Volume 5, Issue 4: For All Debts Public and Private

"You know, Quasimodo predicted all of this."

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The first thing I noticed when I moved to New York to become a writer was how far I was already behind all the other people who had moved to New York to become a writer. First off, it was impossible to miss how much more experienced they were than I was. They’d gone to fancy East Coast schools, they’d traveled abroad, they had parents who were writers or academics or lawyers, they’d planned on moving to New York City their entire lives, this was a place they were always going to end up; it had only recently occurred to me that I’d be allowed in New York City, a city I’d never even visited and knew absolutely nothing about. They also, because they’d gone to those fancy schools, had friends and contacts everywhere; it blew me away how often they’d just randomly run into people from college on the subway. But more than anything else, it was clear, from the very first second I started meeting people, that everyone was so smart. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy, but I was blown away. They had deeper conversations about a far wider range of topics than I could possibly keep up with, and they could go on for hours. Anytime we floated too far away from Cardinals baseball, Nirvana songs or Woody Allen movies, I was hopelessly lost. I had moved to New York thinking I was special, that I had to test myself on the most difficult stage possible. It was obvious, immediately, that I was going to fail that test. I was never going to catch up with these people.

So I vowed one thing: No matter what happened, I’d never let myself get outworked. It wasn’t that I thought that they were lazy, or that I had some sort of inherent work ethic that they didn’t have. It’s just that it was the only thing I could control. I’d never have their contacts, I’d never have their smarts, I’d never have natural fluency with a media landscape I was discovering I didn’t understand all that well. But I could do was work—all the time. Some of this work was productive and valuable. Most of it wasn’t. Almost none of it paid me a cent. I took terrible, low-paying jobs simply because I knew there would be enough free time (and reliable internet access) at those jobs for me to do the actual work I wanted to do on the side. The goal was to keep the rent paid, keep making stuff and try to remain in the game as long as I could until something broke loose. I had no idea if it ever would happen, and for a long, long time, it didn’t. But what else was I supposed to do? Everything else was entirely out of my control.

I do not think this makes me unique, or cool, or some sort of inspirational tale for young people to follow. I know many people who have worked incredibly hard and have still not broken through, for reasons that have nothing to do with their skill or dedication. It is not a magic pill. But I do know, in a media world that seems to disintegrate more by the day, it’s the one thing you have a say in. There are bad actors everywhere, and private equity vultures, and people in charge who do not care about you or what you have dedicated your life to doing. They have existed forever, and they always will. I can’t get rid of them, and neither can you. All that I can do, and all you can do, is work your ass off. Much of this work will be wasted, and almost none of it will be appreciated. This work will probably not save you. But at the end of the day, what else can you do?

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It was a wretched week for the media industry, starting with the Sports Illustrated implosion, followed by massive layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and Pitchfork, along with many others. Many intelligent, dedicated, deeply talented reporters, editors, producers and writers lost their jobs this week. I have been laid off many times, and what I remember most is how personal it feels. Layoffs, particularly in the self-obsessive world of media, often make the news, which leads to many people having thoughts about what the layoffs mean for the industry or the landscape. But when you get laid off, you’re not thinking about any of that. You’re just worried about how you’re going to make your next rent payment. Layoffs may be happening everywhere. But in the end, they really just happen to you.

So it can be frustrating, downright irritating, to feel, when you’re already scared, like someone is trying to tell you what you should have done differently—like it’s your fault. Which leads me to Jeff Pearlman.

Jeff Pearlman is a longtime sportswriter, and a successful one, for good reason: He’s as diligent and dedicated a reporter as I’ve ever met. (I’ve known Pearlman for many years and was recently featured in his newsletter. He’s a good guy.) Pearlman has written many sports books, on the 1986 Mets, on Barry Bonds, on Roger Clemens, on Walter Payton, and, most famously, on the Showtime Lakers, which was adapted into the (recently canceled) HBO series Winning Time. Pearlman’s books are always rollicking good reads, for the best reason possible: Because he has reported the shit out of them. Pearlman is a pure reporter, a guy who is constantly on the phone, whose books always have hundreds upon hundreds of sources; the reason his books have such terrific anecdotes is because he calls so many people and asks so many questions that they end up telling him all these great stories no one has heard before. This is not a skill I possess, and it’s not a skill most people possess. Did you like all those funny, sharp scenes in Winning Time? They exist because Pearlman found out about them.

Pearlman is not just a terrific reporter, though. He is a moralist, and also deeply, almost deathly, earnest. We used to make fun of him on Deadspin back in the day for a news segment from when he was a senior in college in which he proudly made the case for virginity, including the all-timer of a quote: I see, maybe, being editor of a college newspaper, or being really good at something, or being a good citizen, or something like that, as a real sign of manhood. I don't see being able to whip out your penis, heh heh, and do the nasty thing or whatever you wanna call it as a sign of manhood. That's not what I see it as. I consider myself a man just as much as anybody. Pearlman has had fun with that segment himself, but the child is forever the father of the man: Pearlman is as resolute and winsome and certain in his rectitude today as he was back then. The problem is that when he was a senior in college, this only came up if local news happened to do a segment on undergrads not doing The Nasty Thing. Now, because of social media, everyone can see it, all the time. And Pearlman, surely in spite of his better judgment, loves social media.

