Marisa Kabas is the alternative to wallowing in Olivia Nuzzi’s tale of dysfunction and deceit

Colby Hall’s Mediaite commentary about Olivia Nuzzi is winning a lot of praise. The redoubtable Jay Rosen goes so far as to call it “the best thing I have read about her.”

This morning I’d like to offer a countervailing view. Hall’s take is smart, but it’s not quite as smart as a lot of people seem to think. Ultimately, Hall is caught up in a particular kind of insular, New York-based media world that has little to do with the experience of actual journalists. As just one example, I’m going to offer the career that independent journalist Marisa Kabas has built for herself, so stay tuned.

Hall gives the game away right up top, noting that he sent Nuzzi a sympathetic DM after she left New York magazine when it was revealed that she was involved in some sort of non-physical sexual relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After all, Hall knew her. And he’s self-aware enough to acknowledge, “The fact that I’m opening a column about media narcissism with my own DM slide should tell you everything about how far gone we all are. But I promise this is going somewhere.”

The rest of his piece, though, indulges in the sort of generalizations that may be true of elite New York media circles but that will seem like dispatches from Mars for — oh, to name a couple of examples, someone who is covering education for The Colorado Sun, or who’s an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe.

If you haven’t been following the most recent developments in the Nuzzi saga, Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times has you covered, although you might not want to read it on a full stomach. Anyway, to get back to Hall’s Mediaite piece, here are some excerpts:

Here’s what we don’t say out loud: There’s no money in journalism anymore. No fame, no glamour, no prestige. But there’s lots and lots of money in media — in being a brand, an influencer, a personality. We stopped paying journalists and started rewarding performers.

And:

This isn’t Nuzzi being uniquely corrupt. This is her learning the actual rules of the game as digital media wrote them.

And this:

We spent a decade-plus dismantling the institutional guardrails that once protected young journalists. Salaries plummeted. Job security evaporated. Newsroom mentorship disappeared. What replaced it? A ruthless attention economy where your Instagram and Twitter followers mattered far more than your editor’s guidance, where “personal brand” became the only portable asset in an industry of constant layoffs and collapses. We told a generation of talented writers: You’re not a reporter for an institution. You ARE the institution. Your access is your value. Your personality is your product.

And Olivia Nuzzi was brilliant at this game, which is why she succeeded.

The problem with this is that there are about 42,000 journalists in the U.S., the vast majority performing ethically and honorably for newspapers large and small, television newscasts, community news startups, public radio stations and, in a few cases, independent newsletters and blogs. Many are former students of mine. Many are women, and using Nuzzi’s example to paint a broad brush about female journalists is grotesquely unfair.

I want to close by returning to Marisa Kabas, who’s become something of a phenomenon with her independent newsletter, The Handbasket. With tools such as Substack and Bluesky, as well as her own hard work, she has emerged as one of the more important investigative reporters of the Trump era. Recently she addressed students and faculty members at Grinnell College in Iowa, and she’s reproduced her remarks in full. You should read the whole thing, but here’s part of what she had to say:

A lesson it took me much too long to learn is that you don’t have to wait for anyone to give you the opportunity to be a writer or reporter. You simply start writing and reporting. In many ways that’s never been easier, and it’s basically what I did. I started a newsletter and just started writing, knowing it was possible my work would never go far beyond my family and friends. I think there’s this old idea that you need to be ASSIGNED a story, or given permission to pursue something, when in reality all you need is to be a nosy bitch with a smartphone. You’d be amazed at how open people are to talking if you simply ask….

There has been a years-long effort to make us believe that journalism doesn’t matter. That the truth has become so subjective that attempting to share it is a waste of our time. There are days when I feel that weight bearing down on me. When the power of the malignant right wing media ecosystem feels too powerful, and my stories seem like pebbles in a mudslide. Weirdly enough, the only thing that gets me through those feelings is working harder. I’m loath to call it an act of resistance, but when I’m furiously tapping my laptop and the words are flowing out like a song, the thought sometimes enters my mind that there are people who wish I would stop.

There’s no question that this is a difficult moment for journalism. What Colby Hall is right about is that the economic underpinnings of news have collapsed, and it’s much harder to find a job — let alone one that pays a living wage — than it used to be (although it was always difficult).

The Olivia Nuzzi story, though, is not about one woman’s rational response to that decline. Rather, it’s a story about corruption — hers, RFK Jr.’s, her former fiancé Ryan Lizza’s, her former paramour Keith Olbermann’s and the elite institutions that looked the other way as she brought them titillating, voicey scoops about Rudy Giuliani, Joe Biden, Donald Trump and others.

Marisa Kabas is a far better example and role model. But so is the young woman (or man) who’s covering town hall for your local nonprofit news site. Let’s keep the focus where it belongs.