my love of freedom, creativity and in-betweenness, I didn’t take that path. (They told me it would be years before I could truly indulge in original thinking, and if I had the courage to go it alone, staying out in the world might feel more fulfilling. I still deeply admire academics.)

What this decision did was turn my curiosity more toward art than research, though I’m convinced that researchers and artists have a lot more in common that we realize. The desire to examine life’s big questions comes from an investigator’s impulse. The outcome of these investigations is guided by mentorship and accessibility.

Since then, I’ve most loved producing documentaries exploring questions of learning and design, podcasts about religion and art, research about consumer and engagement trends we’re all living through, stories about people I have found interesting and inspiring. And what I haven’t loved producing is… news.

My love for media has always struggled against a profound frustration I’ve long held toward the content of news—war stories that read like sports I have never been interested in, casual tallies of death that contribute more to my hunched posture than to my ability to be a citizen of the world, rigorously fact-checked scandals in industries I have no connection to, and voyeuristic caricatures of people on the margins of society that enforce the stereotypes I am most ashamed of holding.

For these reasons, along the way, I’ve felt the need to renegotiate my relationship with journalism, both personally and professionally many times. And that is where I find myself again, especially as I enter into a season of navigating media on behalf of (and with) a young child.

Taking a break

The past 6 months have been the longest break I’ve taken from journalism, both as a consumer who has had the luxury of turning her head away from the world (and toward a sweet baby), and also as a producer who hasn’t published anything for public consumption.

In the interim, I’ve begun to surround myself with more people who identify as writers first and journalists second. This has helped me explore what it is I need to learn next about my craft, my voice and my position as a writer/producer. And boy have I discovered a mountain of learning ahead of me.

Thus, as I wrote last month, I want to make the conscious choice to move away from the producer’s life and into a practitioner’s. The happiest people I know work ambiguously. They're either building something with no set hours, exercising their creativity, taking weird risks they can’t fully explain, or doing a lot of different things at the same time. A lot has been said about the departure from 9 to 5, but I didn't fully understand it until I began to live my days as an artist.

Journalism as a Practice

In the artist statement workshop, we did an exercise answering several questions:

1. Why do you create this art? What motivates you?

2. What is your philosophy about your process?

3. Why do you engage in your medium?

If I viewed journalism as art, this is how I’d answer them:

1. Why do you create this art? What motivates you?
   I’m interested in using the tools of journalism to understand life. I want to know how people care for themselves. I want to know how to care for myself and my loved ones. I want to know how people experience belonging. I want windows into people’s experiences of decision-making. Windows into navigating growing up, growing old, creating life, experiencing community. I want to know why we mess these things up, what it looks like to succeed at them and how we effect change, both internally and externally along the way.

2. What is your philosophy about your process?
   I report my way through feelings. I always have. As a child, my idol was Dorothy Ann from the Magic School Bus—the bookworm who provided facts on every adventure, saying “According to my research…” I’m good at research, have an insatiable appetite for information when I am trying to get to the bottom of something and I think I made good decisions because of this skill. I love evaluating information fairly. I’ve honed the skill of suspending judgement in favor of clarity. I don’t do it for ethical reasons, I do it because I enjoy it. Sometimes, this reporting makes it out into the world, but I’ve truthfully never found enough existing channels to fit my madness into. When I die, you’ll find the best stuff in my journals, and that’s the truth.

   

   dorothy ann from the magic school bus

3. Why do you engage in your medium?
   I love structured storytelling. Organizing information is a passion for me. I can make a table for anything, distill context into key points, and pace information well. Over the course of my career this has resulted in a body of work that’s been hard to explain: audio, video, writing, research, teaching, experience design and weird combinations of all of the above. I see a product design research deck the same way as I see a short documentary: both require reporting on the backend and intuition on the front end, and excellent pacing to bring the viewer along. This is play for me.

Getting all this down on paper made me realize that I practice journalism almost constantly. I’m just not always interested in producing it for public consumption.

Covering Life

In private, the skills of journalism apply directly to life’s work: decision-making. For every choice I’ve had to make about how to care for myself, my child or my loved ones, I’ve had to:

• Solicit expert advice or opinion

• Cultivate reputable sources

• Observe, reflect, take note, synthesize

• Tell stories in a format aligned to the audience’s needs

In recent life, my reporting covers things like:

• how to safely acclimate an anxious dog to a new baby

• how to breastfeed successfully and healthily

• how to understand and support my own fertility

• how to find and build local community as a mother and a writer

• how to understand various types of mental and physical illness in order to support members of my community

And I deeply enjoy the research that goes into these decisions. I enjoy the learning, the application and also packaging it up and sharing it with people who are looking for the same answers. In short, service journalism.

Which makes me wonder, what if we recast journalism as an approach to life?

I’ve previously written about journalism as a practice, but what about as a posture toward decision-making that we can all practice?

Not everyone has the bandwidth to invest so much time and effort into the everyday decisions they have to make, and few of us are able to synthesize our processes well enough to help someone else out. But in the absence of some baseline media skills, we are vulnerable to experts and synthesizers (human and not) that are smart, but simply can’t have our best interests in mind. Navigating media well is a privilege, but should it be? I think a lot of people might appreciate knowing where to begin reporting on their own questions. I hope to start publishing more of my own processes on these topics—the behind-the-scenes research on what looks like mundane invisible labor, but forms the basis for our well-being. I wonder if I can make it feel like art.

Anyway, I loved the exercise so much that I’ll leave you with this prompt.

How might we reimagine our professional work as a practice?

Whatever your profession is, consider it as art for a moment. Accordingly, rephrase the following questions, ones that are typical to the interview process or dinner party intro, into ones that might help you define your own body of work.

1. What’s your job? » What’s your craft/medium?

2. What have you produced/delivered? » What’s your process?

3. What skills do you have? » What guides your motivation?

4. Why did you choose this industry? » Why do you engage with your medium?

Happy August,

Jihii

P.S. Here’s where I ended up landing with explaining my own work.