I quit ‘the news’—not Journalism. Support my book on Manny Ellis, PNW cop killings & cover-ups

Happy Friday friends!

I’m sorry it’s been so long—I’ve had plenty to say (too much, honestly). But I’m glad I waited. The dust from the 2024 election cycle has settled, revealing nothing but a daily drumbeat of chaos. Corporate legacy media is largely buckling under the pressure, or their hedge fund or billionaire owners are somehow cranking it up a notch. Yet, I feel inspired seeing more and more people asking the same questions that have wracked my brain for many months.

What does it mean to be informed in this moment? Civically engaged? Is trying to stay on top of the news hurting more than it helps? 

But before I go too far down that rabbit hole and into why I paused publishing, here’s the skinny on what’s changing around here:

• Meet Truth to Power Northwest (T2PNW): A digital civil rights magazine dedicated to voices and communities that most institutions ignore, including the incarcerated, the unhoused, the disabled, immigrants and LGBTQ+ folks. It's just me for now, but I hope others will join the collective.
• Subscribing supports my book: I want to document how Manny Ellis’ killing by Tacoma police five years ago next week exposed the Northwest’s long history of police impunity, as well as how politicians and news media helped cover up abuses of power. While The Walk Home podcast is the definitive account of Manny’s killing, it couldn’t fully explore the countless through lines with race and civil rights. Paid members help me dig deeper.
• Less information, more wisdom: Weekly news roundups just aren't sustainable without more hands, and I’m not sure that’s the best use of my time—or yours! I’ll send a free, beefy update about civil rights and policing, including Manny’s case, around once a month starting in late March. I'm calling it Letters from the Margins.
• Increasing collective power: Before refocusing on a self-publishing campaign, I spent a bunch of money and effort testing ways to follow civil rights news across the tri-state region and filter out as much junk as possible. Paid members will get access to these tools and discussions on how to improve them for public use.

More to to come... in due time.

The News Industrial Complex Tried to Kill Me

Editor’s note: I published this introductory section as an excerpt on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago.

I've struggled with the voice inside my head telling me I'd be better off dead for years. But 2024 made me the most afraid I might give in.

For years, I asked therapists how I could stay healthy on the job, blaming myself for the brunt of my inner turmoil: my choices to cover traumatic stories, my lack of boundaries with work, my inner critic whispering I wasn’t doing enough. The industry always told me that I should just feel lucky to have a job.

I worked two dream jobs. I celebrated my wedding. I got a Poynter Institute fellowship. I was also almost always running on adrenaline, questioning whether my family saw me as a burden. Those dream jobs eventually turned into nightmares.

You're not alone if you feel like the industry hates you. In the past few weeks, I've talked with at least a dozen former colleagues. And somehow, those who left news—or got left behind—seem far healthier.

I recently tore through Leslie Rangel and Kate West's new book Normalizing Mental Wellness in News. Essential reading. Yet it stops short of the real elephant in the room. It's not just that newsrooms need stronger policies, more accessible services, and more inclusive newsroom culture.

We're going on five years since the onset of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the so-called reckoning in media. And yet, if it bleeds, it still leads. Outrage continues to drive the most clicks. Controversy is the sharpest hook. Discernment and foresight are dying. Bad faith is filling the void.

All this collateral damage—to journalists, the public, and truth itself—because corporate leaders insist on clinging to the same backassward incentives, sowing still more misinformation, anxiety, and apathy.

Yet all that said, fumbling around so long in the dark has blessed me with seeing the bright spots more clearly: Singular voices standing on their own. More diversity represented in the market. Fresh perspectives in leadership.

I still refuse to be a canary in the coal mine. Yes, covering news nearly killed me. No, I'm never going back to feeding that beast. But I still think journalism matters. I'll just be doing it a whole lot differently.

Brain Gets Smart, Heart Gets Numb

I stopped putting out newsletters last fall because I hit a wall—and couldn’t bounce back. Not after feeling two “dream jobs” slip through my fingers. Not after trying to go independent with this newsletter only led me back to burn out. And certainly not after that referendum on the news industrial complex that returned the presidency to a compulsive liar.

After I lost my job at KNKX, I fell back into the harmful patterns I’d been honing since deciding to become a journalist as a college freshman in 2015. 

Attending a private Catholic school, I heard, read, and even wrote stories for the school paper about the Jesuits’ commitment to cura personalis, or “care for the whole person.” Yet I don’t remember ever hearing a lecture on mental wellness or self-care. 

I do recall the not-so-quiet racism, sexism, classism, ableism—I could go on—that was embedded within our curriculum. I knew the cautionary tales about fabricators like Jayson Blair and avoiding bias and activism, but not what to expect when covering a fatal house fire, let alone a shooting.

Instead, I learned to vent, repress, and repeat while working late into countless nights on the student paper for pennies and fighting for unpaid internships in dying newsrooms. Even then, callousness and cynicism had started to become near-constant companions. I began looking up to the most damaged, most tortured souls, thinking the only way to do work that mattered was to make myself collateral damage.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, one of my close friends put me on to gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, loaning me his drug-laden reporter’s fairytale Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The same friend I had bonded with over conversations about ideologues, even as he helped bring folks like Dinesh D’Souza to campus. The same friend who made me feel my job mattered most—and put me in touch with the future white nationalist commentator leading the statewide College Republicans. 

