Good Journalism Made Me Quit Journalism

Reading Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? in The Atlantic, 25 years after its publication in 2007 was enough to make me drop out of journalism school and join a graduate program devoted to its evil twin, Public Relations. I doubt that was its intent, but America changed a lot in those 25 years.

I graduated college with a degree in medieval Spanish poetry from a college in Central NY. America's universities are designed to make the punch of what college costs and what your return on investment will be be land a few years after graduation. After a few years of struggling in the workforce, I realized I was going nowhere. Maybe more degrees would help?

This time, I was smart. I took a job at NYU as whatever the polite term for secretary is and it came with free tuition. It was the heyday of Gawker and online journalism was still exciting and ascendant. The authors were no longer just dull WASPs who interviewed Pat Buchanan. They had voices and jokes and some even had regional accents like mine.

The parents of NYU students would barge in, demanding to see the Dean of the school where their child was attending when they got arrested for buying drugs in Washington Square Park, and my job was to be a polite, well-educated body to slow them down. I was bad at my job but by virtue of nothing earned. I was simply hired because a rich parent might see me and think: uh-oh, maybe I know his parents (they did not know my very mentally ill parents). There wasn't much to do, and in-between doing classwork and doing "work" for the University, I set out to read great journalism pieces of the past.

What I learned from reading the Great Works: If you try to re-sell a diamond, the jewel that culture says is the symbol of opulence and love and a proxy for devotion, you'll realize: it has no value. It's an inflated market because of concerted efforts by people in Public Relations to fund movies where diamonds were central to the story, to convince reporters to feature “size the diamond” in the story of every royal getting married, to news reporters to never cover what goes on in an actual mine. The Atlantic article showed the triumph of the concerted efforts of cynicism over the weakened body of reality.

What I decided, as I used my precious, limited credits under the spectre of an inevitable housing crash and newspapers folding across the country: We’re on our own, and would you rather be the person who wrote the article that was remembered 25 years later but had no industry, or an unnamed person in an article who didn’t have to take a job getting yelled at by rich parents? I switched schools and careers, and took the more cynical route. I regret it every day, but I regret it with the aid of health insurance.