Has Journalism Loved You Back?

Twelve guests answered. So did a letter I wrote to myself.

I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is love, journalism.

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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.

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.

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.

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?