We’ll be taking an intermission as the fall sports and election seasons reach their peak. Thank you for reading. See you in December.

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This is a note to say thank you. It has been an incredible seven months, and there is more to come.

Here’s a snapshot of what you got since my latest relaunch. More than 20 conversations so far, and a few things I learned:

• Beatrice Peterson: John Bresnahan’s reporting inspired her to get into journalism.

• Andy Revkin: He can sing and play the reporting long game.

• Isaac Saul: He loves and misses writing - and how his readers became paid subscribers.

• Sandy Davidson: She fears the love of truth is slipping.

• Taylor Six: She describes the moment she realized journalists needed something different surrounding substance abuse.

• E&E News: Was in talks to become part of the Financial Times.

• Adam Klasfeld: He wants readers to feel less despair in the news.

There were essays, too. How journalism got me to the top of the world, via three weeks in Tibet. My grandfather’s wisdom about presidential candidates and campaigns, in the form of a question. A notebook entry from 9/11/01, when I was supposed to be staking out a closed-door summit on pollution standards but instead ended up writing poems on the Mall. Twelve guests sharing their wisdom on whether journalism loved them back, a video that taught me how good LinkedIn is for journalism networking.

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More: the cherry on top of the Obama and Giuliani story readers heard all about in season 1 of love, journalism: how my 2015 Politico scoop ended up at Disney World. And I made myself the 2016 movie I have been dying to make.

(And a book of poems. Subscribers, if you did not get your copy, reply to this email with your address ASAP. I’m writing the letters this afternoon and mailing them tomorrow. More than half of my paying subscribers have theirs so far. I’m also dropping a couple at my local bookstore. They will be worth millions alongside my autographed bar mitzvah programs.)

It has been a productive year. I’m ending 2026 as chair of the National Press Club board, and I’m excited for 2027.

A reader poll is coming in December. I want to hear what you want next year: guest essays, premium content, behind-the-scenes on my own stories, how reporters are handling things today, or a blank for you to fill in.

love, journalism is reader-supported. If you read for free and want to chip in, consider upgrading to paid. #30#

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Happy World Series! It’s been a decade since the Chicago Cubs won their first championship in 108 years. I was there. Here’s my story.

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It’s one thing to be a politics reporter running toward Election Day. It’s another thing to be a politics reporter running when your baseball team is in the postseason.

In 2016, the Chicago Cubs were a good team and I feared what would happen as the finish line approached for the sports and campaign seasons.

This is where good editors stepped into the picture.

A lot of things in life are more important than work, including seeing in person my beloved baseball team trying to win its first championship in 108 years.

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I’ve loved the Cubs since before I could write, and I’ve witnessed enough heartbreak. Any sports fan understands what it means to win a championship.

A decade ago, the Cubs were all-consuming in a way that helped me as a journalist to get through the presidential campaign. It had been one hell of a run, and I was still emotionally bruised from having to fact check a debate when one of our players hit one of the largest, longest home runs in the history of baseball.

(One of the better parts of being a politics writer is how I can exaggerate the daylights out of sports writing as a fan.)

This is a tribute to those editors at Politico. They ran a publication dedicated to American politics and its influence around the world. And yet those editors were also fans of the Yankees, the Brewers, the Pirates, and many more teams. They understood that to turn a reporter away as the whole team is racing toward the finish line is something the reporter might regret, 10 years later, when they’re trying to come up with a good theme for an essay to run on the anniversary of the championship.

Some things, like a bar mitzvah, a wedding, a funeral, Game 7, you don’t miss.

Hope you enjoy this special presentation of love, journalism. We’ll be taking an intermission as the fall sports and election seasons reach their peak.

Now, please enjoy me making a fool out of myself in Cleveland. And remember when you’re cheering the final out to stop and shake hands with the other team’s fans. Also: “Who lost a Cubs hat?” #30#

Thanks for reading love, journalism! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Episode 8: ‘F- that. We needed the Cubs.’

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I love getting to know why journalists get into journalism. Here’s Beatrice Peterson, ABC News’ National Enterprise Reporter and the 2026 NABJ Journalist of the Year.

“I got into journalism because I didn’t know any journalists.”

Beatrice has had a great 2026. NABJ recognized her body of work including President Trump’s federal takeover of her hometown of Washington, D.C., and beat reporting about then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In 2020, during the pandemic, Beatrice was an embed covering Gabbard, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Kanye West and other presidential candidates. Gabbard went on to join Trump’s second-term administration.

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Growing up in DC, she took the “long way” to journalism. She loved going out with her family to the city’s go-go night scene. She won music scholarships, wanted to be a musician and planned to drop out of Trinity Washington University after her first year. Instead, she stayed. She worked for Rep. Charlie Rangel, before, during and after his ethics investigation when “reporters were following me to the bathroom as an intern.”

