A bit over 3 years ago, I left a job in digital media for one at a tech company. A friend recently asked a bunch of us who made similar changes what we thought about leaving media. Since this seems to be something that people are doing with some frequency, I wrote down my thoughts in the hopes that they might help people who are evaluating a similar move. 

To be clear, I worked on the tech & data side: I wasn’t breaking stories or creating content (with very few exceptions). And news wasn’t my career, really: I worked at a tech company before my time in media as well. But working at the Gawker/Gizmodo/Fusion Media Group was formative for me, and I think of myself as a “media/news person”, to some extent. 

With the disclaimer that everything from this point on is based on my (often idiosyncratic) personal experiences, here are the things that I miss about media:

• The connection to The Discourse (TM): while I worked in media I felt energized by the reporting, and connected to what was being discussed. It definitely didn’t make me more productive, but I felt like I developed more sophisticated opinions about what was happening in the world, and the lens through which it was being communicated to me (both from publishers and peers). After leaving media, this feeling is noticeably dulled. 

• I miss the people from my old job on a bunch of different dimensions:

  • Media has diversity & representation issues, but tech is a whole other level of monoculture, and not just on racial/ethnic/gender grounds. My experience in media was one of companies aggressively looking to bring in people with diverse backgrounds (and sometimes viewpoints, though that’s maybe a whole other post).

  • I really miss the outspokenness and how people wore speaking truth to power as a badge of honor. I’m on the argumentative side of the spectrum, but public disagreements with people in positions of authority can really stress others that I work with. I was recently talking to a co-worker from an old tech job who remembered an argument I had with my boss literally 10 years ago (I didn’t remember it at all). In media, ‘afflicting the comfortable’ is a credo, and I doubt any of my coworkers from media will distinctly remember any of my arguments with managers a decade later (disclaimer: I’m told by my media friends this is very unique and not a global experience in the industry). 

  • I don’t think I appreciated the passion people in journalism have for their craft. No one in America in 2021 is going into media because they think they’re going to get rich from it. People are news nerds, and they build relationships and friendships with their colleagues on this common set of interests. Don’t get me wrong, I have great friendships from past tech roles and my current gig, but the level of connection doesn’t feel the same. 

• Finally, I feel that the work of news organizations is truly very important, and being involved in writing the first draft of history, self-aggrandizing as that sounds, gave the hard work a real sense of meaning. I’ll say that I do feel energized by my current employer’s mission of helping people succeed online, on the open web, but I don’t feel the urgency or presence of that mission the way I did when Gizmodo broke a big scoop, for example. 

  
  

On the other hand, there are a lot of things that I really appreciate about being in tech: 

• The flip side of being more distant from what’s happening in the world is that I feel more able to keep upsetting stories at an arm’s length. I have conflicted feelings about it, but I can’t deny that limiting my news intake has improved my mental health. In most cases I feel like this is a good thing: I can be informed and engage with the world around me without following every twist and turn of the Chauvin trial, to give a current example, and I think it would be hard to get away from if I was in media still.

• The resources in tech are great, and are used in pursuit of technical objectives. In media organizations, we worked in support of a (great) mission, but building great tech wasn’t the organization’s mission in and of itself. It also was my experience that media companies often worked towards difficult or unrealistic timelines. This happens sometimes in tech as well (particularly in B2B companies, where work is often committed to clients) but it seemed to be far less prevalent to me. 

  • I’ll also say that I appreciate the high level of technical ability and professionalism among my coworkers. That’s not a slag on the people I worked with in media: the technical capacity at GMG/FMG was very good, and many people at Squarespace came from media companies (and we are more than holding our own, IMHO, though we almost universally took reductions in title). 

• I am thrilled to be away from the calamitous ‘sky is falling’ feeling that infuses media companies. The industry’s dynamics are terrible! For all but a handful of sterling brands or companies with generous benefactors, it’s a race to the bottom. The industry has been ‘commodified by its complement’ almost completely, and with the aggregation of media consumers by tech platforms, the theory behind the existence of digital media firms (a la Coase’s famous ‘The Nature of the Firm’) becomes somewhat dubious. 

• This last one is almost certainly the most idiosyncratic and specific to me, but ethically, I had a difficult time working as a data professional in media. There was always some pressure to figure out ways we could make money from our data, and most of the obvious ways were not in the best interests of our readers (enlightened managers understood this and invested deeply in these reader relationships). You might be surprised that I feel better about the ethics of my work at a tech company, but in my specific role, I definitely do. Your mileage may vary on this one, though. 

  
  

Thanks to Jenni Bruno, Tyler Alicea, Josh Holbrook and Allison Wentz for their helpful comments.