My First Byline: Matt Pearce
President, Media Guild of the West
What is your current job?
I am a journalist in Los Angeles and the president of Media Guild of the West, which is The NewsGuild-CWA local union of journalists in Southern California, Arizona and Texas. It's an unpaid, volunteer elected position. I took a buyout from the Los Angeles Times, where I had been a staff writer for more than 11 years, during a round of layoffs in February. The paper is going through a lot of hard times and it was just my time to get out of there, and I've been completely happy with that decision since then. I've been tided over by a decent pile of severance and some savings while I use this time to work on a couple of projects, build out my Substack and start thinking about applying for a few things — once I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
What was your first byline?
I was an English major at the University of Missouri studying creative fiction writing. My favorite short story author was this writer named Stuart Dybek, who wrote these lyrical and sometimes romantic short stories about growing up in postwar Chicago. (As a young fiction writer, I was of course slavishly trying to imitate him, which is pretty much how you get good at anything, even if my own work would eventually go in a far different direction.) I was interning for the well respected literary magazine on campus, The Missouri Review, and was thrilled to death when the editors let me pitch a longform Q&A with Dybek, which we did over the phone. I don't know if it still works this way, but editing the interview with him was a collaborative process, almost like rewriting. Not how you'd do it at a newspaper, but it was pretty special to get to work with my literary hero like that.
But probably my favorite "first" professional news byline was at the Los Angeles Times. After I graduated from the journalism school at the University of Missouri in 2011, I had a week between internships and was staying at home with my parents in western Missouri when a massive tornado destroyed much of Joplin, Mo., killing more than 150 people. That night, I emailed several editors at national publications and told them I was driving down to Joplin in the morning to cover the aftermath and would work for the first place that called me back. Roger Smith, then the national editor at the Los Angeles Times, being on Pacific Time, called me shortly later. And then what was supposed to be a one-day assignment to tide the paper's coverage over until the national correspondents arrived turned into a weeklong assignment in a disaster zone. What was so stunning to me about that whole saga, on top of the heartbreak and devastation in Joplin, was how amazingly good the Times correspondents, Nick Riccardi and Kim Murphy were, both at reporting and writing on terrifying deadlines. I felt like a high school football player lining up with a couple of NFL pros. I wanted to be just like them, and that's what I molded myself after.
For the next two weeks, you can subscribe to Your First Byline for a 50% discount. Subscribers get full access to our archives of advice from more than 215 journalists.
You recently wrote about the economic problems facing journalism. What advice do you have for aspiring journalists thinking about this problem?
I'll be dead honest with you: I think this current information ecosystem is largely setting up journalists, including young journalists, to fail. If you're thinking about doing traditional-style journalism, a lot of legacy newsrooms, especially at the local level, have been failing. Those were the places where you could hone your fundamentals, get really good and break out. Worse, the kind of digital news startups that would replace those places have also been struggling or stalling out over the last couple of years, and even the ones that have been growing aren't growing all that fast.
The independent journalism or creator economy has its own stark challenges. A lot of the people who are successful who have some adjacency to journalism often have existing skillsets or audiences — and money — that they're bringing with them as they try to make it solo. A lot of platforms won't want to compensate you for your content, or at least not fairly, and changes in platform algorithms can potentially sever your relationship with your audience at any notice. On top of all that, you'll be competing against every other creator on the entire internet to break through enough to begin with. If you're amazing, hardworking, have brilliant insights, and then get really lucky, maybe you can probably break through and accomplish something wonderful new. But right now, the creator economy does not strike me as something like a replacement for a middle-class knowledge job where the journalist is not carrying all the risks on their own back, and that means it's going to be the people who money who can afford the necessary runway. It's tough.
If you were starting out in journalism today, where would you focus?
I am a big proponent of learning the tools of investigative journalism, even if you're not thinking of becoming an investigative journalist. Most people out in the world just don't read up on or study the subjects they're talking about. A lot of us just tend to accept the frames and explanations of major events as powerful people give them to us. If you're somebody who can take the time to break through the surface level of what's really going on with a major story or cultural trend — if you can figure out where the money for stuff is coming from — that means you're always going to have something new and interesting to say that will make you stand out. Whether that's at the newspaper, or on a podcast, or YouTube.
5. Are there any things that aspiring journalists can do to future-proof their careers? How can they be ready to adapt to changing business models and ways of sharing information?
I think it's impossible to future-proof your career. The media industry, and what it wants, just changes too much from year to year. Your best asset would be courage — courage to spot the opening, plunge in, try something new, say something bold, and also to be resilient against the inevitable setbacks, like layoffs. Even a failure now becomes training and experience for the more interesting thing that's happening tomorrow. But you have to keep light feet to respond to whatever that is. The media we currently have just isn't working, and so by definition, the thing that's going to work has got to look different. It's also just as likely that you're going to be the one who figures out what works instead of the people who are trying to hire you. To make that work requires bravery.
Find Matt on his Substack, LinkedIn and BlueSky.