She shouts out John Bresnahan’s reporting during the Rangel affair as helping to inspire her to get into journalism. John, Beatrice and I all worked together at Politico. I didn’t know her origin story at Politico until our interview. She walked up to one of Politico’s booths at a Columbia University job fair and pitched herself: “Politico sucks and I can make it better. Hire me.” That’s money.

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Writing her NABJ acceptance speech, she scribbled thoughts in the back of a club while on antibiotics as friends celebrated in her honor. Her speech is fun to watch and shares the love, journalism thesis.

“I think the letter from journalism to me is if you’re persistent enough and you have big dreams and you have big goals and you want to do some crazy stuff that nobody believes might happen, you know, it can happen. You know, things change in a heartbeat.”

Please enjoy Beatrice’s story, and we’ll be back soon.

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My grandfather also had some very specific thoughts on the people who run for president. Since Lisa and I just wrapped up talking about the toll of campaign coverage, I’m dusting off his old question to kick off the race for 2028 today...

The best people never run for president.

My late grandfather, Lew, said that every election cycle. It was the frustrating answer I got as a kid whenever I asked him who he was voting for or who he thought would win.

His answer usually came with a free, hardbound book pulled off his shelves: The Powers That Be, All The President’s Men and Pulitzer. Later in life, approaching 100, he stopped paying attention to the news altogether. But all he wanted to talk about during my visits in early 2016 was when Joe Biden was going to be president.

Now, we’re right back at the starting line. The race for 2028 begins right now, and I’m wondering all over again what lies ahead. For the first time in my career, I’m sitting out direct coverage of the midterms. But just because I’m on the sidelines doesn’t mean I can’t write or pose a few big questions.

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I got my first real taste of presidential campaign coverage in 1992. The Miami Herald let a handful of high school reporters - including yours truly - spend Election Day traversing South Florida to talk to kids participating in a mock election. We filed our stories that night from the newsroom overlooking the bay.

I even managed to get the editors to consent to a headline calling President George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot the “twerp, the dweeb and the idiot” — though I wasn’t very clear on which one was which.

By the 2000 campaign, I was a professional reporter, and my memories are a blur of distinct, chaotic moments: Editors telling me “no” when I asked to branch out from my outdoors beat to cover a Ralph Nader rally; leaving Olympia, Washington, for a cross-country drive the morning after Election Day when nobody knew who won, collecting front pages along the highway where headlines literally read that no one knew what was happening; looking for my first DC job while the Supreme Court did its thing.

Lisa Camooso Miller

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Behind Darren Samuelsohn on our call sat a plastic tub. Then another one. Inside are about 200 journals, decades of a reporter writing to himself, and he’s working his way through every one of them…

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12 days ago · Lisa Camooso Miller and Darren Samuelsohn

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Later, my memories as a climate reporter usually involved inventing new traditions - like golfing or going to the movies on Election Day to brace for the brutal late nights of writing around what it meant for actual energy and environmental policy once we had winners.

It was a completely different beast when I moved to POLITICO. We’d cover current elections, the following election and pretty much anything that even sniffed of voting. As the clock ticked toward 2020, we had a surreal split-screen: one small team of reporters including me was still stuck covering the legal fallout of 2016, while campaign teams were already embedding in Iowa. Josh Lyman had it right on The West Wing when he said these cycles just keep happening sooner and sooner.

Which brings us back to our more recent reality. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, I wore both the reporter and editor hats to publish this headline with Kimberly Leonard at Insider in late 2022:

At that early stage, we reported why there’d be no open primary. Biden, the oldest sitting president, insisted he was the only one who could stop Trump - the former oldest president. To make things stickier, Biden wouldn’t step aside partly out of concern that Bernie Sanders, who was older still, might capture the nomination if he left early.

So, even though these next few weeks will be dominated by the 2026 midterm results, make no mistake: 2028 is very much happening. In fact, it has been underway since the exact moment Donald Trump notched his W around midnight of Election Day 2024.

Of course, we have no way of knowing who the eventual nominees will be. But based on my years on the election and politics beats, I can tell you a few things for certain.

First: Never bank on the front runners. Not this early. I still remember a POLITICO editorial brainstorm right after the 2012 election. I walked out of the room writing in my notebook that a Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton matchup was inevitable for 2016. Cut to two years later: I was on the campaign beat making a handy cheat sheet just to keep tabs on a GOP primary field that grew so large the debates required “kiddie tables.”

