Journalism Clubs, Then and Now
The insularity of the press is part of its appeal—and its great weakness.
While looking through some grade school yearbooks not long ago, I came to the conclusion that I was never much of a joiner.
I was not a member of Honors Chorus, and my commitment to the Drama Club was sufficiently half-hearted to win me a mere one-line role in our production of Oklahoma! I did not join the Tennis Club, even though I was a proficient player. Yet my ancient yearbooks provided photographic proof of one club of which I was a proud member: the Journalism Club. Yes, as far back as elementary school, I relished membership in the fourth estate.
In the first and second grades, I was a mainstay of the student staff that produced a quarterly “magazine” consisting entirely of student submissions. In fact, when I was in the second grade, I appear to have been one of just two Journalism Club members to be represented in both of the staff rosters that were photographed for that year’s yearbook.
I suspect that some students signed up without fully realizing the onerous work of running a magazine, even an amateur one. On the other hand, I loved the entire process: picking up the envelopes of submissions from various classes, voting yay or nay on each submission, and offering feedback to our teacher advisor as she plotted out each issue.
Most of all, I loved the clubbiness of the Journalism Club: the freedom to be excused from my regular class to convene for editorial meetings in the library, and the great unchecked power to pass editorial judgment on the literary or artistic skills of my fellow students. Notably, I did not seek control over our magazine, but merely a voice at what I perceived to be a rather exclusive table; I was such a team player that I never voted for myself to become the magazine’s editor. I was happy just to be part of the club.
Alas, my Journalism Club career came to a sudden end in the third grade when my parents decided to embark on homeschooling. Yet I never stopped craving the camaraderie of the press.
In my early years as a professional writer, I found success as a book reviewer or film critic for a number of major national publications, including National Review, the Weekly Standard, the New Criterion, and the Christian Science Monitor. Yet, owing to my status as an inhabitant of the Midwest, I was pretty far removed from the outlets to which I was contributing, which tended to be concentrated in major population centers on the East: New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. My interactions with editors were from a distance, and I had no sense of being a “colleague” of any of my fellow freelance contributors.
In short, I longed to be back in the Journalism Club.
Then, for one glorious decade, I attained something like my dream. From 2013 until 2024, I contributed to my local daily newspaper. I was never on staff, but I was a much-used freelancer. At the peak of my work for the paper, in 2019, I penned a weekly classical music column and a weekly film column. I was in near-daily contact with my main editor, who, to my delight, preferred to hash out story ideas and edits over the phone rather than in email. On the rare occasions when I accompanied one of our photographers on a shoot, I felt like I was a real reporter (even if I was covering such inconsequential things as art exhibits or ballet productions); on the even rarer occasions when I would have reason to visit the newsroom Downtown, I felt like I was Clark Kent walking into the Daily Planet.
Through a combination of careful study and sheer osmosis, I adopted the lingo that seemed to come so naturally to old-school reporters and editors: I wrote “ledes” to open stories and “walk-offs” to close stories, and I learned that photos were called “art.” The indecipherability, to the general public, of this antiquated newspaper patois was part of its appeal. And, in conversation with my editors and colleagues, I found myself routinely lodging a set of complaints that were seemingly ubiquitous among those in the trade: I would complain about difficult interviewees, unhelpful public relations representatives, and “bad art”—that is to say, submitted photos that were so small that they could never be printed.
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In short, I found the clubbiness I had been seeking, but, having attained it, I found that I no longer cared much for it.
Increasingly, the insularity of the press struck me as less a matter of professional collegiality than a remnant of actual first-grade thinking—the same sense of being among the “in-crowd” that I had experienced in my Journalism Club days. Sadly, journalism can give its practitioners the feeling of belonging to a clique that is allegedly (but not actually) smarter than everyone else, which is fatal to their actual mandate to find the truth and report it objectively. Is it any wonder that so few legacy media outlets could ever grasp the MAGA movement or the president it twice elected? Uninterested in the teeming masses, many reporters would rather file dispatches about the travails of their own troop, a tendency exemplified in the current fake controversy over press access to the Trump administration. Does anyone care about the Associated Press being exiled from the White House except other members of the press—that is, other members of the club?
I love writing about what’s going on in the world, but, having walked away from my local newspaper gig about a year ago, I feel the better for it. I’m a smarter, sharper, and more clear-headed writer when operating on my own rather than part of a coterie. My long-ago classmates who never picked me for dodgeball or softball had it right: I’m just not a team player.
