Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host, Sean Taylor, along with my producer, jb.
Today, our guest is Joe Vanhus. Joe is a storyteller at heart. He's worked in newsrooms big and small, lived through industry layoffs, and now co leads the Trestle Collective, a boutique firm focused on community storytelling.
But his journey started with a gut punch of a message from someone who was supposed to inspire him. I won't spoil it, but let's just say this one hits differently, especially in our world right now. Joe, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Sean.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Joe, really excited to hear about your worst advice you ever got.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Oh, the worst advice I ever got.
Journalism is dead.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Wow. Profound. Journalism is dead.
Tell our listening audience who gave you the advice and some of the background.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: My journalism professor.
Okay, you know, picture this. It is my first day of college. It's August in Jacksonville, Florida. My first class, Spanish 201. Because the guidance counselor said I could handle that. Everyone is speaking Spanish. There is not an English word spoken in the entire class. I immediately realize, oh, well, off to a bad start.
The next class, Intro to communications professor, comes in. Professor Dolan, still a mentor to me, it should be noted. And for the first 30 minutes of class, all he does is talking about how journalism is dying. The industry that you are getting into doesn't exist anymore. What are you doing here?
This is not for you, unless you are a crazy person.
What?
[00:01:49] Speaker B: What did you do?
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Completely knocked over, frankly, because I knew I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to be in the action. I wanted to cover the scene, man.
Given that it wasn't even lunchtime yet, and these were the first two classes I had had, I thought, good Lord, is this what college is?
Is it like, what? What am I doing here? Absolutely.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: What happened next?
[00:02:14] Speaker A: So there were about 30, 35 people in that first class. You know, we come back two days later for class number two.
About 15 to 20 people in there now.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Oh, wow. He scared some people off with his soliloquy.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: More than a handful, for sure.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: And of course, he walks in, he looks at the smaller class, he's like, all right, you know, for the rest of you sickos, let's talk about journalism and communications. And we were off.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Okay, so was this just like a calculated scare tactic?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: If it's a calculated scare tactic, I think it's a good one.
And what's odd is I find myself when I talk to kids who are trying to figure out what they're going to do when they grow up. And I hear it coming out of my mouth, nah, you don't want to get into journalism. Journalism is dead.
There's no support there. You don't want to make a life of that. And given my life and how it's gotten to this point, it doesn't seem like good advice. It sounds like terrible advice. I hate that I have to give this advice to people now.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: The worst advice you ever got. You also give the advice, how's it affecting you that journalism is dead?
[00:03:24] Speaker A: You know, I genuinely believe. I love telling stories, I love reporting, I love journalism.
It's still the best job I've ever had. Spoiler alert. I ultimately get into journalism.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I was about to say it sounds like you stuck with it.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: I stuck with it as long as I could, right up until I couldn't. Wow. Yeah.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Well, let's pursue the path a little bit. So you stick with the class. You finish your degree, I'm assuming, and you get into the field, talk a little bit about the next steps.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Sure. I had an opportunity to go interview and had the inside track for a job at the Florida Times Union, which at the time was the second largest newspaper in Florida. An incredible place to start a career if you were going to start a career in journalism. And I turned it down to go work for an event planning and PR startup because journalism is dead.
I don't want to do anything with it yet.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Wow. So this advice is still lingering in your mind three, four years later with your completed degree to the extent you're not taking a job in it.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Right.
It'd be the first of many journalism jobs I would turn down.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: So. So you take this first job and then what happens?
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Well, the company, we. We made it about three, four months, and then we had a real money problem. And the money problem is that. That they could not afford to pay me anymore.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: That's a. That's a big money.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Pretty big problem. Being honest.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: So, you know, undeterred and seeing this as an opportunity, you know, I graduated in. In May. Now it's, you know, September, and I already need another job. I had some friends living in Nashville. I thought, man, how cool would it be to go to work in Nashville and be part of the music scene? And it took approximately a day and a half to realize that that was not sustainable either.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Do you ever pursue journalism?
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Well, finally I was like, okay, we're going home to Florida, tail between my legs, and.
And we're going to do it at the hometown paper and to see how it goes.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: So this is five, six years after you get the original advice. You're now delving into taking a job in journalism.
What was it like?