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As we look toward 2028, there are a few novel dynamics worth pondering. The potential list of historical “firsts” is long: our first female, Jewish, Hindu, Hispanic, Generation X or Millennial president. (Or, hey, maybe just a person named Mike, Michelle, Karen or Darren.)

Even the idea of a sitting vice president navigating a primary and general election to get across the finish line is rare. It hasn’t happened since 1988, and it has only occurred four times in American history .

The game is on. Who do you most wish would jump into the ring?

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I got my introduction to Andy Revkin when he was at The New York Times: Olympus, as my old college advisor called it.

His coverage of Phil Cooney, a Bush White House aide who edited climate science, dominated the early days of my time in Washington on the energy and environmental beat. I learned back then what it meant to chase the Times, and that my work could be cited in the paper of record, too.

Andy walks me through how that scoop happened. A government functionary named Rick Piltz came up to him at a White House meetup on how dangerous climate change was. Piltz said he had things to give him eventually, but not yet. A couple years later, a FedEx box arrived with Cooney’s handwritten scribbles inside. Andy calls it a lesson in patience, and a case for staying dug in on a beat.

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I met Andy in 2005 in Montreal, at the first climate conference I ever attended, a UN COP. I was starstruck. He wrote for a massive audience. I was in the weeds.

Twenty-one years later, the world heads to Turkey for COP31, Nov. 9-20. Andy’s last day as a Times reporter came at the end of Copenhagen in 2009. His read on these summits: the treaty process reflects what countries have already decided they will do. It does not determine it. His advice to reporters is to do the reporting at home before these things.

Along the way: Senator Inhofe, the chunks debate, and Pete Seeger’s red pen on a song about Arlington National Cemetery, and why Andy ignored most of it. He closes with a line from Jay Rosen: journalism is a practice, not a product. He opened with six words that make a fair thesis for this show: “I love journalism, still, despite all.”

And for the first time in the history of this show, a musical performance. I asked Andy where the exit is, in a world where we’re all trying to pull back and yet speeding up so fast. He answered with “Good News from 2044,” a short song from his new album.

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Enjoy.

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I wrote in early 2023, when I was out of work, that journalism is a relationship. Unbalanced. Lots of times codependent. It doesn’t talk back like a cat, but it does, via readers, editors, and competitors.

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I’d just been dumped. I was planning to do the dumping. I got defenestrated the day after Elon Musk took over Twitter and Paul Pelosi was attacked at his home, about a week before the midterms. I’d been running through 2022 toward a finish line at Insider, wearing myself out in the process.

I was torn deciding how I could step away. I didn’t have a job lined up. I was dealing with the death of a friend, on my own. I was trying to figure out what to say publicly about losing my job without having another one ready.

So I wrote myself a letter, five or ten versions in a notebook. Somewhere along the way I stuck a comma between the words love and journalism. I was asking why I love journalism, trying to talk myself into staying. The letter turned backwards and became a letter from journalism, trying to talk me into staying. I signed it the way you sign a letter: love, journalism.

Why I got into this

My reasons for being in journalism keep expanding.

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I loved it at USA Today because I was passing things on to the next generation, steering a spaceship through incredible times. I loved The Messenger because of the swings we took in our startup burst.

Near the end of my time with Insider, I loved it because I was learning something about myself, the industry I’d chosen and the world I lived in. I loved it at Politico because I got to ask the hardest questions of the most powerful people. I loved it at E&E News because I was learning the weeds of a business that teaches you things you'll never imagine.

I loved it in Olympia because I interviewed hikers on a trail one day and learned about Bigfoot the next. I loved it in Columbia because I was scratching a childhood dream, though it made me realize the press box wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

If I look back, I can see my love for journalism forming as the youngest in a family of three kids. My parents divorced when I was about 12, and I was in the middle of the tell-your-mother, tell-your-father conversations.

“I learned the value of ‘a-ha’ and silence, letting them talk, observing, listening, and connecting dots on my own,” I wrote in my 2023 journal. “I wouldn’t realize this connection to journalism for a good 35 years when I had a chance finally to step off the stage to get some perspective.”

The question

This year, across Season 3 of The love, journalism Show, I asked my guests a version of this question: Has journalism loved you back? This week, I pulled 12 of those answers into one highlight video.

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Manu Raju said journalism “always wants more no matter how much you give it.” Susan Page: “beyond any expectation I ever had.” Natalie Goldberg, who isn’t a journalist, got a different question, whether writing has loved her back: “No, I don’t ask for writing to love me back.” Isaac Saul, on the months before he launched Tangle: “some of the darkest times of my life.” Mike Allen: “the greatest life.”

I asked people in texts and on social media this week to tell me what they thought.

