I am blessed•cursed (yes this spelling is intentional, kind of like with kilowatt-hours) with having a distinct professional mission — I want more journalists in this world. It is decidedly not S.M.A.R.T., but rather distilled down to its simplest form, and that’s likely why it took a complete hold of me, if we are to believe Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
There are so, so many people and organisations apparently working towards the opposite mission, for the world to have fewer journalists, ideally none at all. They have been very creative in their means to accomplish this mission: some starve media of income, others build tools promising to replace messy and expensive humans doing journalism, and yet others jail and kill those humans.
When I think about that — that, rather than winning in a fair battle of ideas or accepting accountability for their actions, they’d prefer to just have no ideas to fight and no one bearing witness — I get annoyed. Not necessarily angry or sad, but annoyed.
Before we get into that, though, I think I need to take a step back and tell you a couple of things about myself.
First, it took me quite a while to realize that I had that life mission of more journalists — I can sometimes be oblivious like that. I happened to get exposed to lots and lots of bad, good, and great journalism very early on in my career; the exposure and a love of reading led me to feel that, while I really like reporting and writing, I am distinctly average at both. And while I’ve progressed a lot over the years, the feeling has not changed.
Now don’t get me wrong, by its very definition “distinctly average” is 100% good enough, and it can even take you places, as I can attest. But for a perfectionist who also knows what a Ricardian comparative advantage is, this was not, in fact, enough just yet.
With a fair bit of effort and a little bit of luck, I got the KSJ fellowship and quickly used this professional accolade as a permission slip for doing something I truly love, as opposed to just “really like”:
- telling smart people what to do;
- performing on stage (I did a lot of theater as a kid, and a lectern in front of slides is a kind of stage!);
- joking and being funny with impunity;
- solving puzzles;
- learning;
- reading;
- and closing obvious gaps (if I think something really needs to exist, I might just bend and slap reality until it does).
In resume speak, this was teaching at universities and creating a whole bunch of “firsts”. No courses on science communication? Hmm. No active professional association or award for science journalists? *raises hand* No books in Russian on science journalism? Huh. (This one I’m extra fond of because I adore translation, as opposed to just “truly love”.)
Here’s the other thing you need to know about me. To be fair, if you have ever really met me or dealt with me, you probably already know this: I am a weirdo. Other ways to express this I can think of are “neurodivergent” and “undiagnosed.” And one of the more socially acceptable and rewarded ways in which I’m weird is, I can’t *really* tell what people mean when they ask “who do you think you are?”.
We just had a book club meeting in July where I invited Nikolay Kukushkin, a neuroscientist and author of Russian origin now living and working in New York. We aren’t friends and we don’t even talk much, but I did have a personal anecdote to open the meeting with: in 2015, while at MIT for the fellowship, I decided to host a Yuri’s Night party, and I invited Kukushkin to give a talk on what zero gravity does to the human brain, according to science, and perform a DJ set afterwards.
I did all of this — the party itself, the setup, bringing the fully random guest (no offense to Nikolay but he was random for everyone but me, I knew him from his popular science work in Russian), filming the talk with my camera, editing and posting it as a video. And I did that because nobody stopped and told me I was not allowed or smart or skilled or cool enough to do that, and nobody asked me who I thought I was, trying to pull this off at MIT.
This is ultimately who I think I am — when I complain about impostor syndrome, it’s really a form of masking. I can’t fully relate to the feeling I think, because I am bizarrely impervious to the damaging power of the question, and I have not internalized it (most of our time as adults we ask this question ourselves, don’t we?).
Not because I am actually smart or skilled or cool enough for everything, but because something in my brain doesn’t quite work as the person asking the question assumes it should. So unless someone explicitly stops me, I’m doing things.
I can offer various explanations for this, borrowing everywhere from Master and Margarita to the Fifth Element to the Russian folk wisdom, which says there are always those «кому больше всех надо» — not sure about the translation here because the literal “who need more than anyone else” doesn’t sound quite complete. Perhaps I’ll just give an example.
At the book club meeting, Nikolay mentioned he was writing his second book in English, which would incidentally put it out of bounds for my Russian-language club. I immediately suggested he should get it translated and then become the first and only science writer to have won the national book award in both nominations, original and translated work. Because who says he can’t? Hell, I’d recuse myself from the selection committee for translations to deliver this one. Because who says I can’t?
This has a ton of assumptions baked in about ourselves and the world, and some are more ambitious than others (no doubt in Nikolay, but my book club is only like four books in, it’s not even one year old yet). And none of this is necessary in any way other than “I think this needs to happen.” Yet I have a peculiar feeling about one of the future club meetings.
Let’s just say I am a very enterprising and resourceful weirdo.
(When I was a high school student, I decided I wanted to lead a workshop on advertising at my beloved summer camp. That proposal was promptly shut down by an older camp staff member who then actually asked me what made me think I could do a workshop like that, knowing nothing about advertising and having no training whatsoever. It was possibly well-meaning in retrospect, but also quite blunt at the time.
I got (a) really upset and (b) a six-year university degree in advertising, which I had to fly back from Moscow to complete because I’d moved there for graduate school before it was done. So I was not always immune to “who do you think you are” from other people, but I’ve always been profoundly weird.)
After the fellowship at MIT, the circumstances of my life, as well as some will on my part – although I’m not completely sure I’m not rationalising this in hindsight – sent me back to Russia. And while I am sad and angry about so many things in Russia of the 2010s, it provided hands down the perfect niche playground for an enterprising and resourceful weirdo with the coolest possible credentials to boot.
