Beware the noisy bar

I’m writing this bit of intro just after attending the monthly meeting of the Federal Communications Commission here in Washington D.C., where the hot topic was the legitimacy of the concessions Paramount and Skydance are willing to make to get their $8 billion merger deal approved. (It’s the rare FCC meeting where the political commentary of “South Park” comes up. “I’m not a ‘South Park’ watcher,” noted Chairman Brendan Carr.)

It is, indeed, an unsettling time in American journalism, even more than the yoozh.

Of course, change calls for innovation, and with that in mind I’m working on a slow relaunch of this here newsletter. I’m hoping to turn this space into a way of, yes, making it known when I’ve published a new piece or done something else to which I’m eager to draw attention. But I’d also love for it to serve as a gathering point for those of us still curious about the intersections of the three things I spend my time on: technology, politics, and journalism.

With that in mind, I thought it’d be fun to peel back the curtain a bit on the journalism side of things by doing a quick look at the reporting out of a recent piece of mine, the Washingtonian story I mentioned last week on the push to mainstream betting on politics. It might be of particular interest to students of journalism and my fellow practitioners, but also as a way of seeing how this kind of work, so embattled, comes together in real life.

One of the great things about journalism is that you can, over time, grow comfortable in your ability to do it while also waking up each day knowing you’ll likely learn something new about doing it well. That’s a possibility that I, at least, find irresistible.

Anyhoo, I present five things I learned while reporting that piece:

1) Beware the noisy bar — A key scene in the piece plays out during a meet-up-style event upstairs at the Ugly Mug, a lively drinkery in D.C.’s greater Capitol Hill area. I did a productive round of interviews, but with attendees wearing name tags, I blanked on a non-awkward way of getting their names committed to the tape recorder I was holding. That earned me a time-consuming round of fact-checking later as I made sure I was matching speakers to their words 100% correctly. In retrospect, I should have just said, ‘Let me say your name so I have it’ and ‘that was so-and-so talking just then.’

2) Admit when that fun little tangent’s actually a dead end — For a long time while writing the piece I was in love with connecting the rise in political betting to the idea of ‘effective altruism,’ as there’s a lot of overlap when it comes to the notion of using quantitative means to judge what’s likely to happen. I wrote on it and wrote on it and wrote on it. Eventually, though, I had to admit that it was already enough to ask a general audience to spend time contemplating the merits and risks of political prediction markets without also asking them to reconsider the meaning of Sam Bankman-Fried. I put on my grown-up pants and killed it.

3) Ask the obvious question — While Pratik Chougule, the main subject of the piece, came up in neoconservative politics, worked for prominent figures on the right, and helped run Republican campaigns, we spent a lot of time discussing how put-off he was by the 2020 election, including the attempt to block the certification of election results at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. As we wrapped up the piece, I realized I’d never properly asked him, does he still self-identify as Republican? (Answer: He does not.) It was a useful reminder that it’s never too late to tee up the obvious questions, even if your source or subject looks at you funny.

4) Podcasts are both boon and burden — So much of American politics is playing out on podcasts right now, and that was the case here, as Chougule is the host of one called “Star Spangled Gambler.” For a reporter, in a way that’s terrific. They provide hours and hours of fodder, often directly from your source or subject’s mouth. But they can also be difficult to mine through traditional search means. If you know the particular episode you’re interested in, Apple Podcasts usefully auto-generates rough transcripts. It’s still necessary, though, to reserve time to trawl through the accompanying audio to make sure you’re reflecting the content accurately.

5) Journalistic propriety has its limits — In reporting out this story, I balked at actually using one of the platforms to try my own hand at betting on political events, which is, generally speaking, good practice; getting financially entangled with the topics you’re writing about is asking for trouble. But it also meant I didn’t truly get in my bones how they worked. So I settled on the de minimis approach, betting a dollar-and-a-half via the Kalshi platform on whether White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt would say a certain set of words during her briefing. She did. It didn’t feel right to keep my $1.41 in winnings, so I rounded up and donated to the Society of Professional Journalists. It made me wonder whether it prompted any curious looks at SPJ when a ten-buck donation randomly rolled in.

Thanks as always for reading,

Nancy