This internal conflict ran deep through my friend group—people I loved and respected, but I didn’t always feel understood my commitment to truth and accountability. I didn’t ask how (or even if) any of them voted. They saw how I reacted to talk about “fake news.” I was desperate to be seen as objective, impartial, and professional—even if that meant swallowing my feelings, dissociating, and going through the motions.

Bill for Bearing Witness Comes Due​

The breaking news and police beats are where many newbie reporters start. I can see how it makes sense to the old guard: throw fresh legs at fast-evolving stories that don’t demand much context; let young talent learn to swim—or probably more often sink—in demanding situations. 

At the same time, nothing messes up your head like seeing a dead body for the first time. In J-school and even when I was starting out full time, it’s not something I remember professors or editors mentioning. At best, young reporters might expect a knowing “good luck” from a grizzled colleague or a heads up from the barely older reporter who just went through it themselves. I can only imagine the culture years ago.

I covered my first police shooting at 22, less than a month into the job. It was the day after the Fourth of July fireworks show at Coeur d’Alene’s beach park in 2019, and walking toward the basketball courts I saw a patch of grass matted with partially dried blood, no crime scene tape nor efforts to wash away the carnage. 

A teenager a few years younger than me had been lying there riddled with more than a dozen police bullets, which took both his legs at his hips. I don’t remember any of my editors asking me if I was OK that day. I do know I didn’t ask for help. And that image of dark, crimson-caked sod still haunts me—just a little less each day.

Almost two months later to the day, I rushed to the scene of another police shooting in North Idaho—the first where I’d see a body bag. This time: a weekday morning, a quiet neighborhood, a second-generation Ukrainian immigrant in a mental health crisis carrying a 4-inch pocket knife.

The trauma aside, I learned many more bad habits in the newsroom: never quite unplugging, with an ear always on the police scanner; eating my hours for the sake of a good story; taking lunch (or skipping it) at my desk so I could keep pounding at the keyboard; suspecting every fluke or tragedy had a nutgraf to extract.

I felt lucky that a few times one of my editors asked if I needed a break from chasing ambulances and corrupt cops. I knew I should probably tap out, but I couldn’t admit that I wasn’t OK, even to myself. Thinking I’d had my fair share of privilege, I felt it was my burden to bear witness no matter the cost.

Now I’ve spent almost six years covering police violence, courts, and systemic failures; at the same time, I watched my best work and that of other well-meaning journalists sow misunderstanding and fuel division. The pandemic scattered newsrooms, most of them for good, driving as much physical isolation as mental. 

Though I never experienced a newsroom therapist or support group, commiserating over the frustrations of the news business used to be as easy as passing along a phone number on a sticky note. Shouting over the cubicle walls proved to be a vital lifeline that I didn’t learn the true value of until it was gone.

The industry’s reliance on extraction—from communities, from journalists, from truth itself—has left us all feeling divided, overwhelmed, and disposable. It’s no wonder many have learned to distrust the news.

New(s) Reflexes

I’ve started to differentiate between news and journalism, facts and truth. The reality is, decades ago the news industry made the financial decision to take a neutral rather than partisan perspective, which simply doesn’t exist outside the mind of your dumb uncle. The result is what we’ve seen unfold before us: an age of anxiety, misinformation, and declining trust in journalism—not just news—altogether.

I’ve witnessed the news, legacy media, whatever—I, like some others, have started calling it the news industrial complex— punching down, turning a blind eye, taking advantage of, squeezing dry and endlessly piling on. It has done this to its most vulnerable subjects, to faithful practitioners, and to loyal readers. It’s stolen confidence and peace of mind from the colleagues I admire most. It’s almost certainly shortened the lives of a few dearly departed friends.

I view “capital-J” journalism, as many say, sometimes sarcastically, as a process—one that’s more creative than scientific. From me and T2PNW, you can expect more art than news; truth than fact; morality than neutrality; experiments than traditions; wisdom than information.

I filed my last stories for my first newspaper during the second night of protests in Minneapolis over the police murder of George Floyd. Watching 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video, I wasn’t stunned by the brutality—I had just spent a year covering some of the most egregious and least scrutinized police violence in the country. I was stunned that this time, people were standing up.

I want to do journalism in that spirit—inspiring people to take a stand—with Ida B. Wells’ grit; Ed Murrow’s integrity; Woodward and Bernstein’s camaraderie; Cronkite’s gravitas; Wes Lowery’s moral clarity.

Something Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show about national political media earlier this year has been stuck in my head:

“We must be vigilant. But part of vigilance is discernment.”

For me, that’s about knowing when to pay attention, when to cry out, and when to let go. If you believe in this vision, join me. Support this newsletter, share it with others, help me build something better than the status quo. Always in solidarity,

–JB

PS: If you want to get involved with Truth to Power Northwest—writing, recording, you name it—hit me up: jared@t2pnw.news.

PPS: If you’re interested in learning how yoga and mindfulness (plus a little ol’ Western medicine) saved my life, please sign up at unbrokencreatives.org.