[00:05:37] Speaker A: You know, it was great. It really was. I was a general assignment reporter.
I had a very large coverage area. And what I loved about the job is that every day I woke up, I had no idea, no idea what my day was going to be.
One of the first stories I wrote that had some success was about this guy who designed little cardboard tree frog hotels that he would stick on the back of folding or opening windows and whatnot that Trey Frogs would crawl into. And that story ran in our paper and was syndicated and ended up running in USA Today, in the Boston Globe, and in 100 newspapers across the country. And I thought, man, well, not only is this cool, this isn't that hard.
Like, I'm on my way. I've been told I'm a naturally curious person.
And if you are a curious person, journalism is the job for you, man, because you are finding out something new every single day.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Do you come across some problems in journalism? Because you just told us a little while ago you're advising your niece not to get into journalism. So something gets awry at some point, doesn't it?
[00:06:48] Speaker A: You know what the problem was?
My professor was right. I think the profession of being a journalist and being able to make a sustainable living is on life support, really. Maybe not dead, but, boy, it's hard. It's really hard.
Like I said, I entered the workforce in 2006.
In 2008, I was on the losing side of a huge layoff. Our newsroom got cut from, I think, 52 people to 13 people.
[00:07:20] Speaker C: That's tough.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: That's really tough.
I was desperate to do anything else, but ultimately I found myself taking another journalism job, which brought me to Athens, Georgia, the Athens Banner Herald.
Then it got even tougher because, you know, that newsroom had just been through a big layoff, and I was the first person that they had hired. And you think, okay, maybe we've found our new normal and I can exist in this new normal and it's not so bad.
But then that newsroom got cut, I think, from 42 people to 2022.
And, you know, at that point, the writing was on their walls, like, this is going to keep happening and I need to get out of here.
[00:07:57] Speaker C: As the numbers of people in journalism starting to decline and all these places that you're going to. Are you seeing a shift in the way news is being handled and Presented?
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Because. Because jb that touches a little bit on. He touched on the business part of it, but he said there was another reason he was leaving, too. And it makes me wonder if there's a little more to it, you know.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: As the migration to the Internet, which I will say the journalism industry was not prepared for.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: How so?
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Well, when I was at the Ocala Star banner in 2007, you know, we were writing a story a day and then maybe a longer story more in depth for the. You know, for, like, the Sunday paper. So you were writing six stories a week. And of course, all those stories went on the website that you could read for free. Well, if you can read everything for free on the website, why are you paying to subscribe to the newspaper? And this wasn't just an Ocala Star Banner problem. This was the industry standard. By the time they got smart and started, well, we need to have, like, paywalls and, you know, push people to Internet subscriptions. Cat was already out of the bag. Nobody. Nobody wants to pay for something they've been getting for free for years. And, of course, the demands have changed, too. There was still the expectation to do the six to seven stories for the print edition. But then I was also, you know, asked to do an online story every day, a blog, three columns. You know, I went from writing six to seven stories a week to writing 20.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: So your workload increases, your stress has increased, your health is not good, and what's happening to the quality of what you're producing?
[00:09:34] Speaker A: Well, that's the problem. Before the layoffs in the newsrooms that I was in, you know, it was not uncommon for my story, once I filed it, to pass through at least four sets of eyes before it ever showed up on the Internet or in the newspaper. So now you have fewer folks checking quality.
You're asked to basically double or triple your output. Spoiler alert. When you're writing that much, you don't have time to make that extra phone call or get that extra source quoted in a story.
Stories get flatter and thinner in detail because you just have to, because the machine is running.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Let's take a step back for a minute. Because we keep talking about journalism and journalism being dead, and I think we're dancing around what journalism really is, because I'll tell you what I think of when I think of journalism. I think of, you know, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, you know, Peter Jennings. You know, that, to me, was journalism. Like, I. When I was a kid growing up, I would listen to those stories and think, wow, that's what's really going on.
And that's important.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: If it was on the nightly news or in the paper the next day, it had authority. Right.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: What does journalism really mean to you? What is journalism?
[00:10:53] Speaker A: I think it's storytelling, but it's also a lot more than that. Right. If you take the argument that the people have the right to know what is going on in their community and what's going on in their government, what's going on around them, then it's the job of the journalist to shine the light on those things. Good and bad. Good or bad, and accurately depict what's going on.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: I mean, I don't mind saying it.
