In this lecture at the University of Oregon, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan speaks to students about her career path. She touches on covering Black LA, the importance of diversifying news outlets, her move into opinion writing, and persevering when a story is intimidating to tell or you feel like you have run out of ideas.
About Our Guest:
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist with nearly three decades of experience as an opinion columnist. Her career spans various prestigious publications throughout the United States, notably the New York Times, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times, where she made history as the inaugural black opinion columnist. Kaplan's writing delves into an array of topics, with an emphasis on race-related issues, alongside broader discussions on culture, politics, and the arts. Her work has been featured and published in various anthologies.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan 00:04
Well, thank, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. As I was, as Khalil was saying, we're agreeing to LA is getting kind of monotonous. It's so hot there. And so it's such a nice change of pace. So thank you for having me. So I'll just talk about, you know, we are out of Black History Month, but we're always in black history, right. So I just want to talk about my own sort of entree into journalism. I not were intended where I thought I would be. But it makes a lot of sense in retrospect. And, and I feel really feel like it's funny, Damian described me as having this long, illustrious career, I just feel like I'm still trying to get it right. I feel like, there's still so much to, well, always so much to learn, but so much to do in terms of just writing and, and making sense of so much chaos, which is expression I used in the last class, because to me, ultimately, that's what journalism is about. Whether it's opinion writing, or straight, sort of news writing or feature writing, it's really trying to make sense out of chaos, and we are an increasingly chaotic world. But at the same time, things are increasingly clear, aren't they, about where we're headed, what things are about. And so really, our challenge is to meet that kind of clarity with clarity. And I think we're having trouble as people doing that. So that's sort of my role is to provide clarity, from where I sit.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 01:38
So, um, I'll start at the beginning. I'm from LA, my family's from Louisiana from New Orleans, Mardi Gras time, right, somebody had reminded me of that, you know, because I feel like the 1.5 generation I, you know, my family, I only live the South in memory, you know, my family was part of that migration out of the south. And Los Angeles was the last one of the last places, they went first to the north and the Midwest, and then finally, to the west coast. So I heard a lot about the struggles of the South. And so I grew up with this, even from I don't know, a very early age, that with this notion that, you know, there was racial struggle, it's just part of life struggle was part of life, there wasn't something out there somewhere, it was just part it was going to be part of, of just living.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 02:31
So but I wanted to write I wanted very early on to be a writer. Now, to me, that meant being a poet, being a novelist, I admired and I read the paper, you know, from a pretty early age, I was back when there was, you know, way, way before, internet or anything like that. So my daily ritual was to read the paper. And I don't know how old I was, but we'd all divide up the paper, my brother would take the sports section, and I would take the, what was then the Metro section. And, you know, people would read sort of over breakfast. And so I thought of the paper, ie journalism, and Time Magazine, we always had Time Magazine stacks and stacks of time, and Newsweek. And occasionally, you know, essence and ebony. And anyway, I thought of all that is very great. But it was like work that was like, sort of people doing just sort of presenting you with information, very neutral, right? Sort of presenting with information, you read this information about what was going on. And that was fine. But writing was something different, right? Writing was creative, it came from my imagination. And I really thought of these two, I thought of these is very, very, very separate. And I really took the news at face value. You know, I never occurred to me that that the reporting was not was unbiased, or that was biased, or that things were being left out. I read the LA Times, most you know, that's where I live. And I assumed that was this is what's going on. This is this is pretty much all I need to know.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 03:59
