Trust me, I’m reporting on myself
Telling true stories in an unsupervised age
I was excited last week to go behind the scenes for a high-stakes editorial board meeting of the Williams [College] Record. As the students debated what stories they would cover, and how, it felt like a reflection of my own life. Even more so for the guest seated next to me—John Stickney, a veteran of The New York Times and Life Magazine—who kept saying, “This is all so familiar!”
I loved how the students were learning by doing: putting out a newspaper to learn journalism. Remarkably, they were doing it with no “adult” oversight. Williams is a small liberal arts college without a journalism major, without even any courses in journalism. The paper has no faculty advisor and gets no administration approval. It’s thus a lot like life.
For example, the students were on their own in solving questions like this: How should they cover an on-campus lecture by Times correspondent Eric Schmitt? “It feels weird because we’re covering ourselves,” said editor-in-chief Ellie Davis. Schmitt’s talk was the keynote in an all-class staff reunion co-organized by the Record. Was it news?
Here’s an ethical dilemma of classical journalism: On the one hand, how dare you report on an event that you yourself created? Isn’t that being a manipulative orchestrator of history, rather than a mere witness to it? On the other hand, if you only ever passively report on news created by others, don’t you risk being manipulated by politically unscrupulous operators? (Isn’t our current national climate evidence of that?)
The editors decided that the lecture was worth covering, with Davis handling it herself. (They didn’t ask my opinion, but I thought this was the right call.) The lecture had been a public event, well attended and widely lauded. Schmitt—himself a Record alum—provided troubling news about how the ongoing collapse of local journalism might stymie the job market for graduating students. And perhaps his biggest theme transcended mere journalism: the value of trust. Schmitt needs to trust his sources, he explained; they need to trust him. Likewise with his readers. Likewise with you or me and anyone we want to collaborate with.
Personally, I found the editorial meeting especially fascinating because I was facing the same debate as I approached this story you are now reading. Was this news? As a Record alum myself, I’d been a co-organizer of the reunion. I was the one who made the formal invitation to Schmitt. I was attending the meeting because later in the agenda we were going to talk about how the paper could take ongoing advantage of the reunion’s energy.
And I have my own publication here on Substack that lacks any adult supervision.
Is this news? I wanted to write about the reunion weekend because it was a terrific event, one that I invested a lot of time in, and one that inspired me to think about the roles of journalism and storytelling in addressing today’s many difficult societal and environmental challenges. That’s what I often write about here.
Substack is always encouraging me to build trust by treating these missives as “letters to a friend.” I knew that in writing such a letter, I would speak to how stimulated I felt by the weekend’s discussions, how much I admired everyone I met there, and the weird sense of affection that arose out of it all.
Yet Substack is, effectively, a challenger to traditional journalism institutions like the Times or the Record. I believe its popularity rests on its innovative approach to solving the trust question. We’re wired to trust people: John Clayton, John Stickney, Ellie Davis, or Eric Schmitt. We’re less wired to trust institutions. When Substack encourages writers to put our selves first, to write letters to friends, it builds trust that institutions can’t match.
But people are shaped by institutions. Schmitt’s admirable values grow from his decades at the Times. My own values come in part from my years at the Record. Let me tell you, friend: I often find myself resisting Substack’s letter-to-a-friend advice because the innovation feels dangerous, a departure from my hard-won lessons in journalistic ethics.
When I graduated from Williams, I chose not to follow Schmitt’s path. Maybe I lacked sufficient trust in institutions like the Times. Or maybe it was more about my approach to storytelling. I have come to believe that good storytelling often requires revealing my personal stake in the story—reporting on myself. I’ve ended up on Substack because its storytelling model fits me better than the Times’. Although adapting to that model is an ongoing process, a natural story.
So here’s my latest experiment in that story: To build trust, I’d like to take you readers behind the scenes in the equivalent of a Natural Stories board meeting. Our first agenda item: how do we tell true stories in an unsupervised age? Platforms, stakes, institutions, storytelling… I’ll admit there are differences between a college newspaper, The New York Times, and a Substack from some guy in Montana—but I find some value in comparing them.
Second, the idea of trust itself. I went into the reunion thinking that journalism’s biggest problem has been the collapse of traditional advertising revenues. Now I think it’s the collapse of trust—which makes it a problem bigger than journalism. Some people have never trusted politicians or corporations, but now hardly anybody even trusts their neighbors. I find some value in writing a weekly Substack that I hope builds trust.
Third, reporting on myself. One of my books will be reissued in paperback on June 9, and I want Natural Stories to cover that as news. I’ll be reporting on an event that I myself created. I’ll be doing so repeatedly, and you may even be tempted to say shamelessly. Yet in my mind it’s not shameless: I hope it will be compelling and fair… transparent about my personal stakes and emotionally satisfying because of that transparency… providing value to my paid subscribers while also promoting a product in which I’m hugely invested. I hope that announcing this up front—both that it’s coming and that I’ve thought about it—will build trust.
My goal is to do it as well as those students. Because the upshot of the story is: John Stickney and I agreed that Ellie’s article on the lecture knocked it out of the park!
End notes:
Will De Man, the indefatigable creator of the National Parks History Substack, has a new book out that I was fortunate to read in draft. Congrats!
I have no idea what this graphic means, but it must be a credit to you readers. Thanks!
The only way to earn trust is to extend it. And that is hard.
John, another smart piece.
I love that you frame it around trust and then that you're forthcoming about your own involvement in the reunion -- and how that may compromise your objectivity. That you were involved in the planning of the event. We know where you're coming from. You may not be a completely reliable narrator (as we might saw when talking about a work of fiction).
All growing out of your belief "that good storytelling often requires revealing [your] personal stake in the story". When we, as writers, reveal that, we alert your readers to our own awareness of our limitations. While we strive to be objective, we appreciate that sometimes objectivity is a challenge.
That is the first part of building trust.
And methinks that in the ever-changing media market, from the introduction of blogs in the late '90s/early aughts to the rise of social media and Substack (does this platform count as social media?) in recent years, those writers who are as forthcoming as you are here will build trust with their readers.
And let's hope they build audiences as well.