In 1996, I got my first journalism gig when I was brought on to intern at a bustling alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper. I was only 20 years old. In the 20 years that followed, I worked for a variety of outlets, doing the thing I love: writing and reporting. There are powerful people who now think that newsrooms should carry the ethos of a dorm-room debate and that journalism should lead with the spirit of a rancorous op-ed page. Some of the journalists I emulated had sharp elbows. Some didn't. But what made all of them great to me wasn't their burning desire to prove themselves to be right; it was their deep, unquenchable curiosity. That is what I fell for. You got to pick up your phone and ask people questions and synthesize their answers into one grand answer—and, mysteriously, someone would pay you for this. That was incredible.
In 2018, I left The Atlantic, and for the first time since I was 20 years old, I was without a journalistic home. It was only then that I realized I loved something else besides the curiosity. In fact, even in my idealized vision of the newsroom as this font of curiosity, there's a hint of vanity. The fact is that, for all my work at The Atlantic, my vaunted search for answers was supported by editors who helped the inquiry, copy editors who made sure the resulting answers were clear, fact-checkers who ensured the answers were true, and lawyers who made sure we didn't lose our collective shirt. This was generally true at every journalistic institution that employed me. What I'm saying is, I was never alone in the pursuit of curiosity. I was part of a team.
When I left, I like to think, I kept getting better, but the effort was much more solitary. And to some extent—this is as it should be—writing is lonely work. But being a writer on staff at a magazine means not just that you are supported, but that you support some larger project you believe to be generally for the good. You don't always believe this—and perhaps here is where the culture of disagreement is most useful. The truth is that you tolerate writers who annoy the fuck out of you. You tolerate covers that strike you as incredibly dumb. And sometimes you, yourself, are the actual dummy. But you believe in some larger enterprise that the team is pursuing. In the case of Vanity Fair, it means a belief in the power of reporting from the white-hot nexus of politics and culture.
We can see this intersection, in fact, in my colleague Aidan McLaughlin's dispatch from the premiere of Melania, the "creative experience" that takes the first lady as its subject. Aidan takes us into a kind of hustlers convention, featuring everyone from Nicki Minaj to Dr. Oz. "The split screen was striking," Aidan writes. "These elites, packed into a once revered institution that the garish emperor has desecrated by renaming it after himself, gorging themselves on canapés and washing them down with Champagne, all while people whom those in this room might, in stump speeches, call 'everyday Americans,' take to the streets of Minneapolis to protest the thousands of masked federal agents who have invaded their city, leaving chaos and bloodshed in the government's wake."
For my part, I spent the past few weeks working on an article we recently published that emanates, again, from a question: What is the underlying ambition of this administration presently being manifested in Minneapolis? The piece, which you can read here, is relatively short. But it was a lot of work—and it was work that I couldn't have done alone. It's always annoyed me that while movies and television have credits, articles (and even books) have singular bylines, thus feeding the idea that writing and reporting is the work of solitary genius, as opposed to the work of a team.
Well, in my first official capacity as a Vanity Fair staff writer, and having been given the microphone, I'd like to roll some credits: editors Claire Howorth and Eve Batey; our head of print research, David Gendelman; our lawyer Terence Keegan; the librarians here at Condé Nast, Deirdre McCabe Nolan and Stan Friedman; visuals editor Madison Reid and producer Kenneal Patterson, who both made the whole thing look good; and Brandon Leung and Wisdom Iheanyichukwu, who get this newsletter to you every day.
These shout-outs are not charity, or even just acknowledgment. It's important that readers know how much effort goes into even the smallest articles, how it takes a team. And it's especially important to know this in a time when journalistic teams are being decimated and hollowed out. "Takes" are cheap. Journalism, to its detriment and to its credit, never is. |
TA-NEHISI COATES,
SENIOR STAFF WRITER |
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