Okay, flash forward a little bit. So when I went to college, I went to UCLA. I'm very local, my father went there. And so I went to UCLA and I majored not in journalism, but in English, because I was going to be a writer. And then after that, I'm still wasn't quite sure about my direction. I thought I might want to be an actor. Just with Ellie needs another actor. And I did a master's in theater arts at UCLA. And it was then that I started it's funny only through theater arts that I started to realize how biased and political the world really is and how present the struggle is because in my, in my time as an actor there, two things happen. One was I was one of 10 graduate students, MFA students who had to audition for plays every quarter. My department advisor told me Aaron, you really don't need to audition for this play. It was Ibsen play or you know, the audience has a certain expectation you just don't really fit into this cast. Now, that would be okay if Hollywood told me that but there wasn't a learning setting a student who have been chosen to be in this program being told I was not useful that I did not fit the audience expectations that, you know, I was very, I still fairly naive at the time when I thought it was it was I didn't fight back so much as just feel frustrated and depressed about that, like, why am I here? What use of AI in this in this setting? Now UCLA is a public university, a liberal institution, we're not talking about, you know, somewhere in the south, but so I was a little bit confused about that.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 05:30
And then just by coincidence, a friend of mine, who was a writer who worked for the LA Times, he knew my brother's long story, but he was starting his own magazine. And his own magazine called Accent LA. And even though he wrote for the LA Times, he felt like the LA Times was not telling was not covering la very well, not covering black communities very well. So he's, he knew I wrote, he had read some of my writing and unlike Professor Hi, he said, you can really write why don't you join this paper? And I'm doing this and I was like, newspaper, I went into my new newspaper. That's not writing. I mean, that's newspapers are great. They are noble endeavors. But that's not me. I still saw myself as a thinker and a writer with a capital W. Ed said, Yeah, okay. You know, it's black. He also for Time Magazine, he done the whole mainstream media thing. He said, Okay, while you're waiting to be, you know, waiting to write America's, you know, the great American novel, let me you know, let's, let's try this out. So I trusted and so he became my, my mentor for five years with this paper that we put out. And it was a pretty good paper, it's called axon delay. And I learned how to report I learned how to write on deadline, I learned how to write various things, I wrote reviews, I wrote News Features, I wrote opinion pieces. And I learned how to be edited.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 06:53
And most of all, I learned that I liked journalism, I liked not just writing and being published, which is very exciting for any writer, but but also making that connection of journalism to not just creative writing. And I don't mean making things up, I mean, something else, and also public service. Because journalism, even though it is certainly a business, as we've discussed, it is also a public service, you're doing something you're you are, again, making order out of chaos for your community, for your state, for your city, or whatever for yourself. So there is a ethic to it. There is and there's a real reward to it. And I got my first sort of feeling about that working with accent, we had a pretty good distribution, maybe 50,000 copies a month. So we were out there, people recognized us. And that was a very powerful and humbling feeling that you know, that maybe I was making a sound so cliche, but making a difference. And using my, my writing skills to, to good effect.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 07:55
And then also as I got older, and this was we're talking late 80s, early 90s, li got rougher things got, you know, there's always, always social crises going on, let's say. And so I realized that this was also not this was not just part of reporting. And making sense of the world was part of my daily life. You know, it was part of like, I had a vested interest in writing about other people and writing about issues. It was also very personal for me from the very beginning, maybe because of that experience at UCLA. So injustice was very personal to me, it wasn't just some abstract thing. And numbers and stats that I discovered quickly people didn't pay attention to anywhere I think that's still the case. So I don't I so I was felt like I could, you know, make those big things matter more try to make them more personal not trivialize them, there's, there's a fine line between true trivializing something and making it smaller so that it is so that it shines a light and it's bigger. And I just was always interested in, in talking about the effect of struggle on my life, the effect of injustice on my life, and by extension all of our lives, right? Because like Martin Luther King said, you know, the injustice kind of distorts all of us, black, white, whatever, everyone in the country.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 09:15
So after five years of writing for x until a we had 1992, I know many of you are already two generations removed from that there was huge civil unrest in Los Angeles. After the Rodney King verdict in which four white police officers were acquitted of assaulting Rodney King, there was a huge as a huge explosion, huge people call it uprising. And then all of a sudden the LA Times discovered it needed more reporters to cover the city. LA is a very tough city to cover. It's very long and low and and the LA Times never did a great job of covering it. And by 92 they realized how bad how badly they did cover because they were caught completely off guard. They suddenly had roundup all rounded up all the people Hello, they could find in their ranks, which were too many, and send them out into South Central Hall, there was a big fight in the newsroom. So they, they decided they needed to expand the coverage and expand the the ranks of reporters and diversify. So I got I was part of that. And I was excited about that, even though it was a big step up, it was something I was excited about. And I thought the world would change. I really thought not that I would change the world.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 10:28