That’s how I ended up with a whole bunch of those firsts on my resume, no doubt helped by my brilliant partners in crime and by all of us successfully passing off science and science communication as apolitical (at least for a while). I did this alongside actual distinctly average journalism as well as teaching science journalism to graduate students at ITMO University.
You see how this works? This time nobody told me I could not teach science journalism, or I was too young and inexperienced, or simply not trained for that. So I did. I am proud of myself, though, for not preemptively completing a whole degree in education and only settling for a dozen teaching courses available to me as an ITMO instructor. You know, because that meant I got paid to learn stuff, to then get paid to teach stuff. What an absolute steal.
Teaching the only science journalism course in a science communication master’s program, with very limited hours, is essentially a job fair presentation, with some writing bells and whistles. For some of those students, I was the first science journalist they ever met; others already had portfolios of their own. I had to do my best not to scar the former for life and to encourage the latter to keep fighting the long defeat. It’s a fascinating puzzle of a course, and I love puzzles.
I think, of all the firsts, it was the teaching that made me realize that, one, I’m vastly more effective at enabling and empowering other reporters and writers, and that is my true comparative advantage. And two, I made it all work –
I will pause here to acknowledge that, yes indeed, this workload was mad, I was always tired, I did not do enough fun things, did not rest enough, did not deliver everything I committed to do, and I will undoubtedly pay for this madness at some point, if not already –
but I made it all work because I could literally see more science journalists working in the Russian language. They were real humans, filing stories and coming up to say hi at events. They were wonderful and marvelous, as in, I could not stop wondering and marveling, and they made all of it worth the trouble.
At some point in this journey I started getting invitations to various panels and discussions and interviews on science journalism and scicomm (full disclosure, I may have set up the first of those panels myself as event organizer.) People kept asking me what science journalism needs, or what science needs, or Russia needs, or the world needs, or whatnot. And eventually I arrived at an answer to most of those questions that was basic and versatile enough for me to tailor it to the occasion and yet stay very much on the key message, as a comms strategist like myself would say.
We need more science journalists. Well, we need more journalists full stop, but I am perfectly happy to get there by making more science journalists (this is also my accountability ceiling of sorts – someone else will just have to make more sports journalists I’m afraid). I would often add we need more science journalists so that even the most bizarre and arcane and beautiful story can ultimately find its storyteller.
Now, there are a few ways to make more science journalists: you can hire more science journalists (check) or teach science journalism (check), you can create resources for peers (check), you can organize grants to pay for expensive science journalism (check), you can create and maintain a community (check), you can celebrate and reward good science writing to make it more appealing as a beat for journalists (check), you can tell people with money they should give you some of that money for all of the above (check). You can be a science journalist yourself (check) and do so publicly, that is, always talk about your work, job fair-style (check).
(You could also birth more brand new people and turn them into science journalists I suppose, but that’s really expensive and I don’t know how Pauline, my two year old, would feel about that plan.)
I am on the record so many times saying we need more journalists; I believe there are multiple newsletter issues to that regard as well as a rambling Facebook post. As you can see, I am also firmly on the record walking the walk, with gusto.
Now is the time to bring back that word, “annoyed” – I am annoyed when I think about the people and organizations working towards fewer journalists in the world. Annoyance as a feeling is key here; it has this undercurrent of irritation, reacting to something badly and thus being compelled to change whatever you can to make the annoying thing stop or disappear.
I have no illusions about making the “fewer journalists” crowd stop or disappear; if anything, for most of them it’s logical and fully consistent with their missions (stay in power forever, earn even more money, monetize fear or ignorance, and so on), so I can see why they are doing what they are doing.
However, I do not appreciate some of those missions at all and am suspicious about others. I do appreciate what journalists do with those bizarre and arcane and beautiful stories – I love reading. Finally, I marvel at how new phenomena emerge from sufficiently complex systems if you just give them enough strength in numbers (see also: evolution).
So I’m just going to push in the other direction, for more journalists – out of roughly equal parts spite, precaution, self-interest, and curiosity, with the itching need to fill a gap as garnish. Also because at this point, even if someone did ask me “who do you think you are”, I would comfortably not care.
(For the record, journalists are extremely important in an informed democratic society and they create immeasurable value yadda yadda yadda, but that is a happy coincidence and not the reason why I can feel so compelled to make more journalists that it occasionally seems like my exercise bike might take off during indoor cycling training if I think too hard about this.
For sure, media freedom is crucial and so on, but please see the pound cake recipe for this particular conviction above. And I would not write “I want to start this program because I can” in a grant proposal either, don’t worry — I’ve mastered masking well enough. But I kind of wish I could because that’s largely true.)
It may seem as though all of this is a manifesto that has matured in me a while ago, and that is true. But recall that I can be oblivious to certain things, so I could not figure out why recently I’ve been feeling so sad, lost, hopeless and uncharacteristically far away from my Antonio Gramsci motto of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. Yes, 2026 is not particularly conducive to optimism, and yes, my life is far from being a beach walk right now, but truthfully it’s always been like that, more or less, so what’s different?
Well, understanding what’s different took me extreme fatigue, a major writing block, a lot of professional anxiety, some seemingly unrelated coaching sessions, a book club meeting, and yes, a question towards the end of an off-the-record interview where I reflexively said The Thing before I even knew what I was doing – “there should be more journalists”.
And as I was saying it, I felt fire rising and filling my mind. I instantly felt the same marvel, wonder, annoyance, energy, and determination you can hopefully see through this text. I thought, “wait, I haven’t said this simple and undeniable truth out loud in a while, have I.” (Maggie, I don’t know if you noticed and how uncomfortable witnessing that may have been, apologies if it was! And thank you for asking the question.)
Very simply, I had strayed too far from the mission of more journalists. I need to work my way back.