I don't trust the news. I mean, I have to tell you, when I read something, I'm always thinking, who's behind this? What agenda is this feeding?
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Sure, I get it.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Is that part of journalism being dead?
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I would have to say so.
Now that's not the journalist's fault.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Unfortunately, the news, especially on television and certainly online, it's pretty partisan these days.
And that's not doing anybody any favors because folks need to hear the truth, even if it's uncomfortable to them. Matter of fact, that's when they really need to hear it. But getting them to believe, that's an entirely different thing. It used to be and it still happens. Let's be clear. There are outlets out there that are dedicated to hard news and investigative journalism and they do a great job. We have outlets here in Atlanta. The AJC is still a great newspaper canopy. Atlanta is a great nonprofit source for in depth news in this community.
Athens, where I live, has flagpole which still allocates a lot of inches every single week to community happenings. And kind of getting into the why something is happening and not just what, which is important.
The thing about figuring out what the why is though, is that it takes time, it takes investment, that takes an army. And we don't have armies anymore. We have individuals.
[00:12:49] Speaker C: Well, that's where the opinions come from. Because you're like, oh, I've got to stand out in some way. And then, you know, get clicks and get the views and get the eyeballs.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: And then you're like, oh, I agree with everything this guy's saying. So I'm going to follow him whether it's true or not.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Right.
The line between influencer and journalist is, can get pretty blurry pretty fast.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Well, that's again, going back to. It's hard for me to trust what I Read as truly being, hey, I'm just presenting the facts. This is neutral. Make up your mind for yourself, because, I mean, what's their objective? What's their agenda?
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Right. Well, therein lies one of the biggest problems. You have a pretty small list of owners that have taken over wide swaths of regional, national, local media in every market.
And when you have that, when you have centralized ownership, well, that's going to make it even harder to really serve those local audiences.
You know, I was talking to a reporter at the Augusta Chronicle, proud newspaper, you know, and now there are six people in that newsroom, and the editor is not only the editor of that paper, but is also the regional editor for all of their Georgia and Florida publications.
How on earth is one editor supposed to get through all of that? Story assignments, making sure everything is right? It's an impossible job and surely a thankless job. And like I said, I have immense respect for those who can.
But, you know, I don't want my.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Niece to go do that, which is interesting. We're back to the original worst advice. Professor says journalism is dead. Now you're telling your niece, indirectly or directly, journalism is dead right on the nose. We're sort of killing this industry by saying these things. Yeah, but isn't journalism critical to a free market society?
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's the fourth estate of democracy. Right.
And I don't think it's any coincidence that the media landscape is what it is right now and our political landscape is what it is right now.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: When did this start?
[00:14:59] Speaker C: Yeah, how did we get here?
[00:15:00] Speaker B: How did we get here? Like, if journalism was such an integrous part of, of the fabric of our society. Right. When did this shit start going awry?
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Well, you see, this is why I took that media history class 20 some odd years ago.
The concept of journalism being this noble profession was really a 20th century concept.
If you go back into basically from the advent of the printing press to the early 1900s, journalism was the wild west, man. Publications would pop up all over the place and they would have wild slants to them.
There weren't a set of principles that like, okay, we're going to all agree that we should do this, this and this. That comes later in the 20th century. And I still think that there's a lot of people in the field who want to play by those rules and do.
The ownership groups of these publications aren't necessarily interested in all of that. I don't know how we get it back, frankly.
[00:16:05] Speaker C: So tell me about why this is the worst advice and how it's gotten us here.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Well, the problem with this advice is it exacerbates the problem. If you believe that journalism is dead, you're not going to want to get into journalism. If fewer people are getting into journalism, that means we're going to have fewer journalists or people, you know, fewer people willing to go that route, which is only going to hurt the end product more.
If the outlets are getting further and further away from their reader base, that's just going to lead to more distrust of the media, which is going to reinforce the idea that journalism is dead, which is going to.
It's a really bad cycle we are on and I don't know how we get off of it.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Do we have to break the machine down and build it back up again from scratch?
[00:16:50] Speaker A: I think we have to.