But I thought, Okay, so now you know, people finally get it, we see the roots of injustice, we see the need for better coverage, you know, not been and creating narratives that are not just criminal narratives of black people, etc, etc. I thought we've learned our lesson. And I thought journalism would change. And, you know, we talked about this in another class. That's not exactly what happened. But in the meantime, I became the beat reporter for most of the Crenshaw area, which is a predominantly black area in LA. And I realized that, you know, yeah, you want to make change. But also, when I met people and interviewed for all kinds of stories, people felt just really happy to be that report, it was talking to them and talking to them, not just about the problems and the issues and the challenges, but about life, about daily life and about history. Because I was always trying to connect the dots of history, trying to recreate my own history, because, you know, even though I'm an LA native, and I have deep roots there, people when you say you're from a life people, like doesn't mean anything to people. Are you really from? I say, Oh, my family's from Louisiana. They Oh, now I know where you are. So I was always trying to to deepen the coverage of LA, not just racially was sort of culturally. And so I did this through through mainly through covering blacker life, which I realized, you know, it sounds really narrow, you're only covering, you know, I get this criticism a lot. Oh, you only cover black people. Oh, that's so small. Or they didn't say that. But that was sort of patronizing attitude. But as we know, now, our hope we know now that that that is a multitude of things. It's not. It's not just black people. It's all of us. I knew that all along. Now. We're just sort of discovering that some people still don't admit it. So but I find it very rewarding and very just affirming, in a really unsettled, unsentimental way.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 12:28
Although as I went about, you know, now I was reported for the times people would ask me aren't you do an accent because they actually prefer that publication to LA Times, which people called the LA crimes. And I understand why they did that. I think they also call it New York Times New York crime just because the coverage was so and I think about how I trusted the time like, they must know what's going on. And my friend Edward explained to me, it's not so much that the paper lies. It's just that it's incomplete. They tell you the one story that tell you the crime story, that's it, but there's so much other stuff they don't cover. And I could not say they can cover everything. But there's such an imbalance of what mattered and what didn't, and who mattered and who didn't. And, and the crime and the mayhem sort of leading edge of pretty much every story in places where I grew up, I knew that wasn't right. I knew that wasn't right. You know, I knew that that that just wasn't the case.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 13:22
So I learned that those so called small stories, the human interest stories were very important in communities that have been under covered under covered, underrepresented. It's not that people want to pick important stories, they want the small stories, the granular stories that tell us stories that tells the story of their lives, and their kind of, you know, challenges that that don't make it to that don't tend to make it to newspaper because, you know, it's like we someone said in the last class. You know, this is just just true about newspapers, people want conflict, and in black communities and communities of color. Conflict is what people you know, that's what they that's what they feel is mainly what goes on. And other news is just not worthy. And that's, you know, that's that's the balance I was trying to provide, which isn't to say I was a PR person, people will get a little confused, like, I don't believe in the sort of positive negative news binary. I hear that a lot. I used to hear that a lot amongst people I cover we need more positive coverage. We need more positive news. I completely understand that. And I completely agree with that. But I do not. I do not make foregone conclusions. Sometimes when I do a story. People don't you know, I have to follow where it goes. Sometimes I have to write something critical about somebody black that doesn't mean everybody it's against the whole race. You know, I understand black people's fear and paranoia about media imbalance media, the lack of proper media coverage. I totally get that. But I have to be, you know, but neither am I. Someone's or some groups PR person. I am an advocate. There's a difference.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 15:00
