About this time 15 years ago, Fox laid me off. As getting canned goes, it was a pretty sweet deal. They were closing an entire online newsroom at the edge of Chelsea in Manhattan, and because the size of the cuts made them subject to the WARN Act, we got more than two months’ notice. I spent my last days there printing out my resume, applying to jobs, and pitching stories.
The Fox News Channel had just launched when I joined the online side as a web producer four years before. Despite the shared name, digital had very little to do with the cable side at the time, and had separate offices in the same loft as TV Guide, another News Corp venture run by James Murdoch. We’d watch the monitors as CNN broke some major story while Fox was still airing pet news, shake our heads, and put up the AP version.
It’s a strange disconnect for people like me who worked in that newsroom under that name. The early FOXNews.com featured mostly wire feeds, but also some ambitious, thoughtful stories on things like detoxing from heroin and the environmental evils of the sugar industry. The staff was a mix of journalism school grads; smart, thirtysomething journalists; and randoms like me. Occasionally you’d see James in the elevator, wearing a seersucker suit and boater hat or some other uncomfortably dandy get-up, but the newsroom itself was loosely run by a series of distracted executives charged with figuring out how the Internet was going to work. Funny how some things have not changed.
It was such a small operation that I got to launch an entertainment section (previously given over to TV Guide content) and write about pretty much whatever I wanted. That meant I did features on Ben Folds, Prince, Erykah Badu, Brian McKnight, Ice T, the guy who played the son on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, and anyone else whose publicist would grant me an interview or access to their media events. (All of this work has since been obliterated from the servers, but I have the printouts to prove it.)
Eventually Fox figured out that it made no sense to try to compete with CNN, and it made even less sense to run a whole separate newsroom downtown when they already had a news operation running in midtown. That’s when the Fox News Channel cemented its transformation into… well, what it is today.
That same layoff year, Fox partnered with National Geographic on its cable channel. I moved on to other jobs and a decade that, both professionally and personally, was too bizarre for me to even contemplate, let alone summarize right now.
I joined National Geographic at the very end of 2009, working on a site called The Great Energy Challenge, and have been covering energy and climate ever since. That role refocused my attention, exploded my brain, defined new goals, and pushed me in directions I would never, ever have imagined even 10 years ago. (All in a good way.)
Late last year, James Murdoch appeared before me again, sans boater hat this time, as he announced that Fox was taking a 73 percent stake in the society’s media properties.
When people ask whether I think the merger will undercut National Geographic’s environment coverage, I say no, and it’s not just because James, who helped broker the deal, is by all accounts quite accepting of climate science. It’s also because Fox, above all else, is a huge company that exists to make money. It knows the value of a strong brand; after all, that’s what the news channel became. You may not like the Murdochs, but you might concede that they are probably not stupid enough to buy a brand known for its nature and environment coverage only to rip out its entrails.
That’s my hope and opinion, anyway. A skeptic might point out that after Fox and National Geographic launched the National Geographic Channel, some of the programming decisions went seemingly far afield the society’s conservation mission. I don’t have an intimate inside knowledge of those decisions, but I do know they weren’t made by Fox in a vacuum. I also know that every single person in National Geographic’s editorial group cares very much about doing real, accurate, good stories, which is evident every day on the site and in the magazine’s pages.
The dawn of National Geographic Partners undeniably marked the official end of an era, but that era was drawing to a close long before Fox arrived. The magazine staff had already been forced to pack up their offices, stuffed with dusty books and afghan rugs and old couches and typewriters and curios from around the world, and move into white, ergonomically sound newsroom workstations about a tenth the size. We’d already said goodbye to Green Fridays, a puzzling but awesome policy where eight to 10 days out of the year (during the summer, ostensibly to save on air conditioning, but beginning in March, hence the puzzling part) the office was closed and people worked remotely or not at all.
It was already known that the magazine’s circulation, and thus ad revenue, was on the same slide as other print publications. It was already known that Digital needed a Strategy, just as Digital has needed a Strategy in every newsroom everywhere for the last two decades. It was already known that National Geographic’s online energy coverage was funded by a “strategic partnership” with a large oil and gas company, because contrary to popular belief, newsrooms don’t run solely on coffee, bile, and gumption.
