Why I Retired from Rageposting
Constantly feeding the Political Rant Industrial Complex isn't sustainable.
When I worked at an alternative newsweekly in my twenties, I wrote feminist rants on a near-daily basis. I got kinda famous for it. My anger was real, there were reasons to be mad, and readers responded. After the 2016 election, a frenzy of rage animated the alternative press. I think it really did help some people to have their feelings of political unease and despair mirrored back to them in bratty blog posts like mine. I know it helped me to write them. At least at first.
But when you do this kind of work, you can begin to feel like a conduit for all of the fury your community feels. You can begin to feel an obligation to be angry, because it’s what you’re known for. You can begin to lose the distinction between your own genuine anger and a performative rage that you know will land with readers and boost your analytics and, as they say, do well on social. Here’s the dirty little secret about rage-posting: It’s saleable. A deeply-researched 3,000-word story on the day-to-day operations of an abortion fund may not get any traction on Twitter. But indignant fury with minimal sourcing? That shit’s marketable.
I left my job where I did this kind of writing for a lot of reasons—it paid terribly, I was burnt out, and though I loved Portland, the media market was beginning to feel claustrophobic. I wanted to be able to do things like have a savings account and be able to afford my contact lenses. That job had been a blessing. It launched my career. I look back on it with deranged fondness. I will never have another job like it, and when I go back to Portland for a wedding this summer, I am sure that nostalgia will sink its teeth into me like it always does, and I’ll look back on Young Megan in her alt-weekly era and feel proud of the magic she made possible on $33k a year.
But by the time I left that role, I knew I had outgrown it, and that if I didn’t move on, I would stop growing. When our news editor left for a job at the local public radio station, I remember standing among my colleagues at his going-away party at the hole-in-the-wall bar we frequented after work. Whiskey in hand, I looked around the room at my coworkers, our little island of misfit toys, and it was like I was seeing them from somewhere else, somewhere far away in the future. I felt a sense of belonging and camaraderie I hadn’t known could come from work, and I also knew in that moment that the next going-away party would be mine.
And it was. I was hired at The Seattle Times a few months later. I wrote a final feminist rant, toured a famous Portland mausoleum and took a victory lap around the city’s best vintage shops with one of my best friends from college, then drove north back to Seattle, where I would find myself somewhere I’d never expected to be after graduating with a BA in English in the midst of a recession: under the fluorescent lighting and chaotic deadlines of a legacy paper.
I was tired of having to perform anger all the time. I was tired of having to have an opinion on everything. I was tired of writing pieces that skimmed the surface, but didn’t delve into the powerful people and systems that enabled the policies I raged against. I was an assigning editor at The Times, and though I was told I could write if I wanted to, I didn’t have to.
For the first time in my life, that came as a relief.
Writing opinion pieces can be fun — if you’re reading this, you know I still do it! — but not when it’s the only thing you do. While the momentary rage of getting my jabs in felt cleansing, it didn’t feel like I was addressing the root of the problem. I was standing with my readers in their anger, but I wasn’t helping any of us understand what had caused it.
What I really wanted to do was to write in-depth coverage of abortion policy, but I couldn’t find a place to put it. Whether I was at a mainstream daily or an alt-weekly, I was always juggling so much other work that it just wasn’t possible on the scale I wanted. It was easier to dash off a rage post than to interview the doctors, lawyers, and advocates I speak to so frequently now that when I call them up for stories they all but answer the phone by saying “You again?”
Recently, reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, I found language for what I was experiencing when I grew frustrated with the Political Rant Industrial Complex. She writes about receiving a response from John Berger, an early reader of her book The Shock Doctrine. While some readers had reacted with anger to the information in Klein’s book, Berger said that reading it helped him enter a state of calm. Klein writes (emphasis mine):
Calm is not a replacement for righteous fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and — I hope — in the minds of my readers as well. The information is almost always distressing, and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.
This is exactly how I feel about my reporting. It reminded me of a note I received from a reader last summer saying that reading my coverage of reproductive health policy had given her “clarity and reassurance.” Anger might be marketable, but that’s way more meaningful to me.
Like Klein, I believe strongly that anger can be a force for good. It’s an important emotional messenger. It’s often a sign of injustice, a boundary crossed, a call to action. Our anger can tell us when we’re being exploited, and it can motivate us to fight back. There is a reason the Clash sing “Let fury have the hour / Anger can be power / Don’t you know that you can use it?”
You can and you should.
But in my professional life, being angry all the time did not produce my best work. Some of what I wrote was funny and true, but it wasn’t sustainable to be mad all the time. And these days, though it might sound odd given what I do for a living, I don’t go through life feeling particularly angry. I write about arguably one of the most rage-inducing issues of all time, but most of the time, my work doesn’t add to my anger, because I know fact-based reporting and meaningful analysis of abortion policy is part of the solution. I hope that instead of adding to your anger, it provides understanding and insight into how we got here to begin with. Because that’s the only way we’re gonna get out.
What I’ve been up to: I’m still at Axios through the end of June, and SPEAKING of stories that may make you feel more calm and less anxious, I recently wrote about how a new policy for retrofits will make Seattle’s unreinforced masonry buildings safer if and when the Big One comes. (Take that, Kathryn Schulz! Just kidding, I admire your work, Kathryn Schulz!)
I also recently saw a performance from Malacarne, the contemporary dance project from Seattle choreographer Alice Gosti, and if you’re only going to ballet performances, you are MISSING OUT.
Media I’ve been consuming: This story on how swimming can be more inclusive of trans athletes. And this one on how national journalists can do better by the student journalists doing the best coverage of Gaza solidarity encampments across the country right now.
This TikTok from an air traffic controller, and this one on media literacy.
I’m also continuing my Buffy rewatch (it rules) and bought this very silly hat in anticipation of LOTR returning to theaters in June.
A note about this newsletter: It hits your inbox at least once a month. Burbank Industries is just me, a reproductive health policy reporter at the dawn of the theocracy. This post is public, but most of the content on this account is paywalled, so if you want to follow it, I would strongly recommend a paid subscription.
The reason for this is that I’m going to post things on here that are just personal writing and not my reporting, or delve into the thorny aspects of that reporting, and I like to keep some separation between these things. Additionally, as an independent journalist, I don’t benefit directly from subscriptions to publications I write for (although you should support them!) so this is a great way to support my work directly if it’s meaningful to you. Thank you for reading!
Playing you out: One of the best songs ever written by one of the best bands to ever exist.
Loved Doppelgänger so much. And love this: “I write about arguably one of the most rage-inducing issues of all time, but most of the time, my work doesn’t add to my anger, because I know fact-based reporting and meaningful analysis of abortion policy is part of the solution”
I just watched this great lecture by Ed Yong, and in it he talks a lot about how surprised he was by the responses he got to some of his stories about Covid and Long Covid. He of course tried to explain aspects of these conditions in his pieces but he didn't expect to hear from friends and family of patients who after reading understood, for the first time, what their loved ones were dealing with. I think his body of work too evokes that sense of calm you're writing about – and I for one am so grateful for journalists who engage and communicate at that profoundly impactful level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjNy1rn0yPk