One Missouri alum said I was asking the wrong question. No job loves you back, he said, and the better question is why journalists do what they do. Another colleague credited journalism with great life experiences and with the skills to stay balanced around difficult relationships, and agreed it’s a practice. Two singled out Mike Allen’s answer, and one called the license to badger people an underrated part of the gig.

My answer is yes, in time. It gave me a career and every story behind it. It also broke my heart, more than once. What do you think? Has journalism loved you back?

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Today: Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle. I tried to bring him onto my Insider team in 2020. He had a better idea

Isaac Saul landed on my radar in early 2020. His emails on Tangle summarized the news, how journalists were covering it and ending with a neutral take on what it meant.

I was a Politico reporter covering the Trump White House, about to leave two decades of full-time writing for a role at Insider where I would hire, build and lead my own team out of Washington. Isaac stood out as a great fit.

We spoke in March 2020, and I pitched him on joining. He wasn’t interested in applying. I am glad.

Back then, Isaac was an editor by day and a newsletter writer by night. His first issue had gone to 13 people. He stuck with it. A year or so later, he quit his day job and went all-in on Tangle.

Now he has a team of a dozen journalists, and he says there are more than 600,000 people on his mailing list.

On the latest episode of The love, journalism Show, I asked Isaac why he chose this noble profession. He went from sports reporter at Pitt into politics, and he saw a gap: “The media ecosystem wasn’t really working for the people that I was really close with.”

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I reminded him that in March 2020 he told me he was dreaming about doing this full-time. Here, he explains what happened between the dream and the decision. He asked his employer for six months and told them, “I’m trying to build this off ramp for myself.” Then, paid subscriptions turned on, and 500 people out of 3,000 signed up.

Isaac helped love, journalism at its 2023 launch, too. He read some of my earliest copy. I reached out then to compare notes, since he has been at it longer and closer than I have.

As I returned this year for my third tango on Substack, we talked about the 2026 landscape and what it looks like today for a journalist working on their own. His read: "an incredible saturation of the space,” and “we’re kind of approaching peak newsletter.”

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Tangle is a special creation. It gives you sides, and then a take. I asked how that compares to my time in the trenches of climate policy, where I took the science as given and covered the argument over whether to act. In my experience, the market settled that debate.

Isaac pushed back on the two-sides frame. “It’s never two sides. It’s almost always 12.” When I asked whether that holds for January 6 or the rule of law, he said of the election fraud claims: “If the election had been stolen in 2020 and I could report that, I would have won a Pulitzer.”

On Sept. 29, Isaac launched a YouTube channel under his own name. He is also starting a separate newsletter for the opinion essays that have been sitting in his drafts folder. His first target: the fear campaigns of election season, and how to decide your vote “without succumbing to fear.”

And like every guest, he answers the closing question: did journalism love him back? “For me, the answer is yes. And I understand that I’m lucky to be able to say that.”

Had a cold last week (update, t’was COVID!), so this post tied to my Rob Schwartz show got bumped a bit. But considering our story is nearly three decades in the making, waiting a few extra days didn’t really matter.

There aren’t many guardrails on top of the world.

Which was one of the many terrifying things to keep out of mind while packed on a local bus - a bus that didn’t require a ticket and kept no record of my existence. We were hours from the nearest internet café.

I was one of the only Americans around, which was the best part, traveling from Shigatse, Tibet’s second-biggest city, alongside monks, backpackers and locals. When the driver pulled over, everyone scrambled along the riverbank to find a shred of privacy for a bathroom break. Altitude sickness: check. Up ahead, a bridge had buckled over the roaring water, so we waited. For what, I’m not sure.

During that long, never-ending ride, I fell in love with the Grateful Dead song “Brokedown Palace.” Over those hours, I built up a sensory memory that’s been reused for about 30 years whenever I need a moment of peace and solitude. Like when I’m in a dentist’s chair.

There were a lot of moments like that in Tibet. Another one I love is the story behind this photograph. I took a million shots wandering the Yogurt Festival on my own. This is the one I framed.

Rob Schwartz is the reason I was in Tibet at all.

I’d been teaching English in Japan and was set on visiting Vietnam on the way back home to the States. Then I met Rob at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. We were both journalists on assignment and became fast friends. He talked me into ripping up my post-Tokyo travel plans to make a run for Himalayan nirvana instead.

Rob knew Mount Kailash. His first trip to Tibet, in 1987, lasted three weeks, not enough time to make the trek. So he returned in 1988, hitchhiked about a thousand miles from Lhasa in full winter gear to complete the grueling three-day kora around Kailash at roughly 17,000 feet. Hinduism calls it Shiva’s home. Buddhists and the Bön hold it holy too. The Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra all map their origins near its base.

