I’m not settling in at the keyboard to write about Anderson Cooper, but let’s start with him. On my lap is an op-ed from the New York Times that’s about Cooper allowing he’s gay. “All this talk about privacy reveals deep and troubling assumptions,” argues the writer, Daniel Mendelsohn. “Mr. Cooper compared disclosure of one’s homosexuality to revealing ‘who a reporter votes for’ or ‘what religion they are,’ but in a post-Freudian age in which sexuality is seen as a core aspect of identity, this comes across as disingenuous. If you’re really ‘happy, comfortable . . . and proud to be gay, as Mr. Cooper says he is, the simple fact of being gay should be no more a ‘privacy’ issue than being straight is for straight people. It’s just who you are.”
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But the larger question, about reporters coming clean, is greatly with us. The Tribune‘s new BFF, Journatic, got itself into a spot of trouble this month when This American Life revealed that Journatic had been providing TribLocal websites with stories whose bylines were not simply made up, but made up to conceal from readers the fact the stories were cranked out in the Philippines by minions paid pennies an item. It’s one thing for journalism to use secret sources; it’s another to use secret journalists. Brian Timpone, the head of Journatic, argues that when his people do the grunt work of filing on monthly sewer district meetings, the seasoned reporters he admires are freed up to engage in the Serious Journalism that informs the citizenry and bulwarks liberty. I’m not sure it’s working out quite that way—at last count Journatic was accountable for several more layoffs than Pulitzers—but if Timpone truly thinks so he should stop hiding what he’s doing and launch an ad campaign that boasts about it:
A 1995 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism (my alma mater), Timpone is not the only product of that fine facility who believes that journalists should keep certain things secret. Kathy Bernard is a 1982 graduate who drifted into career counseling and now runs a website, getajobtips.com.
Her clients are not all journalists, but journalism is the archetypal example of an upended workplace whose veterans are tossed out of work, find themselves marginally qualified for the new jobs that pop up, and don’t even know how to apply for them. “There’s very little human interactivity,” says Bernard. “You apply online. The companies use keyword software, and if you don’t have those keywords in your resume you may be rejected with no human being ever looking at your application. It used to be that people who were gung ho would walk their resumes into a place to apply for a job. Now I’ve interviewed recruiters who say they find it creepy.”
This journalist had a good writing job at a Chicago daily until she was laid off a few years ago, and then she learned a bitter lesson: “Your brand is everything,” she tells me. “And your brand is created by what you produce.” Your next employer will google you to see if you’re real, so “create some kind of backup system for saving your best work digitally so it can be captured by Google.” Her work wasn’t.
I don’t know. Names are changed, hair is dyed, ages are hidden, experience is concealed, and the old-fashioned talents we’re most proud of go unmentioned, because that’s the way the cradle robbers want it. Forget his sexuality—Anderson Cooper flaunts his gray hair. Give the man some credit!