I am what I probably am an advocacy journalist, which I, you know, define as someone who has a real abiding interest in developing coverage for cause or for their community or something that needs coverage. I don't shy away from that. I think that's why I became a columnist. But I am not a PR person. So if there's a difficult issue, for example, give you an example, LA has in Los Angeles, we've had a huge demographic shift from like, South Central was at 75%, Black back in the 70s. Now just about 75%, Latino, LatinX, that's a big shift. It just happened in the span of 3040 years, well, maybe even shorter time than that. And nobody really in the way people covered the way the traditional media covered, it was conflict tension between Blacks and Mexicans, you know, and here's the thing, that's not untrue. But the nature of the tension was not, you know, you're taking my job, it was much more nuanced than that. It was a sense of displacement, black people felt that it was not personalized to any group of people. But because the media was not used to covering nuanced issues for black people, and really knew their daily lives, they didn't understand how to do that. So they always painted it as either black and brown, you know, like this, or they're all having tacos and chitlins, you know, getting a loss. That sort of ethnic festival story, right? Which a lot of that after 92. Right. And, and there's nothing wrong with the festival. And and sometimes people do come to blows, but there's a lot more that doesn't, that doesn't get set. And that's what I tried to fill those those very important gaps, I guess. And I'm back, by the way, as an advocacy journalist, I'm a player in this I'm not above this. I also I'm in a neighborhood where my my neighbor is Salvadoran, there's some white people coming in, you know, I can't say I'm, I feel I feel uneasy about a lot of things. I am not above it all. I am not objective. I am I am part of this narrative. And I just sort of, I think they have a they call it a process statement. I kind of always confess my, my own unease. That's, that's the great thing about being an opinion columns, I can say to you. I don't know I'm not sure. I'm just trying to figure it out. You know, and I don't have to be, I don't have to be removed. I don't have to follow that rule.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 17:18
But I do have to be clear. And I have to base things on facts and real experiences. And not, you know, not exaggerate and not distort. And when you're writing about anything racial, that's very hard. People assume you're distorting the assume you're on one side of the other. And actually, I'm not. I'm not but I but I, I'm very, I'm very much an advocate. My father who died in 2020 was was a columnist for the LA Sentinel, the black paper in Los Angeles for 30 something, what was it 35 years. And he was a he was a not a stylist. But he wrote informational columns that that were very, he's a very principled sort of voice. And I took that as my god, I took that as my lodestar. I was a much more of different personality than my father, I can admit that now. You know, I'm not him, I could never aspire to be him. But he informed a lot of my, I guess, passion, and sort of vision, and I'm really grateful for that. But it's funny. Now, we've had a, we've had kind of a racial awakening, you know, which is great. But there every day, I still feel I still feel the uncertainty of, you know, does my voice matter? That might sound strange given that I've been published and, you know, big papers. But that doesn't, you know, that is that doesn't change your life. And it doesn't, it doesn't mean that dynamics have changed. It means people are more aware of trends. And that they want to, you know, look like they're on trend.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 18:52
And I'm not, I want to be too cynical, but there's still a long way to go in terms of balanced reporting. And there's a lot of resistance to it. And at this point in history, and I think I've said this already, but we are facing so many critical, sort of tipping points. That's become a cliche, that I really believe, though, I really believe this. And if we had, if we had been more honest with our racial history, and if we had, we had done this earlier, learned our lessons earlier, I think we would be well on the way to handling climate change, to to handling all these other kinds of inequality that are costing us so much right now. I mean, so much.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 19:40
I really feel this country, if we had, if we would tell the truth about ourselves more, you know, we would just be in a much, much, much better place on so many things that are now at a boiling point, but you know, we are where we're at where we're at. So, at this point, also what's happened in the last 30 years as this democratic chipped was happening in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, we have lost so many papers, we've lost so many publications that is not good for diversity, it is not good for expanded coverage just because journalism, as a business as a property just became got kind of unraveled for, I think, 100, whatever years, we've managed, we managed with papers been privately owned families owned via the Chandler family and Los Angeles on the times. And that seemed to work kind of, so they would more or less stay out of the business of the paper, and they owned it. And that's how an advertiser is advertised in it. And that was that. And then as the internet started to, you know, assert itself. Suddenly, nobody wanted to own newspapers anymore. They were they were sold. They were, they were cut. I mean, this started back way back in the 90s. But But jobs were lost, the LA Times today is less than half of what it was when I started 92. So it is a much smaller operation for a big market like LA, there's one paper that's really running at half strength is crazy. It's crazy, the LA Weekly, which used to be a force in LA, I mean, a political force, where I really learned how to, you know, really learn how to write long features and opinion and you know, it's gone.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 21:23
