The beginning of something new

I can imagine what you’re thinking: Is it 10 a.m. on Saturday already? Is this yet another week when you’ve endured several days of amnesic catatonia?

Happily for you, it is not. It is Wednesday, which is in fact not when you usually receive this newsletter. But this edition is, for once, a newsletter, in that it contains news that I wanted to share.

I have accepted a new role, one that means this newsletter will come to an end. But before I explain the mechanics of how that will work, I’d like to share a bit more about what I’ll be doing and why. This is the same explanation I’ve posted to my personal website, so it’s a bit more formal than is the norm for this newsletter. To get the full newsletter flavor, just imagine that it’s 83 percent more self-deprecating.

What's next for me

Last summer, The Washington Post offered everyone who worked in its Opinion department money to leave, so I left.

I’d only been there for a few months, having spent most of my 11 years at the paper on the news side. When, shortly after the 2024 election, the executive editor told me they were thinking about moving me to the opinion side, he assured me that it wasn’t because I’d written a rebuttal to Jeff Bezos’s essay in the paper about rebuilding trust in the media. A few months of reflection later, it seems like maybe, at least in part, it was. 

Anyway, by August I was out of work for the first time in a long time. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew what I could do: I could write about data visualizations and I could add numeric context to news events. I’d been doing those things for years — more than a decade! — and continuing to do so was a way to fill time and earn a bit of money while I figured out my next step. I am grateful to the subscribers to my newsletter and to MS NOW for giving me space to do that.

I also knew what I didn’t want to do moving forward. Even before I left The Post’s news side, I’d grown disenchanted with the national political conversation, the frequent futility of it and its incessant toxicity. There are places for sophisticated debate, but the national political discourse is rarely that place. There are moments when nuance can effect change, but this is a time in which nuance is rarely rewarded.

What’s more, the national political conversation is oversaturated. This is in part because the stakes are elevated, driving attention and engagement. But this also means that insignificant changes are often presented as significant ones. There is often less to say than many pundits pretend. Shifts in poll numbers, for example, are usually not plunges. A talking head’s talking point has to my knowledge never actually destroyed its target.

This oversaturation is also a function of the splintering of the media environment. There are countless influencers and podcasters who riff on news events, competing for limited attention. This has been sufficiently successful that members of the traditional media are often encouraged to replicate the influencers’ methods. Being a journalist inside a traditional institution often means feeling as though you need to emulate the hustle of a YouTuber. But just as politicians’ ability to campaign doesn’t necessarily translate to effective governance, an ability to capture attention and an ability to inform are often similarly at odds.

There’s another reason this is detrimental: an increased emphasis on individual journalists leads to a decreased emphasis on the institutions of journalism. Institutional power is a hobbyhorse of mine; my last column at The Post centered on the idea. This is also admittedly not a great moment to champion the importance of institutions, given how frequently accrued power has been abused over the past 15 months. But institutions provide continuity, accountability and support for the work of journalism. It is much easier to challenge power when you know there are lawyers who will defend you. It is much easier to hold leaders to account when the public trusts the institution that’s doing it.

All of this reflects where I am now more than where I was last August, admittedly, but that’s the nice thing about having some time off; you can waste time noodling over the state of things.

So last month I found myself presented with two different job offers, one in which I would write columns opining on the news of the day and one in which I would not do that. As should probably be clear, I chose the latter.

Next Monday, I will start my new role as an editor and columnist for Hearst, working both with the newsroom in Connecticut and with a national team that builds tools that can be deployed across Hearst’s newsrooms. My work will be centered not on what’s happening in Washington but more directly on what’s happening in communities.

Over the summer, I wrote an essay for my personal site in which I reflected on the way in which status has become globalized. We’re not keeping up with the Joneses, the people down the street; we’re keeping up with the Kardashians. Fame is universally attainable but that means that status is universally diluted. Being a prominent member of one’s community was at one time near the apex of possible achievement. It is now hardly prominent at all.

We probably can’t entirely rebuild this. But by bringing more attention to what’s happening in our communities, perhaps we can raise the salience and value of local achievements. Maybe rebuilding trust in the media also begins at the local level.

My goal at Hearst will be to help tell stories about Connecticut and to try to figure out ways in which such stories might be told better. I’ll be working with one of the oldest media institutions in the country, doing what I can to help strengthen it. And I’ll still be doing a newsletter and writing occasionally, because, hell, 11 years of habits die hard.

I remain clear-eyed about this moment. But I think I am also clear-eyed about how I can best contribute to making it better.

What's next for this newsletter

So that’s the upshot. As mentioned above, How To Read This Chart will not continue in its current form but I’ll be working on a new newsletter for Hearst. If you’d like to sign up for it directly, you can do so here. How To Read This Chart will be archived at least, so you can enjoy it in perpetuity, if you’re one of those sickos.

And if you are one of the staggeringly generous people who contributed to this newsletter, you’ll receive a separate email this week explaining what happens with that. Needless to say, this is not a good moment at which to start contributing.

That’s a good place to end, though. This newsletter has been enormous fun to write and it has been enormously rewarding to see how much it has been enjoyed. It has been a small part of your life but a big part of mine, and your small contributions of attention and feedback have been instrumental in helping me understand how and where my work can best be directed.

I thank all of you. Sincerely. And hope you’ll continue to offer up some small part of your attention to what comes next.

- Philip