Study Hall Digest 5/8/2017

Hi

This week, Desmond Cole, a twice-a-month freelance columnist at the Toronto Star, quit when he was chastised by management for disrupting a meeting of police in the name of black activism. “If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community, I choose activism in the service of Black liberation,” Cole wrote on Facebook. Cole wasn’t technically fired, but it became clear to him that the mainstream Star’s insistence that activism and journalism are separate things was untenable for someone who cared deeply about the latter.

Study Hall friend Lewis Wallace has written about this: How do you write when (mainstream) writing requires you to come from the perspective of the oppressor, and if you’re from a marginalized group, your oppressor? How do we challenge this in the age of Trump? Being unbiased, to me, seems a pointless exercise—what is the line between writing and activism? If your writing isn’t advocating something, then WTF is it saying???

In some more depressing news, Facebook is hiring 3,000 people to watch out for murders, suicides and other traumatizing videos on the site. It’s a good reminder that social media is just media—it requires curators, publishers, editors, and an audience. Now those jobs are just outsourced to underpaid workers in other countries.

In some less depressing news: Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker, and some other people, are raising funding for a new “Breitbart of the left.” Seems like it could be fun, though Spiers’s politics are pretty middle-of-the-road, whereas Breitbart is like far, far right, so it’s maybe more a Breitbart of the center-liberal? I guess we’ll see how that’s different than, say, BuzzFeed, or Fusion, or Mic.

Final Thoughts

How are people feeling??? About the media, about life, about Trump (thank god Macron won, right?? (even if he’s an investment banker who wants to make French people work more :())? I’m finding myself desiring long-term, super-meaningful work that feels disconnected from the daily news cycle—I want to write books about emotions and weird shit. Trump has definitely redefined what ‘political’ feels like—it feels less like reading the news and more like making sure I’m okay, less like voting and more like building shit with people—it feels smaller and larger, and less short-term. I obviously think journalism is important, but it feels so taxing and sometimes mechanical under Trump (as we discussed on the Listserv, the president seems to loom over every piece lately).

What are people doing to stay emotionally present, and on top of everything happening? How are people feeling about their work? What are y’all doing to grapple with this crazy world? <3, Peter