Thus, when Pearlman—who came to prominence at Sports Illustrated, most notoriously with his John Rocker interview, which later became a staple of my God Save the Fan book tour—sees the events of the last week, he can’t help can’t comment on it in his very Pearlman way: Earnest, sincere, strident, moralist … in the exact way people who just got laid off—or are still reeling from a recent layoff—do not want to hear. And it has turned him into that apocryphal Twitter’s Main Character that no one ever wants to be. Except, maybe, Pearlman.

Thus Jeff made a video. It’s worth watching, if just because it has gotten him yelled at all week. It starts with the quote that’s getting him killed: “It all starts with making yourself indispensable.” I understand what Jeff is trying to say here: He’s saying that you have to find a beat that you absolutely own, that you have to try to provide something that no one else provides, that you have to make yourself unique, and thus indispensable. I also understand that if the last few years in the media industry have taught us anything, it’s that no one in the media industry is indispensable: The best and brightest reporters and writers and television personalities in the industry have still gotten shit-canned. But more to the point: If I had just been laid off, or if I were in an uncertain industry that just watched the canonical Sports Illustrated vaporized by assholes, I cannot think of something I would want to hear less than, “well, you should have made yourself indispensable.” It would have made me want to throw my computer out the window.

Many—perhaps not surprisingly, mostly from established sports reporters who currently have jobs and are doing fine, at least for now—echoed Pearlman’s message. But there was a massive backlash, mostly from the young journalists Pearlman was ostensibly trying to give advice to. They pointed out, correctly, that most of the work Pearlman is encouraging young reporters to do is not valued by their bosses, that it often leads to doing six jobs at once, that it will guarantee absolutely nothing, that no matter how good you are at something, if some middle-tier dipshit thinks cutting your job and eliminating all you worked so hard to make will impress his boss and his spreadsheet for about 15 minutes, he will do so and never think twice about it again.

One of the most common criticisms of Pearlman, though, was far more specious, and one I found telling. Many young journalists said that it was easy for him to say all this, because he’s had a job and a successful career; he couldn’t possibly understand how hard the industry is now. On one hand, this is undeniably true; the industry has shrunk considerably since people like Pearlman (and me) entered it in the late 1990s. But not to be fact-check police here, but there isn’t a person who majored in journalism in the last, oh, 40 years, who didn’t have someone in their life tell them they were making a huge mistake, and that the industry was collapsing. My parents thought I was a moron for majoring in journalism! It was extremely hard to find a job straight out of college back then—I’d argue even harder than it is now, actually. My graduating class at the University of Illinois back then had hardly anyone who had a news job straight out of college; that’s why so many people went to grad school or became lawyers! It’s a super, super tough industry, and always has been. But just because there are more entry-level jobs now doesn’t not mean the industry has gotten easier. It’s actually a sign it has gotten harder. The reason there were so few entry-level jobs for us is because people held onto journalism jobs forever back then; former sportswriter Bill Simmons once said that he founded his first website because otherwise he “would have had to wait for everyone at the Boston Globe to die to get anything published.” Those jobs were so valuable because if you had one, you were in. And that’s what’s so terrible about the industry now, and why so many young journalists are so despairing. There is no clear path. There is no stability. The ground is always shifting between your feet. You can get your foot in the door. But once you walk through that door, the whole place burns down.

But that didn’t make the criticism that Pearlman was somehow pulling up the ladder any more fair. It’s just that what Pearlman was saying is not what was being heard. The speaker and audience were not having the same conversation.

This is to say: The people who Give Advice To Young People Starting Out In This Industry and The Young People Actually Starting Out In This Industry are actually living in two entirely different universes and having two entirely different conversations. If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is how everyone has been always been forever, about everything. Older people think young people are doing everything wrong and should listen to what they have to say because they’ve gone through all this before. Younger people think the experiences of older people have no relevance to what is happening in the modern day. Older people think the way they did things is thus the way things should be done; younger people think everything that’s happening to them is the first time it has ever happened to anyone in the history of the planet. They are forever talking past each other.

I remember when I was in college, Richard Roeper, then a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times (and later Gene Siskel’s replacement on Siskel & Ebert) came to talk to Daily Illini and Daily Northwestern students at the Illinois College Press Association convention. He was a big shot at the time, the hot new “young” guy on the beat, but he wasn’t a young guy to us: He was a grownup who had a job, and we were college kids who wanted one. He gave us all some advice, I have no idea what it was, it probably would have been helpful had we listened, but we didn’t: We all sniffed at him, saw him as an establishment stooge who acted like he knew everything when it was in fact us who knew everything. He surely walked out of there thinking he’d helped out some young people; we walked out of there thinking when we are adults, we’ll get it in the way these dumb adults don’t … though, for what it’s worth, Richard, if you know of any internships at the paper available, please let me know, I think I’d be great for it. The irony of course is that the entire newspaper industry would collapse within a decade of his conversation with us, making everything he told us entirely meaningless. Older people don’t know the future any more than younger people do.