“Oftentimes what people hold as holy also actually are really contributing to the extension and ability to live their lives,” Rob told me during a recent visit to The love, journalism Show.

We planned to go. But the monsoon rains washed out the roads, and we had to back away.

So, we hung out in Lhasa for a few weeks and made a movie instead.

Rob, a self-described wannabe filmmaker, wrote a quick script called My Karmic Laundromat. We shot it around town with Lena, a traveler we’d befriended (who now writes Tessa Fights Robots on Substack). The plot featured a kissing scene and an attempted reincarnation. I still recall a traveler from Japan warning us the local police were keeping close watch on us because of all the heavy camera gear we were lugging around.

Rob never did produce our movie, though he says he still has the cassette footage somewhere. His ultimate review: “as a film, I don’t think it really holds together... the script is pretty weak... there’s no real conclusion.”

When we weren’t playing filmmaker, we wandered around the Barkhor, the city’s main commercial center, and explored the Jokhang Temple. I ate yak burgers. We bought heavy fabric and hired a local tailor to stitch us chubas, the traditional Tibetan robes that double as warm clothing and a massive, useful sack to carry gear. We stayed at the Banak Shol hotel, which featured a free gear-and-info co-op run by travelers. Rob called it a spirit of cooperation and adventure “that you just don’t get in other places.”

Rob left to head back to Tokyo, and I stayed a drop longer. I took a side trip to Shigatse with a thin Chinese notebook. At dinner, kids banged on windows and pulled jacket sleeves, trying to get tourists to share food or coins. That night, I wrote: “The American looks down at his book, refusing to accommodate and perpetuate a seemingly and feelingly hopeless charity. A city of hope in a hello state of mind. Oh China! What have you done?”

On the way back, the bus hit landslides and roads washed out from overnight rain. My Dead CD stayed on repeat. Staring out at the world’s highest peaks, I sifted in my mind through the hypothetical ways the world back home would find out if my bus rolled off the mountain.

When I got to my Hotmail and emailed home, I wrote: “Nothing will be too difficult in life again.”

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This is an episode I’ve been looking forward to since my Substack started. Meet my friend, Rob Schwartz.

Thirty years ago, a dying professor at Brandeis changed how the world talks about aging and death.

Tuesdays with Morrie made Mitch Albom a different kind of writer. What almost nobody knew: Morrie wrote his own version first — finished before he ever got sick, rejected by mainstream publishers, and left in a drawer in his Newton, Massachusetts study for a decade after his death.

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His son found it there in 2002. Rob Schwartz — a journalist working in Tokyo at the time — recognized it. He’d talked to his father about it while it was being written. It took another two decades of editing, alongside his own career, before The Wisdom of Morrie finally reached print in 2023.

This episode is about that manuscript, and about a friendship that started a year after Tuesdays with Morrie was published. Rob and I met at the 1998 Nagano Olympics — I introduced myself to Mitch Albom first, inquiring about Morrie’s son because I knew about him being a journalist in Japan from reading the book. Turned out Rob was right there in the media village, working as a translator and fixer for Mitch’s live radio show broadcasting on Detroit time.

We became fast friends. A few months later, we traveled to Tibet: a self-made film that never got finished, a mountain we didn’t reach, a bond that’s held.

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I’ve been excited about taping this episode of The love, journalism Show. Over about 80 minutes, we talk about the drawer, and about my own copy of TWM — a 1997 graduation gift from grandparents who never doubted I’d win a Pulitzer (still working on that).

We also talked about Morrie’s “tension of opposites,” his four questions for a meaningful life, the passage on marriage that I had read at my own wedding, and the one about the bird on your shoulder asking, every day: is today the day?

And we talk about what drove Rob craziest about a father the rest of the world only knows as a saint. Thirty years on: one book the world got, one book it almost didn’t, and a friendship that’s been around for a while.

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It’s Yom Kippur eve. I admit to cranking up the volume on this poem, the bonus track from my recent book, Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven.

I’m a proud Ashkenazi Jew. I come from two places my people found fantastic. I was a snowbird before I knew the word for it, a jumper before bungees, a singer who owned the lounge, loved women, loved life, loved so much more than my family. Genetically predisposed to trauma, separated preteen from mom and dad’s union — who knows what bad seeds formed, pitted one against another. The ultimate ref. I had no choice but to survive two boomers, parents who fought and survived and were born here, so don’t even ask. A line behind me that shoots sideways now — my blood for the mosquitoes. #30#

Hey there PAID subscribers: Excited to be hearing back from all who got their signed copy of Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven.