And honestly, that's ultimately how I ended up with what I'm doing now with the Trestle Collective and my partner Jonathan McGinty. We got together because we wanted to tell stories again. We wanted to be journalists again.
Local publications are struggling.
You mentioned your dad, Sean. You mentioned that he would read the paper cover to cover on Sunday.
You've got the non sexy stuff about reports from city hall or some new ordinance.
Those stories are never going to get a lot of clicks.
Those are the vegetables. No one wants to eat the vegetables, but the vegetables are the most important thing.
It is why I have hope, because I see in different communities, I see independent journalists out there at these commission meetings trying to capture everything and put it up on their blogs or newsletters, whatever they may be. But by and large, it's hard to serve a community as a whole like that.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: You have hope, though. I heard you just say that. Yeah, journalism is dead, but I just hear you say you have hope. What's the resurrection story? Where does your hope spring from?
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Where does my hope spring from? Because people still want to hear a good story. People still need to hear things that make them uncomfortable.
The powerful still have to be held accountable and people want that. And journalists are the folks to do that job.
And I think, man, yeah, I am.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Hopeful that maybe that's the hope is it's just not really dead. It's just a reinvention of itself.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: We have to make sure that whatever we're talking about is well thought out, well researched, well documented, fact checked, proven, you know, et cetera. Which is not what we're in the midst of right now today. It's just, I mean, who can race to the headline? Who can just produce something?
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Right? Right.
We're in the correction business.
We need to get back to the journalism business because journalism does, in fact, take time. Now, journalism is timely, but it takes time to get it right. It takes time to go through those processes and checks.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: Yeah, it'd be good if we can start to get back to. It's more important to be right than first. Because right now it is more important to be first than right. Doesn't matter. Do you think there's a way to solve this today?
[00:19:11] Speaker A: No.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Tell me why.
[00:19:13] Speaker C: Tell me why not?
[00:19:13] Speaker A: I don't. I think much like many of the systems in our country that are legacy systems, the media system is broken. You know what I mean? Like, it's a new world now.
[00:19:26] Speaker C: Bummer.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Which is. I know, it's terrible, which is why I still give this advice, which is terrible advice. Like, don't be a journalist, man. We need journalists more than ever right now. But we also need a business that can support the journalist. And right now, the journalists are not being supported by their own business.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Something to take away from this is when you give some bleak or dire advice to someone, it can become self fulfilling. Right. This whole episode has really been steeped in. Journalism is kind of killing itself that whole cycle. Right, right.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: It's an outside and an inside job.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: Fortunately.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: Well, the first step to solving any problem is to admitting there's a problem. So maybe we're kicking it off here.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Well, we're trying.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: I'm rooting for journalism as much as anybody.
The business of journalism to pull itself together. Like I said, there's a lot of folks who want to get to the bottom of things and tell good stories. And we got to make sure the good ones have the platform to be read by the people who need to read it or see it.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Well, I'm rooting for you, Joe, and I appreciate you coming and telling this story today to our listeners. Great example of the worst advice someone ever got. In your case, journalism is dead. Being really impactful and a lot people can glean from your story. So really appreciate you sharing it with us today.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Well, thanks again for having me, Sean. Yeah.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: So, jb, here's what sticks with me. It's not just that Joe got bad advice. It's that the advice is itself. Journalism is dead. Isn't that what's partially killing journalism? For sure.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: It's like, you know, cannibalizing itself. You know, when he said he.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: He.
[00:21:10] Speaker C: He finds himself giving the same advice and he's like, why am I telling my niece not to get into journalism? It's like that cycle. It just keeps spinning and spinning, you know, even if we don't want it to, but we don't really have a solution.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's ironic. I mean, if you think about this episode, and I'm thinking back through all of our episodes, very rarely has our guests gotten the worst Advice they ever got and then turn around, experience the pain, and then passed it along to somebody else later. This is pretty unique, right?
[00:21:40] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: You know, here's the irony, right? We need great journalists now. God, more than ever. I mean, people who can dig deeper, ask better questions, and not rush to be first at the expense of being right.
[00:21:54] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like giving up on journalism because it's broken just guarantees it stays broken. And, you know, and a little reminder, you know, when someone tells you your dream is dead, it might, because they're afraid it isn't.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a little reminder.
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