Taking breaks and making things last.
I always feel deep-down weird when we have a slow week of publishing at Tone Madison. It doesn’t take much for us to have a week where we only publish one or two articles, as opposed to the five or seven we’d really like to. Stories fall through or need to get pushed back, people get sick, administrative fires need putting out. (All of those things happened this week! Ha.) We are also nearing the deadline of a year-end fundraising campaign, and we really need people to contribute. Tone Madison is a worker-owned, reader-supported news outlet. That means monthly or yearly donations from our readers are our most reliable source of revenue. It also means the NewsMatch program gives us an extra boost: every dollar our readers chip in by December 31 will be tripled. Please donate if you haven’t.
There isn’t always a readily available backup to fill a sudden gap in our editorial calendar. Oh, the thing we were going to publish Tuesday isn’t happening? Well, we could scramble to come up with something or other to publish Tuesday, or we could spend Monday and Tuesday continuing to work on any number of other in-progress stories that need editing, reporting, editorial art assigned, etc. That’s usually what we’re doing, even on a day when you don’t see something new pop up on our homepage.
Oh, and sometimes we give ourselves a break on purpose. That’s what we’re doing through the end of December and the first week of January.
We have learned a lot of lessons about the editorial and business sides of running our own publication. One is that sometimes we need to rest. That lesson took a while to stick at Tone Madison, steeped as we are in anger and curiosity and pesky questions and obsessive tendencies.
A few years ago, we decided to institute an annual winter breakāno work and no publishing. (This isn’t even paid time off, though it would be nice to get there eventually. We essentially furlough ourselves for a couple weeks.) And each year, we come back from that break energized and full of ideas. We end up making better use of our timeāand better decisions about what to do with the money our readers donate. We shake off our tunnel vision and get a fresh perspective on our challenges. It’s good for us as people and makes it more likely that this thing will last. Wild how that works.
If we really wanted to keep up a relentless pipeline of Content with the staff and budget we have, we could: 1) work ourselves to the point of burnout 2) neglect the kind of time-consuming stories we actually care about 3) settle for publishing rushed work that lacks quality and purpose 4) all of the above. I think that would be a much greater disservice to you, our readers, than just having a few slow or dead weeks here and there. Different readers come to us for different things, but none of you come here for brainless filler.
We can’t have all the quality we want and all the quantity we want and make this sustainable. Brute-force workaholism is not the solution. Trust me, I’ve tried and it’s really very foolish. The economics of media are brutal and bleak, so we’ve got to slowly raise more money while carefully stretching the funds we have. I’ve accepted this.
Still, you can’t cure a journalist of the neurotic drive to fill the space, refresh the page, and stay in the conversation. The work culture of media tells you that passion, ambition, and ideally a sense of public service should enable you to block out stress and lousy pay and poor work-life balance and endless precarity and angry people on the internet and so forth.
In fact, it’s all so terminally busted that if you are going to go to the trouble of working in media at all, you might as well do it your own way and try to make it better. The staff editors and I collectively own Tone Madison, so there’s no corporate blowhard (or non-profit director blowhard; six and one half dozen) forcing us to show up to work the day after Christmas or whatever. We don’t rely on a treadmill of raw traffic for the site’s income, either. We can take breaks! It’s good!
Workaholism doesn’t make a person more productive or skilled or smart or anything. It just makes you more… worked, and at a certain point that is of dubious value. Whenever I catch myself spinning my wheels on something for too long, I am reminded of an exchange from Deadwood: The Movie (2019) between saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) and perpetually furious lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant):
Swearengen: You ever think, Bullock, of not going straight at a thing?
Bullock: No.
If you’re always going straight at a thing, you’re missing a lot. That’s a trap you can fall into if you’re always rushing to feed the beast. Stepping back and taking some downtime can give you fresh perspectives on a problem. You also just need that break, whether or not it ends up helping you with work.
This time of year I always feel a bit exhausted and depleted. I’m looking forward to spending some time curled up with my cat McCoy, playing some video games, and making some food for friends. I am wishing all of you a lot of rest and care as the year draws to a close. Thanks for helping us get through it, and we look forward to seeing you in 2024.