The One Secret Technique That Drives Journalists Insane
Ha ha ha!
These âLying to Yourselfâ posts (1,2) are for founders, c-suite, and other executives who are engaging PR or comms for the first time. (All are welcome, of course.) They are public first drafts. I reserve the right to feel differently in future iterations.
Youâre a founder. Youâve taken countless risks to keep your vision alive. Maybe itâs not even your original vision, but somehow youâve kept your head down and made something happen.
Then you get an email from a reporter. Theyâre wondering if you might have some time to talk. Or even just answer a few questions via email.
You hadnât been courting media coverage. You feel a little flush. What does the reporter want? Theyâre at a pretty big publicationâone youâd love to have your company mentioned inâso maybe itâs fine. Good even.
You agree to meet the reporter for coffee. Theyâre nice! Theyâre listening to your story, nodding when you talk about some of the times you thought your company might fail. You try to pick up the tab, but they smile and refuse. You both sort of laughâoh right.
Three weeks later you wake up to a bunch of texts. Your company is in the news. And itâsâŠwell, itâs not great.
Youâve been quoted a couple of times. Nothing awful, but without the context of the whole conversation your words can be construed to be a little more bloviating than you meant them to sound. The ironic tone you took in conversation didnât come through. And the whole riff about how hard it is to find good employees? No other way to parse it. You sound like a prick.
Youâve got to do something, you think. This isnât fair. You have a hundred different things snapping at your attention every day, and now this reporter shows up out of nowhere, disarmingly enthusiastic, and all the sudden youâve got yet another crisis on your hands.
Oh, yeah, Twitter. Yikes. Itâs not good. Someone has shopped your face onto a meme that doesnât even make sense, but the tone still comes through. Someone who worked for you a couple of years ago has several hundred retweets of their thread that shares, for the first time in public, they note, how they didnât feel safe bringing up some of their complaints about your leadership in meetings. More memes. The one with you, Elon, and Bezos is almost flattering. At least youâre important enough now to be a cartoon captain of industry.
Okay. Youâve handled worse. Youâre a humble person. And you have nothing to hide.
Itâs the next morning. Your head of HR quit after what you still donât see as a tweet âstorm.â Sheâll stay quiet for the next couple of weeks, she said, but someone at another company just texted you to ask you if sheâs any good. It doesnât make sense. You just explained in public what the reporter got wrong. It wasnât pride. This has hurt your company and the people who work for you. You canât let your people think youâre weak, that you wonât stand up for yourself, the company, them. You have a responsibility.
Like your fellow founder buddy said last night over a drink, the problem is modern media itself. They arenât going for the truth. Theyâre going for quick hits, stuff that will get outrage clicks. They donât care about you or your business or the people whose jobs they are jeopardizing with this pointless attack piece.
You open up Twitter again. I see you tweeting and make a note to send over my rate card in, oh, looks like another week or so.
Hereâs something about journalists you should know: theyâre almost all miserable.
The reporter at a major newspaper feels like his editors neuter his stories every time. The blogger at a dying blog network isnât sure where sheâll go when the company is finally sold for parts to a private equity roll-up. The opinion page writer doesnât understand why her younger colleagues are slagging her columns in public. The guy who just became editor-in-chief of a dying magazine gets a look at historic P&Ls and realizes, adjusted for inflation, heâs making about half of what his predecessors made in the â80s. The recent college graduate just found herself laid off before sheâs even had a chance to file her first feature. The conservative finance writer, detested by everyone at the office for his bad taste in clothes and decor, pacifies himself by leaking rumors of union organizing to competing publications. A group of writers and editors sitting at a dive bar act elated to hear that the travel writer has sold a book, only to drag her as soon as she steps out for a cigarette. A writerâs manager told her that investing in individual stocks was unethical for a journalist; the manager just bought a brownstone with a down payment provided by her parents. The local paper columnist just got promoted because everyone else was laid off.
Fun culture!
