Leaving News
Last Friday was my last day at the Washington Post. Amidst all the challenges facing the Washington Post and the media at large, I submitted my resignation and will be starting a new job in a new industry.
Ever since graduating in 2016, I’ve worked for four newsrooms and media-adjacent organizations in two different countries and languages. I’ve given talks at conferences, universities, and podcasts. Working in newsrooms always presented challenges that were both difficult and fulfilling, and among other things inspired me to pursue my master’s degree in cartography and GIS.
Last Friday was my last day at the Washington Post. Amidst all the challenges facing the Washington Post and the media at large, I submitted my resignation and will be starting a new job in a new industry. Skip to the bottom if you want to know where I’ll be going, but first I need to get some catharsis out of the way.
I’ve always been drawn to newsrooms because I’ve strongly believed that newsrooms are among the most fertile environments for innovation and creative engineering. There’s nothing quite like working technology in a newsroom, largely because the constraints of the news cycle leads to developing technology that is scrappy, effective, experimental, and published at scale. It’s why tools such as D3 and Svelte were developed in news organizations.
Ever since Snowfall was published in 2012, every year there are more and more creative approaches to digital reporting, including elections results coverage, which is what I have spent the past two years working on at The Washington Post. I’ll eventually publish something more specific to the work accomplished in the 2024 election cycle, but I honestly feel that in 2024 we reached a peak elections coverage after taking everything we’ve learned since starting digital elections coverage.
But beyond the satisfaction of seeing projects go live, one of the best parts of working in news organizations is the people that you meet along the way. Working on digital storytelling innovations is rarely a career that one accidentally falls into or is advertised at the top of any “most prestigious careers” list. It’s a job that almost everyone working in actively and specifically seeks out, and also one that attracts a huge diversity of interesting, creative, and technical people who chose to pursue this career for reasons other than money.
I’ve met so many people along the way, whether as colleagues I interacted with daily, people I’ve met at conferences, or people who have simply reached out to me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Email. Like journalists, every single technologist working with newsrooms have had wildly diverse opinions, approaches, and perspectives leading to insanely creative works and results.
So why am I leaving what I once considered to be a dream job in media? The primary reason is that news organizations are no longer what they were a decade ago. The support for and investment in creative, digital, and data driven storytelling is no longer as strong as it once was, with many news executives pivoting to a dubious pursuit of “AI”, ignoring the legacy and foundational cornerstones of journalism that have built the news organizations of the past.
Additionally, the culture of empowering employees to openly experiment and innovate has changed into a top-down approach where executives no longer seem to trust employees to build things that matter. Gone are the days of hackathons, open source, 20% time, and intern programs that made a positive difference on people like myself when I was starting out in my career.
To put it bluntly, the trend of declining local newsrooms across America has really begun to impact even the strongest news organizations that have survived up to this point, and the decisions being made at the top of these organizations are only contributing to their demise.
I’ve wrestled with my personal responsibility in this for a long time now. Given my experience and background, I would be well positioned to fight to keep the environments that helped me grow as a news developer and build toward when things are once again better. But if I’m honest with myself, I’ve become a little burnt out on news, jaded by all the disappointments over the past few years, and really craving a chance to do something completely different.
For that, I will be starting at Rivian in a couple of weeks. Although I never pictured myself working in automotive, conversations I had throughout the interview process have certainly piqued my interest, and I’m excited to bring my experience into a new industry. It feels bittersweet leaving the news industry, especially at a time like this, but I’m also looking forward to having the opportunity to try something new.