Why I Left the L.A. Times

And some thoughts on what's happening to journalism

Recently I accepted a buyout and left my job as a columnist at the Los Angeles Times after 13 years reporting on Southern California. I’ve spent the last month or so struggling to explain why, both to myself and others.

There are all too many reasons to leave after 13 years of watching the paper be devastated by cuts and bad leadership. The trouble is deciding which to share, because I have no desire to bring harm to my former newsroom.

I don’t mind sharing that I struggled as a columnist. I knew early on that I would probably fail to live up to people’s expectations of what a columnist was, but I thought my failure could be instructive or at least interesting. A clash of values was inevitable. I was the first Asian American columnist in newsroom history, and at the time I also became the youngest columnist on staff.

Some coworkers went out of their way to let me know what they thought of my promotion. A few months after my job was announced, I was on a Festival of Books panel moderated by a fellow columnist so unfamiliar with my work that he described it with the following: “when he writes about ethnic food, you can just smell the Chinese food cooking.” I have never been a food writer, and cannot recall an instance in which I described the smell of any kind of food cooking. His first question was more of an accusation. “You know you’re too young to be doing this, right?” He said, to chuckles from the audience, who like him, were mostly old and white.

A manager once told me that a columnist is supposed to be a representative of the newsroom. But the newsroom never agreed to be represented by me, and I never agreed to represent any other values but my own. And from the beginning, mine were always different.

I began to write about Asian American communities in Southern California at a time when journalism about identity and race was seen as a backwater beat. I persisting in doing so even though an older colleague I respected told me to “drop the race stuff.” I took a stubborn pride in forcing people to acknowledge the relevance and importance of the communities I was writing about. I quickly learned that I wasn’t always allowed to decide what was interesting and newsworthy about these communities. I, and most other reporters who were not white, were considered biased by default because we sometimes shared a broad demographic category with the people we wrote about.

It is true that in each pair of worn, lotion'ed hands; each spray of salt and pepper curls tied in a handkerchief; each weary smile, I could see my mother, my aunts, my grandma. It is true that I recognized the thwarted pride and inward-facing anger of immigrant men like my father in many I met, that I saw myself in the struggles of many second generation Asian Americans. And it is true that these facts made successes and failures feel uniquely painful and rewarding.

But I never understood why these facts meant that I could not be objective. To me, objectivity was not a single identity or some theoretical projection of perfect neutrality. It was more like the practice of considering the value of perspectives not your own. Less tough guy truth-telling and more to do with self-honesty and having the mental elasticity to zoom out of your own egotistical worldview in an attempt to perceive a larger picture.

Why wouldn’t a story about any kind of person, whether it’s Texan longhorn ranchers or the Fairfax Jewish community need to pass some muster with the members of their community? To respect people and communities as both audience and subject?

I and many others believed that culturally fluent journalism was not only more humane but more convincing, vivid and truthful. It could wield more explanatory power and reach more people. But I found few useful lessons in the LA Times archives.

Instead I encountered so many examples of harmful, prurient coverage that I began to collect them like evidence. I’d stay late at the office reading them, printing out the worst ones and keeping a grim archive in my desk drawer.

One day I found a familiar byline on one of these stories: Bob Baker, a longtime editor, reporter and writing coach for the LA Times. He had taught the training sessions at my college newspaper that had served as my introduction to journalism.

Bob wrote a story that reported the cause of a bloody gang war as two young men fighting over a female romantic interest. When I searched the name of the gangs involved, I found hours of interviews on Youtube, including several from gang members who insisted that the true cause was the murder of a gang member’s younger brother. I didn’t know who to believe, but I could see that these men, aging former gang members who had already served and been released from life sentences, no longer had much reason to lie.

Newspapers during this time had a tendency to describe crime exclusively through the perspectives of police. Bob had interviewed a gang intervention specialist about the cause of the violence, but he hadn’t quoted any actual members. His white suburban perspective was not universal, but it was mirrored across every section of the paper. These mistakes and omissions built a wall between the newspaper and it’s communities brick by brick.

I have no anger for Bob. He was a kind man with strong values who taught us about inverted pyramids with a genuine sense of fun and excitement. He was good enough at his job that his book, “Newsthinking” still sits on my reference shelf 16 years later. He died years before I discovered his name in my archive crawls.

But as a young writer with an idealistic belief in shining the newspaper’s light into underserved communities, I reported in the aftermath of decades worth of accumulated mistrust and neglect. In Asian and Latino immigrant communities I kept running into the belief that their stories weren’t supposed to be in our paper, that any attention would almost certainly bring misfortune. In Black and brown communities I found an intractable, earned hostility towards me, my institution and our intentions.

Bob never mentioned any of this in his journalism talks, and my editors often downplayed my concerns about fairness and balance.