Every day, reporters tromp through the worst that humanity has on offer. Crime. Global warming. Insane politicians. Dozens of sniveling PR people kissing their ass. Workers being taken advantage of. People starving, dying.
Even if theyâre not a hard news reporter, theyâre all lied to almost every day. Sometimes those lies take years to manifest. Every business or tech reporter has dozens of stories about a time they reported a piece, fact-checked it, gave a company or executive or politician the benefit of the doubt, only to realize over time that the whole thing was a ruseâeither a purposeful hiding of facts or a situation where their skepticism was founded.
Being a journalist doesnât feel powerful. It feels, more often than not, like pissing in the wind. You spend weeks or months trying to reveal a truth, correct a wrong, even celebrate something inspiring, only to have it published on the same day that a gunman kills a bunch of kids or the president says something stupid, sucking up all the attention. Or almost worse: your story pops off, people are outraged at the injustice you unveiled, and thenâŠthatâs it. A week or two later no on is in jail, the bad guys are still in power. You finally hit the mark, and it just doesnât seem like it mattered. So you pick up the phone and start digging again.
Now am I suggesting you should pity the reporter thatâs sniffing around your business? Maybe give them a little leeway? Fuck no. Theyâre doing their job, but you should do yours. And that includes maintaining your personal agency in any exchange: knowing when to talk (rarely) and when not to (your default); spending the time to get to know the reporters and their work in your industry, or engaging PR professionals who can do that for you; building a corporate culture that inoculates itself from making the mistakes that the outside world would want to expose in the first place; understanding at least the broad strokes of how the media works, not just things like the difference between âoff the recordâ and âon background,â and not just because itâs a curious little ceremony of a sacerdotal class, but because itâs your job as a leader to understand any channel you choose to engage with that can impact your business.
What you should not doânever ever, not onceâis bitch in public about the media. Or call them trolls or say theyâre only attacking you for clicks. Or insult a reporter specifically.
Itâs not just because itâs a bad look with no clear win scenario. Itâs because when you go on the attack, youâre showing fragility in your character. To the whole worldâand to your employees. Youâre also exposing how powerless you feel. How one bad story that will probably go away in a couple of weeks has turned you into a mewling snit, ready to drop your attention from your business as soon as anyone threatens you even a little bit.
Iâm not saying it should feel good. Yes, youâre human. You have feelings. But who cares? Youâre not a hero. Youâre a business operator. You have chosen to dedicate your life to creating wealth through capitalism, largely for yourself, probably, but maybe for the people who work for you. Thatâs fine. Not heroic, but fine. Most societies seem to need merchants. So be excellent at that. At creating wealth. Focus on that. Think about how your interactions with the mediaâeven a combative oneâcan increase your chances to create wealth. And if they canât? Just donât interact with the media.
Attacking an outlet? Or a journalist? The depressed person working in a dying industry? Why tangle with them? (There are ways to correct the record without creating a bigger messâand sometimes it is necessaryâbut itâs harder and more expensive than most people want to admit. More on that in the future.)
Reputation, which can help create wealth, but is demonstrably not essential to the process, is a byproduct of actions over time. Journalism isnât, on the whole, a creative force. At its best itâs destructive in a way that, like bankruptcy, creates space for new growth. And it operates by telling, not doing. That is its nature. And while it is imperfect, it is folly to try to take on professional storytellers via the mediums which they control. (That includes, more-or-less, Twitter.) Respond with actionâor most commonly, inaction. Get back to work.
And if you really care about the erosion of quality in media? Found a media outlet. Oh, that sounds awful? It is. So leave the reflexive public criticism about industries you barely understand to the experts.
Thatâs the secret. Accrete power. Build wealth. Be satisfied. You have more opportunities to have all these things than almost any journalist working today. And they know it.
I like knowing that there are founders who will have read this post, that we'll ~never know~ because they a few of 'em will actually follow this sound counsel. the intrigue!