Fox didn’t “eat National Geographic.” The Internet ate National Geographic, or at least took a pretty juicy bite out of it, just like it has every other legacy magazine and newspaper. I am exasperated with the faux outrage over the merger. The fact is that if people cared so much about keeping National Geographic independent, more of them would have been reading it and paying for it. Admittedly, even that probably wouldn’t have stopped advertisers from flocking to newer brands, brands with stronger ties to the almighty millennial. To expect that the Yellow Border could keep trundling along unchanged, piling up in people’s basements, is like expecting our power plants and cars to keep running on fossil fuels even though the planet is telling us to figure something else out. Like it or not, the world is moving in a new direction, and the old guard is just trying to keep up. So am I.
Which brings me to my current status. This week, I left National Geographic to pursue freelance writing. I will be doing some contract work of a type that’s new for me and which I will be sharing when ready; I also plan to keep writing about energy and environment for various outlets, including my former employer, if this essay doesn’t get me in too much trouble.
A few factors led to this move, chief among them the looming disintegration of my energy job on March 31. In keeping with the concept of not getting in too much trouble, I will say only that from the beginning, my position has been subject to annual renewal. As of this week, there was still no indication one way or another whether that renewal would happen this year.
I’m not implying (because so far as I know, it’s not true) that this uncertainty has anything to do directly with any one entity or person. It’s just another product of a disrupted landscape.
Many of my older peers have been rattled and saddened by the buyouts, the layoffs, the relentless change. I have been too, to an extent, but for me, working in media has never promised stability. And the more I try to think about my career from the perspective of the media consumer I am myself, the more confused I get.
I’m excited by all the deeply reported, excellent work I see not just in the expected places (The New Yorker etc.) but at Huffington Post Highline, California Sunday, Matter, and so many other publications. Too many other publications? So many publications.
I’m dismayed by my inability to support, let alone read, so much good work, especially as so much of it lives online, and my eyes and brain are so very tired from the ever-peaking content. (Don’t forget, friends, that you can always print this essay to read later.)
I’m in love with podcasts, and feel inspired listening to all the interviews on the Longform Podcast alone that prove journalism is far, far from dead.
I’m so in love with all of this content, for which I have no other good word even though I’ve come to loathe the word content, that I occasionally tilt up from a glowing screen to the realization that I seem to love it more than being in my actual life, even though my actual life is pretty fucking terrific.
I feel professionally obliged to at least marginally keep up with the driving, whiplash-inducing, 24-7 “news cycles” while feeling that it is slowly sapping my soul. Then I find myself in a conversation about politics, or the economy, or something else generally considered important, and realize how many articles I’m still ignoring.
All the while, I aim to keep improving as a writer and reporter. But the people (besides myself) who can help me do that—all those veteran colleagues—are overwhelmed, retiring, or simply getting the hell out of journalism. I can’t say I blame them.
Freelancing is not likely to help my sense of media overwhelm—indeed, it stands to intensify it—but I’m hoping it will give me more latitude, and more hours, to do work I think is worthwhile, and/or be assigned work someone else thinks is worthwhile, minus the backdrop of existential anxiety that pervades the offices of so many media companies right now. It’s a chance to write those stories in quiet, near a window and my preferred brand of coffee (and bile and gumption).
It was a little surreal to be sitting, again, in a newsroom owned by Fox contemplating the expiry of my employment. This time, though, I wasn’t printing out my resume (who does that anymore?) or applying to new jobs. I was thinking about the kind of writer I want to be, and how to make my own way doing it.
Ever heard of that old-timey phrase, “this is where I came in”? It’s for when something feels like a retread—oh brother, not again. It refers, I’ve been told, to when movies played on loop back in the day. There was no start time. You bought a ticket, walked in, and started watching. When the story came full circle, you whispered to your friend, “this is where we came in.”
So this I where I came in. I’m going to exit the theater for now, and look for a new picture.
christinabnunez at gmail