But I connected with coworkers who’d had similar experiences, and together we wrestled with the tough choices that were left to us. We helped forgive each other for our mistakes and found strength and inspiration in each other. At times, it felt like a newsroom within the newsroom, one in which we could express our own beliefs about what the LA Times should represent.

Each of these coworkers left for better paychecks or better treatment, and all too many left the industry entirely. Layoffs devastated the newsroom again and again, and all the ownership tumult seemed to leave the largely the same people in key positions. In the end I left because at some point, you look at a place that was once your home and all you can see are the holes in it.

I’m starting this newsletter because for years, there has been a growing tension between the kind of journalism I wanted to practice and the kind of journalism that people believe will make journalism organizations profitable.

Journalists don’t pay people for the information and data that we assemble into articles. To me, this choice defines what journalism is and who we are. Journalism doesn’t happen unless we can convince people that some stories are too important to be bought or sold, except by us. There is no business model without people giving us free data, no story that doesn’t require the willing and free participation of a regular person who believes in our mission. Our argument is that information should be donated to us because we are creating a public good.

What’s obvious to me is that there are huge cracks in professional journalism’s social contract. Fewer people are willing to be interviewed by the newspaper, perhaps because they recognize how a highly ranked Google link can forever define your digital identity.

Young journalists, who are asked to make the most calls, experience this disconnect between mission and reality most directly. Editors who have not sought interviews on a daily basis for too many years do not understand that the social calculus of seeking an interview is no longer as simple as when they started. Neither party can pretend to naïveté about the economic ramifications of the transaction occurring, and journalism orthodoxy offers no guidance except a dull recitation of dated values that few can truly say they believe in any more. It’s hard to describe the psychic burden of trying to bridge this gap between the public’s perception of journalism and what you actually do. I just know that I’ve seen too many talented, sincere and kind people burn out.

We live in an age that makes the economic values and incentives of storytelling obvious. Growing up on social media gives you an innate sense for the marketability of stories and personal data. Algorithms train you to recognize that marketability everywhere, especially in yourself. The more journalism organizations commercialize themselves in response to economic pressures, the harder it will be to convince the public to donate their stories and data, the raw materials for the product.

Journalism institutions don’t see the deterioration of this social contract because we do not tell an objective story about ourselves. That failure leaves a lot of journalists confused about who we are, what our institutions represent, and why we’re doing this work. We believe ourselves to be heroes and are confused and angry when we are greeted as colonizers and corporations. We lecture the public and demand that they acknowledge our value with subscriptions and do not ask why no one is listening.

I decided that if I must practice journalism for a commercialized information product, it may as well be one of my own design. I’m hoping to write my own contract with the public using everything I’ve learned in my 15 years of practicing newspaper journalism.

I don’t believe journalism is dying, even if its institutions always seem to be. Journalism is practiced by all kinds of people everywhere, regardless if there is a professional organization or journalist involved. Anyone who shares information in the public interest, who accepts responsibility for the public’s need for information and tries to get it correct, they are a journalist in my book. Journalism’s principles and practices are created by the public’s desire to know the truth, and that will never die. Good journalism, professional journalism, depends on how serious, how sacred your contract with readers is.

I’m saying this because I’m worried that journalism won’t survive if it’s left in the hands of journalism institutions, whose business models will never be as fluid as the internet requires. We can’t depend on the journalism job market to provide the kinds of steady, high paying jobs that produce good journalism. And though it’s not easy to say this, we must let go of the idea that professional journalists are the only people who should do this work. We should throw open the doors of this profession and spread those principles as widely as we can, so that journalism can come from anyone, anywhere, not just salaried journalists.

Journalism’s survival depends on its principles surviving. So here are some of mine:

Journalism should have a powerful, unshakeable humanity, a sense of empathy and emotional intelligence that no AI can ever hope to replicate. Journalists should report transparently, explaining our intentions and decisions and trying to earn people’s cooperation rather than finesse them into giving quotes and content. We should be powerful, prolific listeners who do not just state the truth but help others acknowledge and accept it. The most powerful kind of journalism is produced when writer and subject find a common cause.

Journalism should be a firm anchor to place, history and geography during a time when all of that seems to be collapsing. It is an information product that costs money to produce, but it is also meant to be nourishing, humble and given freely, rather than bought and sold. It doesn’t pretend to perfection, but corrects its mistakes and instead strives to show that it was made with care, by hand.

In other words, I want the future of journalism to be more like a lunch box. Something with modest goals but capable of ambition, tailored to your tastes and made by someone who cares about you. If you subscribe, I will send you a homemade meal of reporting, photography, illustration and criticism twice a month from where I happen to be at the moment. Future topics might include boogie boarding, LA chili, night markets and nontraditional food and product reviews. I’ll be traveling a bit over the next year, and Lunch Box will be coming with me, with future editions planned about Taiwan, Japan, and Mexico. I don’t have answers to all your questions about journalism’s future or mine, but through this newsletter, I hope to find them and share them with you.