Why I Won't Quit

"Why had I compromised my independence for an organization that couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me why my journalism didn’t matter?"

“Follow the Light,” by Joe Preston

If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, it may come as a surprise that I’ve never once thought of quitting journalism. I’m always bitching about something with this business: low pay, late pay, no pay; helicopter journalism, missed opportunities, a lack of trust.

I complain because I care. Journalism has been in my life for my entire life. My dad worked in TV news; I edited the college paper, started my own paper and have been working in the field since 2003. It’s what I do.

But it seems like every day I draw breath, the media industry creates new ways to push journalists to quit. If you have a staff job, you’re likely in a union begging for a living wage from an executive who makes triple or quadruple what you do. Or the place you work has laid most people off, or folded, or the well-paid executives have decided journalism is just too risky and what they want is content.

Or maybe you’re just starting out, and you have no mentor to show you how to do the job. Or you can’t get a job, so you give up before you start. Or you covered elections, then COVID, a round of mass protests, another election, more protests, then the ripple effects of what happens when Americans invite fascists over the threshold like vampires. You look at your paycheck and say, “You know what? Fuck this.”

For a long time, I thought I could control how much all of this affected me by being an independent journalist. I set my own terms, draw my own lines, work at my own pace. Nobody can lay me off. I choose what I cover. If I feel traumatized, it’s probably my own fault. If a place pays late, or sucks to work for, I don’t have to write for them anymore.

Last month, I published a manifesto for how I’ll operate going forward in journalism. I felt like I had to because, quite suddenly, at the end of 2025, I stood at the edge of my own career and wasn’t sure what was going to happen to it.

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Back up to 2013. My longtime office job in journalism was at an alternative weekly in Spokane, Washington. I was a staff writer and music editor, but anyone who has worked at an alt-weekly knows everyone does everything. I wrote investigations, weird profiles, every kind of review you can imagine. I edited and commissioned freelancers, started an 80+ band music festival that I ran on top of all of my reporting. I’ve matured to the point where I can finally say this was a wildly low-paid, emotionally-taxing, character-building time in my life, and I am so happy I did it.

This kind of newspaper appealed to a person like me: The entire premise of any respectable alt-weekly newspaper is fundamental skepticism of mainstream media. By working there, I was automatically acknowledging that journalistic institutions are flawed, and don’t serve all readers.

So you could argue I was broken from the start. I never aspired for a beat reporting job at a daily paper, never aimed to be in a press club, never wanted to learn what business casual was. Mainstream journalism rarely reflects worlds I have access to. And to claim a complete lack of bias is, in some ways, mythology. At least alt-weeklies were honest about that.

Working at an alt-weekly gave me a taste of what being independent meant, but it still came with obligations. It got old having to fill the paper week in, week out, and I wanted to concentrate on bigger stories.

Everyone around me thought I was nuts when I made the leap to become a full-time freelance journalist in 2013. No regular pay? No benefits? I would shrug. Even with a job, I had red utility shut-off notices on my door, a repo’d car. It’s not like I was leaving stability behind. If I hustled as a freelancer, at least that hustle would be for my own benefit.

My goals were bigger, more philosophical: I wanted to translate my home of the Pacific Northwest to the larger world. It’s a beautiful, dramatic region, not just in its landscapes, but its history, people and politics. My goal was to make the region better through telling stories — good reads, tough reads, stories people wouldn’t forget. I’ve done that, and it continues to drive my work.

Along the way, I started to believe in myself. I wrote to freelancers I admired and asked how they got the confidence to charge more money; they said telling myself a story I didn’t deserve a living wage was just that: a story.

My price went up. I realized I had to have a lot of projects going to make a real living, so I made podcasts while I wrote a book, put together longform stories while I taught classes, took on a stray lecture while I wrote grant applications.

Ten years into freelancing, in 2023, I broke my own rules.

I had become increasingly frustrated with prestige publications. If journalism is a business of ethics and facts, I could not feel ethically right doing work for national publications that distort facts around poverty, transgender people and, time and time again, the western United States. I was tired of reading stories about how people outside Montana love Yellowstone. I was so sick of seeing the same paragraphs in every story about my hometown, Portland: for a while it was Portlandia-Little Beirut-bicycles-coffee, then after 2020 it became riots-homelessness-drugs-liberals. There seemed to be a total lack of understanding about the Northwest. Pearl-clutching bullshit was passed off as unbiased journalism. I had aspired to write for many of these publications, but they seemed to be filled with line-toeing, power-loving, state violence-normalizing, conventional-thinking reporters who treated my home like it was a child that needed a lecture from an adult.

So I shifted my focus from telling Northwest stories for large media outlets to telling Northwest stories for Northwesterners. I started doing more work as a correspondent for the great western magazine High Country News, where I remain a proud contractor and contributing editor today.

