Burn it all down
A eulogy for a death that didn't have to happen
June 1997.
A call out of the blue. A friend of a friend of a friend.
Yes, I had been a reporter before, in Philly and South Africa, I said on the touch-tone phone. The Washington Post was doing something new on something called the Internet. “Online.”
I had just graduated from cooking school. Thirty years old, sleeping on a futon in my childhood bedroom, making six bucks an hour at a coffee shop while I figured out what was next.
They were putting together a features team, he told me. They wanted someone who knew food.
That would mean sitting behind a desk instead of standing behind the line.
I was conflicted when I got the offer. I might be throwing away my education, betraying my new trade, I told myself. But opportunities like this didn’t come around often, my friend and mentor Gillian told me. You can always cook, she said.
In many ways, though, I was cooking — a new way of story telling in a nascent medium. Not unlike developing recipes, we print journalists were encouraged to experiment and explore the possibilities. It was more than exciting; it was wild west.
We didn’t know how to describe the work to the outside world as we tried to make sense of it ourselves but it didn’t make it feel any less important. We were proud to do this work. We were proud to uphold the standards of this venerated, Pulitzer prize-winning, speak-truth-to-power institution and to be both part of its history and its future. Together we weathered 9/11, not just as journalists covering the most existential story of our careers but as grieving neighbors.
We believed in journalism because we believed in democracy. Then and now. This was our way of participating in this amazing experiment that was/is a multiracial democracy.
We grew up together, and some of us died. Some of us met and fell in love and got married, like your girl. Most of us, eventually, moved on. But we would never forget the first decade of the online newsroom of the Washington Post. Because it shaped our lives and our careers and the way we told stories. And it shaped the lives of our readers, who lived everywhere because that’s what the Internet made possible.
Our love for the newsroom — and what it stood for — never did die. We kept it close to our hearts. And now, we are grieving again.
It took a few days for the deaths to sink in: Sports (in a town of seven — seven! — major professional sports teams.) Books. Ukraine desk. Jerusalem and desks. Photography. [PHOTOGRAPHY. How does a newspaper not have a photo department?] Arts criticism. Metro and Food on life support.
All these years later, this kind of severance cuts close to the bone. Not just because we know people who have been laid off. Not just because this is my husband’s livelihood, our chosen profession, our calling. Not just because there are hundreds more journalists out of work. But this: The fourth richest man in the world, who could stop the hemorrhaging in one fell swoop, is on track to kick The Washington Post out of the car like an unwanted dog and left to die on the side of a dusty highway.
The cruelty, it seems, is the point. A fount of inspiration from the guy just down the street, who’s turned cruelty into an art form.
This ain’t no ordinary layoff story. This is the story of becoming unrecognizable. Who do we become without the Fourth Estate?
Well said. And well sad.
Indeed, what have we come?