Journalists Describe Changing State of Media

According to journalists Hendrik Hertzberg ’65 and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the field of journalism has become harder to enter but less lucrative in the United States today.

Coates, a senior editor at “The Atlantic,” and Hertzberg, a senior editor at “The New Yorker” and former Crimson managing editor, discussed the shifting state of journalism in the United States at a lecture in MIT’s Stata Center Tuesday evening.

The discussion was directed by Coates, who asked Hertzberg questions about his experiences as an opinion columnist and about the evolution of journalism over time.

“We are at a Gutenberg moment. Everything has been thrown up in the air, and we don’t know how or whether it is going to settle,” Hertzberg said, referring to the Gutenberg printing press that revolutionized information exchange in early modern Europe. “The internet allows anyone to transmit their opinions and ideas to the public, creating a wave of opinions and ideas that may be difficult to sift through.”

Responding to the assertion that the public is losing the ability to recognize good journalism because of this trend, Hertzberg stressed the importance of not glorifying the past.

“Though there are more opinions out there, I doubt that the proportion of good to bad ideas has changed,” he added. “Journalism in the past has been pretty dreadful.”

Coates added that journalists starting their careers today “need more conviction and must always have the intellectual courage to answer the questions that arise from their ideas in order to entice readers who have other things to do than read essays.”

Hertzberg said that he might not be as motivated to get into journalism if he were starting today.

“For me, it was the path of least resistance,” he said.

Thomas M. Levenson ’80, a professor of scientific writing at MIT who moderated the discussion, noted “a potential correlation between the dreadful state of US political culture and pathologies in opinion journalism culture.”

However, Hertzberg disagreed, calling the degree to which journalism degrades political culture “routinely exaggerated.”

Both Coates and Hertzberg agreed that the elements that drew them to opinion writing still remain in journalism today.

Coates said that what he loves about writing is “making the reader feel the argument, not just read it.”

Hertzberg said that for him, it is the effort to make writing aesthetically pleasing in its structure, sentence by sentence, that makes writing worthwhile.

“Putting sentences together has a graphic aspect, and graphically beautiful writing can open your ideas to people who do not agree with you,” he said.

Coates also described the growing opportunities afforded to writers in a changing media landscape.

“Blogging is a kind of recreation that allows me to come up with things that I cannot come up with in formal writing,” Coates said.