Please reply to this email if you are on the paid list and didn’t get one. I need your snail mail address. This is an analog present.

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Adam Klasfeld is back for an encore visit. We last spoke when The Messenger came crashing down on both of us in 2024.

I recruited Adam Klasfeld in the summer of 2023. We spent the next nine months covering every Trump court date together — Florida, New York, DC, Atlanta. Lawrence O’Donnell said our trial coverage was the best out there. We built something called the Messenger Scale to poll 80 legal experts in real time. Then the whole thing collapsed.

I did an episode with Adam and two other reporters right after it happened — standing in the wreckage, trying to figure out what we’d built and what it meant that it was gone.

That was almost three years ago. Adam didn’t go back into a newsroom. He built his own — All Rise News. Same beat, same courts, nobody telling him what to chase.

I wanted to know what that’s actually cost him. What he’d never say to my face back when I was his editor. And whether, three years and one dead newsroom later, journalism still loves him back.

Today is the 118th birthday of the oldest journalism school in the world — Mizzou's, September 14, 1908. So there was only one person to call: Sandy Davidson, my law professor from the School of Journalism, and for three decades the attorney for the Columbia Missourian.

Sandy Davidson taught me the Missouri Method’s core premise: students learn journalism by doing it, not by reading about it. That hasn’t changed since 1908 — except for everything around it.

She was blunt about the moment we’re in: “The First Amendment is taking a battery right now.”

We got into what’s actually protecting journalists today, and the honest answer might be: not much. Reporters subpoenaed within 48 hours of a leak. DOJ skipping its own guidelines. Forty states have shield laws — Missouri isn’t one of them.

Then there’s the harder question underneath all of it: who even counts as a journalist anymore?

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The Supreme Court punted on defining it back in 1972. Sandy calls what’s happened since “asymmetrical journalism” — the same shift that let cheap drones take on billion-dollar armies has let anyone with a laptop take on billion-dollar newsrooms. Wimbledon just barred influencers after chaos at the US Open. Her take: institutions can set standards, but nobody’s found a principle that actually holds up — everyone’s just making the rules up as they go, tennis courts and political conventions alike.

We talked about the New York Times’ first defamation loss in fifty years — a single anonymous source, $9.25 million — and what that should teach student reporters about single-source stories. We talked about local news deserts, and what actually disappears when nobody’s covering the city council meeting anymore. And she answered a question from one of my fellow Mizzou classmates now teaching high school journalism in South Florida — a nice full-circle moment from our pen and paper note-taking days in Gannett Hall.

Sandy and I have stayed close through the years. She’s been a teacher and adviser long after my graduation. Recently, I shared the work I’ve been doing via love, journalism. “For me, it’s love truth. Is the love of truth slipping?” she replied, setting the stage well for this episode.

Today’s entry is from my notebook, written on Sept. 11, 2001: I’m 26. A reporter covering the energy and environmental beat. That morning I was supposed to be staking out a closed-door Senate summit on pollution standards. None of that happened.

Unbelievable. Unthinkable. Astonishing. Heartbreaking.

What words can be used to explain, express, fathom the events of the last six hours? At least four US commercial planes were apparently hijacked this morning — each crashed in kamikaze style. The two World Trade Center buildings in New York City are destroyed, collapsing to the earth. The Pentagon too has been hit, and another plane was apparently ditched in rural western Pennsylvania. It is not known how many people are dead and injured.

Washington, DC looks like a city under siege. At least for now, all federal buildings are closed. The Lincoln Memorial is surrounded by white ropes, backed nearly a mile. People are wandering around with cameras. Television reporters and producers stand in large droves at important vantage points. Horses. Police. Sirens. Fire engines. The smattering romantic couple sit with legs interlocked. People in suits and ties wander obliviously — a free day off when it was not expected.

Trying to comprehend the day’s events, it’s exhausting. Why? Why now? What are the implications? Are we going to retaliate? Go to war? What does this do to everything that was happening in the world?

I’m exhausted. Today has felt like Pearl Harbor Day, Columbine, Challenger.

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Then i wrote a few poems:

Great white puffy clouds hang in the air like powder —
oblivious to the havoc below.
Sky high, arching through at sonic speed,
piercing nature to a target in the distance
like a dragon.

“This looks like a quiet place to study,”
says the man with the girl walking the dog.

