Peering Into the Newsroom Generation Gap

And wondering if tensions may actually be starting to ease somewhat

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

In just the third of these newsletters, now more than three years ago, I wrote about a rash of retirements in journalism (including my own), and what I saw then—and still do—as the widest generation gap to confront this country in more than 40 years. This week, I want, with some trepidation, to flip the script, and try to look at the other side of that generation gap, and what it means for newsrooms.

I was moved to do this by recent remarks by two news executives, one publicly and the other privately. Publicly, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn told the Wall Street Journal that he traced some part of recent tensions at the Times over the leak of unpublished newsroom material to an issue in our schools:

Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past.

A few weeks later, Kahn elaborated to Semafor, that

this generation of college grads has [not] been fully prepared for what we are asking our people to do, which is to commit themselves to the idea of independent journalism.

He concluded by declaring, “the newsroom is not a safe space.”

Privately, just days before Kahn’s remarks were published in the Journal, a news executive from a different company told me of his experiences with people hired into what I call 21^st Century journalism jobs—jobs in such areas as data, product, and audience, which didn’t exist in the last century, and are thus largely held by younger people—who had come to him seeking to have stories they did not personally like, but for which they had not been responsible, spiked or even taken down after they had been published.

I don’t want here to litigate particulars at the Times or elsewhere, in significant part because others have done that already. But I do want to explore what’s going on more generally to exacerbate generational tensions in newsrooms.

Acknowledging some responsibility

First, it should be acknowledged, as I tried to do three years ago, that we elders bear some of the responsibility here. When you look at how things have changed in America as the Baby Boomers have aged—especially widening inequality amid increasing diversity—permit me one quote from the earlier column:

the couple of generations coming behind my cohort might reasonably conclude that we clambered up top and started to pull the rope up behind us. That the racial composition of our group is so different from theirs must significantly increase the sting.

But that’s not all that’s going on.

what’s behind all the finger-pointing?

From campuses to newsrooms

I think that Joe Kahn has a point about our educational institutions, although I also think, even amid recent protests, there is reason to hope that the soul searching underway, particularly at many universities in the last six months, could turn out to represent a turning point, the beginning of a resurgence in valuing moderation in tone and tolerance of intellectual diversity.

In particular, more people are realizing that the shift on campuses (and to some extent elsewhere) from evaluating speech or action depending on the intent of the speaker or actor to focusing instead on the subjective perception of the listener or recipient had swung too far.

Yes, how what someone says makes someone else feel matters, but it also matters that the listener’s perception be objectively reasonable and not just subjectively felt. That is to say, it is possible for sensible, sensitive third parties to judge whether something is objectionable; a person claiming to have been offended is not entitled to be the sole judge in the righteousness of their own cause. The same standard can and should be employed in newsrooms. If it was, I think quite a few recent flashpoints might have been defused, at least somewhat.

Just a few more words about the campus protests and their implications for newsrooms. As someone who lived through many of the Vietnam protests, it’s important to note that those this Spring were not anywhere as large or pervasive. The encampments and building-occupiers were few in number— although I have no doubt that their cause (even if not their tactics) are broadly popular on elite campuses. Next, and more significant, the protests of 2024, unlike those of 2020, seem to have done remarkably little to roil workplaces, including but by no means limited to newsrooms.

The new jobs are no longer so new

There is even more reason for hope with respect to my private interlocutor’s concern. The 21^st Century is almost a quarter over. The new newsroom jobs are becoming established roles, the number of people in them growing, their acculturation in newsroom norms and values such as independence, contrarianism and nonpartisanship is deepening. I think we will look back in a decade and see that the gap in outlook between people on various newsroom teams has closed markedly.

There are, however, other factors at work here as well, and one deserves special attention--  another source of newsroom tension which also seems to me at root generational.

Broader bargaining

This is the broadening agenda of unions as they extend their reach to digital publishers, some of them nonprofits. Where there are no profits from which unions can seek a larger share (either because profits have disappeared or never materialized in the first place, or because they are not sought), and especially where there are no prospering shareholders with whom they can contend for more money, it is inevitable that organized labor will organize around a widening set of issues.

These tensions multiply, though, when the agenda moves beyond a particular employer to other items of concern to union members, from politics to conditions in other workplaces.

Journalists generally agree to abstain from some activities which would undermine confidence in their work. Examples range from partisan political activity to untrammeled investments to some commercial relationships with enterprises they cover. Eventually, and likely sooner than later, I think the new generation of labor activists in journalism will come to understand that they need to place analogous limits on the objectives they pursue collectively—and for the same reason: to guard against loss of trust in the independence of their work. That trust, after all, remains the bedrock of the business models of the newsrooms with whose managers they want to bargain.

My wish is that these thoughts have felt empathetic rather than presumptuous—I do realize that I am writing from one side of the gap largely about the other—and I wish also that, in their relative optimism, they don’t strike you as Pollyannaish.

Instead, just as the last great American generation gap in retrospect likely was deepest in the tumultuous year of 1968, I am coming to think that this one, we will one day see, may have reached its widest point in our own traumatic year of 2020. If that is so, we may soon start to feel the generational tension in newsrooms ease just a bit. With all the other challenges we face, let’s hope so.