I committed to doing investigative work for Oregon Public Broadcasting through a narrative deep-dive podcast called Hush, which I created with one of my Bundyville collaborators, Ryan Haas. The project seemed like a dream. I maintained my status as an independent reporter, but OPB would give me a steady check and health insurance for taking on such a massive project.

With Hush we created something rare in today’s journalism industry — something unflinching and immersive and full of heart. The first season exposed corruption in Oregon’s capitol city, and how a man named Jesse Johnson was incarcerated on Oregon’s death row for nearly two decades for a crime he didn’t commit. Our work quite literally helped free him from prison.

I pitched another season to OPB, got a green light and knew I had roughly a year to get another season done. I never got another contract, but every month I filed a timesheet showing I was working full time, even though I worked on Hush nights, weekends, every spare moment I had. My life became very hectic: promoting my new book, making Hush, freelancing for HCN. It took more than two decades for my career to finally feel stable. I was busy, but comfortable.

This past year, Haas and I put out our second season of Hush, about a Columbia County, Oregon family whose 18-year-old daughter, Sarah Zuber, died in strange circumstances years prior. The Zuber family was frustrated they had no answer from local investigators. We poured thousands of hours into making the show, exposing the bureaucratic churn that torturously ground down this one family. Proud is the only word I have for this project, but that barely describes it.

Haas eloquently explains what happened to Hush in his devastating essay, “I Had a Dream Journalism Job. Here’s Why I Quit.” The long and short of it is this: for all of our hard work, OPB canceled the show.

I’m still not sure what happened, why Hush was shelved. What I know is that when the second season was halfway done, I couldn’t seem to get a response from Chief Content Officer Jason Potts about the pitch for the third season of Hush.

In early November, on the same day CEO Rachel Smolkin announced on social media that OPB had closed its federal funding gap of $5 million, Potts finally sent me a three sentence email. Two of those sentences were platitudes, the other was: “We are not moving forward with Season 3 of Hush at this time.”

No one at OPB called me to tell me this news. No meeting to say it to my face. No professionalism. I was being fired, and I still don’t know why. That regular paycheck, that health insurance — it was all gone in one email. I was furious, but most immediately I was angry at myself. Why had I compromised my independence for an organization that couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me why my journalism didn’t matter?

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I remember as a kid watching my dad go through layoffs at television stations, the ways it threw our family into disarray, how the whims of media CEOs and CCOs and consultants made us have to pick up and move every two years, start again at a new school, make new friends. The stress rose off him like steam. I’m not far from the age he was when he left the business for good.

I question the ability of any journalist to do our work right now when the boardroom jockeys of the industry, with their mansions and six-figure salaries, seem so intent on killing off reporters, people who barely make rent.

When I think about why I put my independence on the back burner to make Hush, I have a few reasons I can point to: age, fatigue, a desire for something stable. Who can say no to a dream project? I was older, better at doing this work. I thought, finally, someone sees what I can do and is willing to pay for it. I thought I had earned stability, and I was willing to hang up my independence for an organization that wanted me to simply do what I do.

All of this reminded me of the cruel reality that there is no stable place in media. It made me remember how much value there is in being independent.

I don’t think anyone was trying to get me to quit journalism when they canned Hush. I don’t think they thought about me at all. They didn’t know the person they were wiping off a spreadsheet — me — was someone who cares deeply about this profession, which I would have told them if they’d cared to respond to my emails.

I had a few hard weeks after being canned, but even then, I never thought about quitting. I just had to shuffle around in sweatpants for a few days. It turned out I was never actually at an edge of my career — not really. I was just at a crossroads, one I’d stood at lots of times before, where I just needed to figure out a way to make journalism work for me.

This might sound silly, or obvious, but from time to time, I do have to remind myself that I work for a reason: I want to know how I’ll pay my bills each month. I want, maybe, just once, to say no to the payment plan. I want to have the same doctors for years on end because my health insurance isn’t changing all the time. I want to buy an air conditioner and fix a broken window, and I want to save for retirement, even though I know I’ll always do this work in some way, even when I’m old. I don’t think any of this is too much to ask.

If I can’t work for outlets who really mean it when they say they publish courageous journalism, where executives step aside and allow journalists to show them what courage means, then I will make one myself.

The Western Edge is an attempt to preserve the spirit of Hush. This is a project based on picking up the phone and calling people. It’s grounded in relationship-building in communities across this region. It is centered in a belief that journalism done well can do good in the world, and it’s a project where the stakeholders are readers, not moneyed people buying their way onto boards.

In these dark times, I see journalism as a bright spot in all this fog. It won’t change the world on its own, but it can show the way toward a better future as long as we can keep that light burning.

It’ll be a cold day when I let some executive snuff it out for me.