Will you write for the populist revolt?
Let’s put our readers first for a change
Plugged-in. Jaded. Depressed.
We turn on the news and see:
Teenagers-turned-activists are fighting for their lives. White extremists are openly and violently taking to the streets. Climate change is here, it’s deadly — and there’s little being done about it. U.S. wealth inequality continues to climb at a startling rate. Many people — even the young and educated — are struggling with basic necessities like affordable healthcare, housing, and steady employment.
The future seems extremely precarious to any reader who keeps up with the news or is living through these realities for themselves. And it’s starting to take a real toll — both depression and suicides are on the rise, and millennials are colloquially known as “the most depressed generation.” They’re also one of the most anxious groups — only beaten by the generation currently transitioning to adulthood, Gen Z.
I’ve always believed that the rate of meme generation correlates pretty accurately to the collective jadedness of a society. Jokes — crafted around a base of memes, copypasta, reaction gifs, and old vines — about nuclear annihilation, suicide, neocolonialism, climate change, and a Handmaid’s Tale-style overthrow of American democracy get parroted ad-nauseam in group chats, Twitter threads, and special Facebook meme groups. Sometimes making fun of a bleak future is the only way to face it with a steady gaze.
Both the future and our current reality are terrifying in many ways. There’s no sugar-coating it. But as a society, we’re terrible at talking about our fears and problems productively. This starts with the mainstream media and reverberates throughout the echo chambers of our social media.
As writers and journalists, we have a responsibility to portray both the good and the bad accurately and realistically.
But mainstream writers and journalists are often as reactionary as meme lords. They focus on opinions and conversations instead of problems and solutions.
This kind of makes sense if you’re an entertainment writer — “You’ll never believe what Katy Perry said to Ariana Grande about Pete Davidson’s new hair!” *As far as I know this hasn’t actually happened but if it did you know Vanity Fair would be all over it.
But it merely adds to our collective anxiety when the majority of headlines about global affairs look like — “You’ll never guess what Donald Trump told Kim Jong-un about the size of his nuclear button!” *Sadly this actually happened — in the paper of record no less.
Most people don’t have a detailed history of U.S. — North Korean relations or knowledge of the technical specifications of their nuclear arsenal. Your average reader doesn’t have any of the much-needed context to understand how serious the threat of Nuclear War in 2018 actually is, and whether North Korea is even the biggest threat. Recent history is not taught in most schools, and when it is taught, it’s rarely taught well.
You have to go out of your way to get any factual context on many of the issues in the news today. Why don’t news sites write more big-picture pieces? Why don’t most publications write their stories based on issues, instead of stand-alone events and conversations that don’t make much sense without a historical and scientific context that’s widely lacking in American society?
This is just the model we’ve been taught to follow — keep up with current events, make your investors happy, and tell a story in a way that’s new and exciting for your tribe or it’s a waste of ad space.
I think most readers would agree that this model wasn’t designed in their best interest.
In an age of global tech and communication, we’ve entered an equally global era of misinformation and espionage. We finally have the tools to address educational inequality in this country, but we still need to invest the time and the money.
If you’re an independent writer, chances are you don’t have much of the latter. At least, I don’t. But I do have the time.
Major publications continue to offer only the most superficial coverage of the issues Americans face — gun violence, mass incarceration, homelessness, educational inequality, systemic racism, fascism, violence against women, environmental devastation, and more. They’re not going to touch this model as long as it’s making them money and keeping advertisers and investors happy.
It’s going to take a movement from the bottom-up to actually inform our readers and start a productive conversation instead of just perpetuating memey panic. It’s going to take a writers’ revolt.
We’re all an expert in something. We all have experiences and perspectives that someone else has never heard before. When you’re not doing the writing that keeps food on your table — be it local journalism, ghost writing, or editing website copy — take a little time to share the background info you know. Write a Medium article, start a newsletter, launch a podcast, tweet an informative thread on Twitter — whatever you think will reach your people best. You might be able to make money off it, and you might not. But your readers will appreciate it, and you’ll be one more voice of reason in an increasingly chaotic echo-chamber of national anxiety.
Anxiety and depression can paralyze you. They convince you that your actions and even your existence are meaningless.
The way news is presented today only exacerbates these feelings. But knowledge is power. When we take a few steps back, when we as writers can say that this has happened before, that there are solutions, or that you should take action on this because your voice means something — we honor the truth and we put our readers first.
Don’t just regurgitate other peoples’ conversations. Be a writer — a good writer.
Because good writers revolt.