Everything seems ironic, monumental, significant. The story behind the story — the human face, the emotions of a TV cameraman, what is not spoken in the moment, or maybe what is — its meaning important because it will be the memory.

another:

US flags have been lowered to half mast around the Washington Monument.
They rattle and whip in the wind.
The winding of the camera after a picture is taken —
one of thousands —
capturing the memorial immortal
on a day of vulnerability.

one more:

Motorcades, no-go zones, half-mast flags,
smoky reminders of a building —
six billion eyes on it.
Traffic, official badges, the scoop —
nothing else to even consider.

and some more descriptions:

People are walking around the Mall solo, aimlessly scratching their heads, looking about, stopping and sharing their thoughts with strangers. They look like zombies. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my life. It’s an absolutely beautiful late summer day — sunshine, breeze blowing, nearly all off work. We just experienced a terrorist attack unlike Oklahoma City or the previous World Trade Center bombing. It’s hard to fathom.

The rumors of the day: bombs exploded at the State Department and Capitol, the National Mall. Planes crashed near Chicago and Camp David.

That’s all I wrote there that day in a spiral notebook on a bench on the Mall.

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On the night of December 12, 2021, another bar regular looked at Taylor Six and said something that changed the trajectory of her life. What was it, and why did it land the way it did?

Love, journalism readers got to meet Taylor earlier this week in our inaugural guest essay: You Are Not Alone. She’s the founder of the Journalists Recovery Network, and so it made sense to tape our podcast for National Recovery Month.

Both of us hope sharing what Taylor has built can help even one person.

It’s a powerful story: award-winning journalist by day, closing down the bar by night. Two versions of the same person coexisting, a fear of someone confronting her directly. We talked about battling addiction and the journalism identity, as well as the moment in recovery where identity starts loosening its grip.

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Taylor’s group works with journalists across the recovery spectrum - sober, sober-curious, still figuring it out. She takes solace in her views of “enmeshment” - the way the job stops being what you do and becomes who you are.

“I can't overstate just like how freeing that was to know that that was actually something that was out there that explained so much of how I was feeling for years,” she said.

Taylor built the Journalists Recovery Network out of the 2023-24 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. She described the moment she realized journalists specifically needed something different; and what she tried before finding success leading a group that doesn’t promote any single method of sobriety.

As Taylor put it near the end of our conversation: “It’s okay to share our stories to make this field better for journalists who bravely continue to come into this field.”

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I’ll never forget my first day at Politico. “Welcome to the NFL,” Mike Allen said upon spotting me.

We were soon co-bylining morning newsletters as oil spilled in the gulf, building policy credibility and my boss introducing me as the “Mike Allen of energy.”

We reported scoops together. Here’s a fun video of Mike nudging me to describe how U.N. climate conferences always made me come home sick and predicting how much the 2015 Paris talks would be remembered beyond Obama’s presidency.

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Finally, I got to interview Mike for The love, journalism Show. We covered his journey from Politico to Axios and those thousand-word-morning-inbox-stuffers that helped make him famous before launching Smart Brevity and now his new book: Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less.

Co-authored by Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, this is their attempt to apply that same “do the work for the reader” instinct to life. Confront. Delete. Amplify.

We covered a lot on the show. How he says “no” and tries to structure his Sundays. In Mike’s words, AI is “the greatest complexity generating machine in the history of humanity.” He shared his guide on how to make it work for you, instead of against you. We explored the three tectonic shifts he sees reshaping politics, technology, and reality itself. And whether the pre-9/11 version of journalism was simpler by default, or if 9/11 exposed a failure of imagination we still haven’t fixed.

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This one closes where we started. I asked Mike the question I ask everyone: has journalism loved him back? “Oh, the greatest life,” he said.

Sixteen years after “welcome to the NFL” — still true. Still in love with the game.

Taylor and I also taped an upcoming episode of The love, journalism Show. You’ll want to stay tuned for that. - Darren

Nearing the end of 2021, I was coming to the realization I wanted to do something different with my drinking and drug use. There was a constant, nagging feeling that something I kept getting away with was going to result in my name splattered across headlines announcing I died, killed someone, or ended up in jail.

And it would be one of my coworkers writing the story.

I was living a double life for years as an award-winning journalist by day, and a down-bad drunk at night. A heavy weight sat on my shoulders as I constantly looked over them with the fear of being caught. Even worse, I thought someone would try to confront me about my drinking. I worked long hours at my local newspaper, and even longer hours when I shut down the bar each night in a drunken stupor.

But on the night of December 12, 2021, another bar regular looked at me and said, “You think you are special because of what you do for work, but you are just an alcoholic and addict like the rest of us.”

I went into Alcoholics Anonymous the next day and later discovered I had an identity problem. Instead of journalism being my job and something I was passionate about, it was my entire identity. Trying to grapple with the idea that I was just a human being that also struggled with addiction was hard and took me years to actually confront and accept about myself. Even more personal, it was easier to let people get to know me as “the journalist” than it was for them to actually know me as a person (yuck). But truth be told, I didn’t know myself as a person.

