A not-so-lightning round with Brian Morrissey

After more than half an hour discussing the future of media, Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau asked Brian Morrissey to stick around for 20Q, a recurring column that is basically a lightning round of questions looking for pithy answers. Morrissey happily agreed, but admitted that brevity might not be his strong suit. What followed was a more freewheeling conversation about the media he consumes, the tools he uses to write and some of the habits that come with a life in journalism.

What news source can’t you live without?

There’s this thing called pbanotes.com that we built. It’s a private social network for the People vs. Algorithms podcast.

It basically sprung from a WhatsApp group the three of us used to prepare for the show, share what we were seeing and comment on things. It was a typical group text, and I realized, “This is my favorite media of the week.” I look forward to going there because I know Troy [Young] and Alex [Schleifer] are going to have some smart stuff, and I know I’m going to make a few jokes at Troy’s expense.

It’s a good product and a good experience. Troy got the vibe-coding bug, and we basically created that experience for our hardcore loyalists in the audience. The preparation for the show is done there. It’s kind of like an open-kitchen restaurant.

We share links we find, but also observations about the world and our daily lives that inform how we view this area evolving.

That’s self-serving, but I like it because it involves more community in the process. I’ve been creating media artifacts my entire career. I prided myself on being flexible. I had colleagues who were like, “I only write magazine stories.”

I’ll write a magazine story. I’ll write a newspaper story. I’ll write a web story. I’ll write a blog post. I was pretty good at Twitter when it was Twitter. I was great at Slack. I like creating different things. I like more dynamic forms of content.

We’re having a conversation now, and I like conversation a lot more than toiling away to create a little artifact that I’m going to serve into the world. I like doing that sometimes, too. When I write something I really like, I think, “Yeah, that felt good.”

Everywhere, people are ascribing more value to things that are participatory and that they can feel part of. I write more conversationally now, and obviously I speak conversationally.

My professional writing used to be different from how I would write to a friend, and some of that is normal. But I think we’re seeing a gravitational pull away from that professional sheen and more toward personal writing.

We’re at this period where we’re figuring out, “Do we use AI for writing? Do we use AI for this?” I don’t use AI to write things on my behalf.

There’s a lot of advantage in being able to write or create things in a way that draws people into the creation process or makes them feel some kind of connection to you as the person putting that thing out in the world.

This may be the longest lightning-round answer I’ve ever gotten.

Sorry. I’m not good at lightning rounds. I don’t have any colleagues, so I don’t get to talk to people.

Who is your favorite fictional journalist?

I honestly have no idea.

Here’s the thing—and I’m terrible at the lightning round—I love the profession of journalism. I don’t regret going into it at all. But I was never attracted to capital-J Journalism through its lore.

I went into it because I thought it fit my skill sets and what I found interesting. I’m very curious about how the world works, and that was the root of it.

I didn’t go into journalism aspiring to be Woodward or Bernstein. I didn’t even consider it as a profession until I was in my 20s.

Maybe Peter Parker? He became Spider-Man, didn’t he?

Spider-Man was a photographer for the Daily Bugle. I’d count that as journalism.

Yeah. Why not? That’s a pretty cool thing to be able to finesse. Talk about getting into a better market—fighting crime and doing all that.

At least he has something to fall back on.

You can go in a lot of different directions as Spider-Man.

Pen, pencil or keyboard?

Keyboard. But probably more like phone.

I really admire Tina Brown because she’s a great editor, a great magazine writer and a great newsletter writer. She can write anything. You could give her a crayon and she would write something amazing.

Michael Wolff, who was my boss very briefly, is another old-school guy. He just writes for the love of the game.

I really admire good writers and the fact that they don’t care what format they’re writing in. They don’t care about their tools.

I’ve written newsletters on my phone that have been good. I remember writing one in Istanbul Airport on my phone, and I take that as a point of pride.

I’ve never been good at speaking to write. That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s all this talk about Whisper. The way I speak is like Trump. That’s not good writing.

Maybe the people who are good at that are just more structured thinkers. I don’t know.

To me, writing—and this is the part I wouldn’t want to give away—forces you to put structure around thoughts.

I could not stand meetings where people wanted to present things to me because that’s performative. I would make people write things down. When you write it down, it’s going to expose you. It exposes loose thinking. It exposes the fact that you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.

If you’re talking, you can do all kinds of shucking and jiving.

Who would you want to write your biography?

I would only want to write my own.

I kind of understand why people wouldn’t want a feature writer to write a feature story about them. You have to sand off all the edges and find some narrative thread to make an interesting, compelling story.

I’ve written them, but I’ve never been the subject of one, and I’m not sure I would like the experience.

I used to think about that when reporters would come back and say, “I spoke to 10 people, and there’s a toxic workplace here.” You could go on LinkedIn and find 10 people who would say that exact thing about almost anywhere.

I think that would scare the shit out of me.

You have a lot of energy. Coffee, tea or Monster?

Coffee.

I don’t think coffee will ever leave the profession. It’ll always be very coffee-oriented. It’s the best way to procrastinate, and I think the number one, two and three trait of a journalist is procrastination.

Do you read your work after it’s gone live?

Sometimes. I want to force myself to do it more.

One of the things we’ve lost with media scarcity is the craft. At Adweek, our most-read web stories were always our print stories because the magazine came out weekly. If you were publishing weekly, it forced differentiation.

I did this at Digiday. I said, “We’re not going to publish once a day like a newspaper.” People would say, “But the story’s ready.” I’d say, “It doesn’t matter. Publish this at midnight.”

That forced differentiation. You couldn’t just say, “This thing happened. I’m going to write it up and call a couple people.” It raised the bar a little bit.

One of the hard parts with what Puck calls “appointment journalism” is that it forces productivity, but you get a lot of kind of meh content.

Particularly in late August.

But today was all right.