I just think, particularly in an industry as diffuse and constantly shifting as media, maybe we just should stop with the idea of older people advising younger people about anything, and younger people acting as if they should care for any other reason than to reject that advice. If anything, doesn’t it make more sense for young people to give advice to older people? I know how I’ve made my career; I need to know how people do it now. My favorite part of Pearlman’s video is when he mentions TikTok as one of the ways for young people to build out a career, as if Jeff Pearlman is native to TikTok, as if there’s anything he could tell a young person about the platform that they don’t already know. Young people need to tell him about TikTok, not the other way around. They need to tell me too! When I visited students at Nichols School in Buffalo last year, I learned so much more from them than they learned from me. I’ve been me for a very long time, and that myopia can’t help but come with an inherent bias that I think I know more than I do, along with countless blind spots I’ve complied along the way. That’s why I need young people to explain all the things I don’t know anything about! All I know is that I’ve reached the point in my life when my kids are teaching me tricks on my phone rather than the other way around. Isn’t it the way it always works? Isn’t it the way it should?

I understand why Jeff Pearlman, and many other established people in established fields, feel like they want to help out the next generation. They want to pay it forward, they want to help out, they want people to have the same opportunities they had. But I also think they want to feel valued, like they are Esteemed Experts whose advice is hard-earned, whose advice should be heeded. But I don’t think young people listen to it that way. I think they think we’re full of it—or, at the very least, we’re simply standing in their way. Meanwhile, we older people believe young people know a lot less than they think they do, because we remember just how much dumber we were when we were young than we are now, how many idiotic mistakes we made, how sure we were that we were right about everything and how hilariously wrong we turned out to be. I’m not sure either side is convincing the other of anything. I think we’re only listening to ourselves.

So when asked How To Make It In This Industry, all I can say is:

1. I don’t feel like I’ve “made it” at all, and I never will.

2. The only thing I know how to do is have the life I currently have, and the only way I got that life is by doing things exactly how I did them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be standing here.

That is not helpful at all for a young person, or for any person, really. But it’s truthful. I vowed when I moved to New York that because everyone was smarter than me, I would just have to outwork them. Have I? Is that why I’ve been able to do some of the things I’ve been able to do? Will that work for anyone else if they try it? I have no clue. The media industry is awful right now. But it always has been. How have I navigated it? I’ve pedalled as fast as I can, I’ve gotten lucky, I’ve tried to keep my head down and create good work. I have, in the end, tried to do work that makes me happy—work that I’m proud of, that I can stand behind, that pleases me, the person who of course is my toughest critic.

In the end, that’s the only advice I have. Ignore the older people telling you what to do, ignore what The Industry Wants, don’t tie yourself to any one thing, don’t worry about doing anything other than doing work that you are proud of and the work that inspired you to enter whatever industry you entered in the first place. Work your ass off at the thing that makes you most want to work your ass off. Find the thing you love and are good at, and do it relentlessly, at a level that personally makes you proud. I don’t know if it will it pay off. I don’t know if it will be something a theoretical employer will want. I don’t know if it will bring stability or wealth. But I know it will please the person who knows and values your work the best: You. You can’t control anything else. But you can control that.

And hey: With any luck, it’ll work out, you’ll have a wildly successful career and you’ll be able to someday tell future young people how you did it. They’ll be happy and eager to ignore and resent you for it. It will, after all, be your turn.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The NFL Season of Swift, New York. This is … probably the last time I write about Taylor Swift?

2. Which Division Champs Will Repeat? MLB.com. There are two obvious picks, and then four other wild guesses.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, back when Grierson’s back from Sundance this weekend.

Seeing Red, first show of 2024 with Bernie, discussing the return of Matt Carpenter, the Bally Sports mess and the Cardinals’ budget “restraints.”

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“A Vote for Trump Is a Vote for Chaos,” Noah Smith, Noahopinion. I’ve been waiting for someone to write the "sane, sober, explaining-to-your-otherwise-reasonable-aunt” argument against Trump that avoids all the histrionic potholes many arguments fall into. This is pretty close to the ideal one.

Also, honestly, look at those ding-dongs up there. My God.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! I am caught up on anything sent in 2023 now, so if you haven’t gotten a response, it got lost, send me another one!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“I Am A Scientist,” Guided by Voices. Add these guys to the list of bands I was too immature to appreciate when they were actually popular. (Well, “popular.”)

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Doing another half-marathon tomorrow, so if you see me on the streets of Athens, please do not throw something at me.

Have a great weekend, all. Go Lions.

Best,
Will