Writing & talking
A few things I've published and one thing that's coming up
It’s fall in Boston, and here I am dusting off this newsletter after an unplanned summer hiatus. I had big plans for my time off between the spring semester and fall semester,1 but time slipped away on me.
What’s coming up (the talking)
Next Thursday, October 9, I’m joining The Self-Investigation’s Mental Health In Journalism Summit 2025. I’ll be speaking at 11 a.m. eastern about research that I worked on with my advisor Meg Heckman.
The project started after Northeastern adopted the Boston Globe’s archives when the paper moved offices in 2017. Meg was conducting oral history interviews with visual journalists who worked at the Globe about the processes behind their work, and the people she was interviewing started talking about the mental and emotional toll of their work. At that point, Meg brought me in, and we put together the beginnings of a paper about historic perspectives on the toll of working as a journalist.
As you’ll see in my talk, today’s journalists aren’t the first group of people to feel the weight of covering difficult news stories. I think it’s important to show that it’s not a new phenomenon to be affected by traumatic stories. Instead, what has changed is a growing willingness to talk about it.
The whole schedule for the summit is excellent, and tickets are super affordable (ranging from $0 to $100). I watched a number of sessions last year, and I hope you’ll check out the program this year.
What’s been going on (the writing)
Last month, I went to New Orleans for the Online News Association’s 2025 conference. It was a great time - lots to learn and lots to eat (as pictured below). I just wrote a story for Storybench about some of the sessions about AI that I attended. I’m still thinking about the one about the potential for publishers (including newsrooms) to license their content to AI companies. I don’t know if this setup will ever become dominant, but I hope it does.2
I spent July and August as interim editor-in-chief at The Scope, a hyper-local publication housed within Northeastern’s School of Journalism. The publication focuses on neighborhoods that surround Northeastern University, particularly the Dorchester, Roxbury, and Fenway neighborhoods. While I was there, we produced a handful of stories ahead of the preliminary election for the open District 7 City Council seat, including a questionnaire that nine of the 11 candidates responded to.
Also in July, I wrote about the regional Murrow Award that the WCVB-Northeastern partnership won. WCVB’s excellence in innovation award entry was comprised of stories produced by Leanna Scachetti when she was working at WCVB as a fellow with the Reinventing Local TV News Project. Later this fall, Reinvent will be publishing our findings about how local TV newsrooms can translate their video storytelling skills to social media in order to reach people ages 18 to 34. We’re really excited to share all of our insights. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox as soon as it is ready.
I also made my podcast debut on What Works: The Future of Local News.3 My opinion journalism professor Dan Kennedy and his cohost Ellen Clegg invited me on to talk about my essay on bridging the gap between practicing journalists and the academics who teach and study journalism. I’m used to asking the questions in interviews, so it was a little odd to be on the other side of the conversation. Thank you to Dan and Ellen for having me!
Finally tonight…
I got into watching Survivor during the end of summer. I started the project after hearing a few podcasters talk about the upcoming 50th season of the show. I wanted to understand why this show had lasted so long.
I watched seasons 1 through 8, which aired from May 2000 to May 2004. It was wild and a fascinating time capsule. I couldn’t believe how much U.S. culture has (and has not) changed.4
Season 6 in the Amazon started off with the tribes split up by sex - men in one tribe, women in the other. It was the horniest season I watched, as evidenced by this quiz game:
There’s also an essay waiting to be written about what these early seasons of Survivor tell us about diet culture in the U.S., but I gotta get through my grad school thesis before I tackle that.
Many, many, many thanks to my wonderful friend Micah who patiently read my texts (often including photos of my TV) as I watched these old seasons of TV like they were brand new.
Those plans included writing this newsletter, but based on my absence from your inbox, you know how that went.
I just finished reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, and learning more about how OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) built their models makes me quite pessimistic about the odds that AI companies ever pay for content/data.
This should technically be filed under “talking,” but that doesn’t really fit with my what’s coming up/what happened structure. And since this is my newsletter, I make the rules here.
The amount of casually-used slurs in the first few seasons is… ROUGH.