As I was going through my program, I felt alone and isolated with misguided thoughts that no other journalist ever dealt with something like this before. Man, what a false idea that was.

In 2024, I launched the Journalists Recovery Network, now a non-profit that supports journalists struggling with alcohol and substances or are in recovery. My initial idea was to let other people know that they weren’t alone if they decided they wanted to get help.

What was wonderful about my expectation, was that it only scratched the surface of what I would learn; including how many journalists and media workers live with addiction everyday and navigate this industry.

As part of creating the Journalists Recovery Network I’ve had the incredible opportunity to meet other journalists in recovery who are essential to my support system in the industry and staying sober.

As a group we have attended conferences, spoken on panels, and we offer a community of like-minded individuals as a means of support. We do not promote any form or method of sobriety, and some of our group’s members are not sober. Simply put: The group is there for you if you want support and can connect you with existing resources.

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I’ve learned that other journalists struggle with the same problems I did. They think they are alone or they don’t know how to have boundaries with work to the point it’s enmeshed in their life. This industry itself can be like an addiction – all consuming and detrimental to our wellbeing.

But I have been taught there are other journalists who struggle with experiences that I didn’t. Some don’t know how to interact with sources after getting sober. Some are weary of booze-heavy conferences. Many of us don’t possess positive coping mechanisms that promote a good work-life balance.

We hope other journalists know about our group so if they, or a coworker, need support, they can certainly reach out. Even if they don’t, I just hope that other journalists who may be struggling with alcohol or substances know that they aren’t alone.

Today, I am defined by much more than my job. I am defined by more than my addiction. I am a fiancé, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mentor and friend. I love to cook, bake, read, sew, and garden.

Above all else, I have learned I am a human being, too.

Taylor Six is founder of the Journalists Recovery Network and a crime and courts reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader.

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Featured today: airplane delays and sloppy handwriting. From my new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy.

Hard rock, ‘cause there wasn’t much else but Chick-fil-A or expensive Chinese food. Delayed American, again, two hours, then canceled and redirected without asking, to Miami. Okay, bar fajitas. A hundred dollar tab for two Negronis, too. Tatted fed waiting for daughter. She disses the bartender for reccing the original Hooters. Not much else in Clearwater — I mention it’s home of Hulk Hogan and the Scientologist. She rolls her eyes. I know. I got stuck there during concrete snow this February. Helping mom — the Mom Express, kids helping parents. Then two guys see my journal, ask me to move my bags. Excited. Who still does this, one of them asks? The other, smack, at the sight: “What’s that chicken scratch?” #30#

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August has always been slow — the news goes quiet, vacations, kids head back to school, and for a few weeks the whole country seems to exhale. This month I wanted to hand you something different during that lull: poems. A palate cleanser, one a day, pulled straight from the new book. I’ll admit sharing them felt a little scary — this isn’t the beat you signed up for. But that was sort of the point.

In between poems, I stood outside the National Archives and watched the Indy cars buzz past — self-appointed sentinel duty, making sure no one crashed into the Constitution or the Declaration. A strange, good way to spend a loud weekend.

Wednesday night was the National Press Club’s journalism awards dinner, in a building marking 100 years in 2027. Watching this year’s honorees do the kind of work I once strove to do myself — it’s the reason I keep showing up for this Substack, and for the Press Club board chair role too.

Coming this September:

It’s National Recovery Month, and we’ll spend some of it on journalists who struggle with substance abuse — building the kind of support network our industry doesn’t talk about enough. Mike Allen joins to talk about his new book on work-life balance. And with Labor Day here, the politics hat goes back on: a groundbreaking former Senate chair, journalism educators, and more, all looking ahead to the midterms.

Thank you for indulging the poems. Back to the regular beat soon.

Today’s day four from my new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy. Yes, it does feel strange sharing poems.

A brain empty already by five thirty AM. Bugs aren’t even yet buzzing. The mosquitoes leave no change. Here I show off what’s happening. No idea tomorrow what I said today. This never ever happened. I can say I won’t remember, and nor should you — like a dream, like a road on vacation. Maybe this is what they say it is.

#30#

Today’s day three from the new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy. Now get ready for some shim-shimmying.

Little Laughs of Recognition

When the words suddenly come and know too where they’ll land, you can do tight leg tucks and shimmy, shimmy, bang, bang. Because the freedom comes in these kinds of moves where form rewards tightness. Mind over matter and promises of firsts ahead. Little layers of success, little layers of certainty. When the landing is right there in sight, hunger in the morning gut, hunger in the head when birds, morning, sing, and I delight in the little laughs of recognition.

#30#

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