It's still around, but it's not what it was. It's, it's a shadow of its former self. And I look at that, and I think it's like a mass extinction event, along with the other mass extinction events that have happened in the world, but news book publication, not just newspaper publications have really taken a hit. So that is meant that we cannot pass we do not, you know, we do not have the the coverage that we should have at this point. But at least we have consciousness about what we need to do. And I hope we aren't, and I hope we get there somehow, before the planet disappears, sorry, no need to be so pessimistic. But before I came here, I read a story in The New York Times about this is a very interesting story. The climate, the climate scientists who've been saying year after year after year, that, you know, we need to make some changes, or we're all going to, you know, it was all over folks. They're so frustrated, some of them that they're not being heard, because, you know, in order for things to happen, the governments have to do something. So they're gonna go on strike. This is their plan. Some of them are petitioning other climate scientists just go on strike, don't even show up for a report. You know, we need to get people's attention. I think there'll be kind of fantastic. unorthodox, but you know, I understand that.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 22:42
So anyway, um, so but we need to change the climate of the country, and it bears repeating, if we had figured out if we had, if we had addressed the racial climate in this country, when you know, 30, even 30 years ago, 92 When I got started, we would be so much further ahead. It's like, I don't know how many of you saw this documentary Who Killed the Electric car? Well, now we have electric cars are coming online. That's great. But you know what, they had the first electric car back in the 80s. I think they're actually you know, the story will actually did pretty well. There was momentum around it. What happened? Well, the traditional car industry literally killed that car is too much competition, they didn't want to take over, they literally took it off the market and went and killed it. They went to a junkyard and smashed up, you know, it was murder. And I thought, what if we had if that had been allowed to develop? Oh my god, we wouldn't be we would be much further along. So, you know, we as human beings are need help.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 23:44
Okay. So anyway, my great struggle now, sometimes I really feel like I've said everything I can say, I feel like I have run through the same arguments over and over. And that really, you know, the only thing left for me to do is go home and write about my dogs because, you know, I just feel like my energy will be taken up and taken up and take it up with this struggle, are asked my father, how do you do it? How do you do it? He said, My father had a great saying he would say to me, and you know, by the way, his column was one of the only one thing he did, he did all kinds of justice work. And he said, I am frequently disappointed by never discouraged I thought wow, that I cannot say that has been true of me but I try to aspire to that. So what he's saying is you have to allow for feeling discouraged and feeling like your work is not you know, kind of going to avoid but but for him it's going to work harder. So this feeling will pass and I will I will you know of course I'll write but it does it is kind of depleting especially now and it's very confusing right now in this racial moment where half you know roughly half the country is really wants progression and the other half is is trying to kill like electric car like It's really stark and violent. And it's really kind of in some ways beyond words, you know, we've already used all the metaphors we can the Civil War, the Confederacy. And I mean, it's hard to, I don't know, see, I'm already not even having words, I don't have words.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 25:17
So that is the challenge that go back and find some words, to look at things new to find, to just continue to do that, to address those very big issues, but also to pay attention to the small day to day life. I do that. I do that consistently. You know, I think that's maybe where I have a distinction. The struggle, yes, the racial struggle. Yes, I am. I am sort of, I am proud to, to be part of it as a journalist, but I'm also an American. So I write about American things, like, I bought too much stuff. Why did I have so much stuff, and a lot of the American things connect to the racial struggle in ways that I that are kind of unexpected, but real, for right about things on a very small scale, but they always ended up being bigger than that bigger than me, bigger than my, you know, terrible shopping habit, which I'm proud to say is gone. It's COVID killed that, you know, I don't eat stuff that much. I just decide I don't need stuff that much. Another thing that's become a passion of mine is the environment because it's like a Dick Gregory the activist said, he used to like poopoo, the all the white activists who were against nuclear armament, he goes, I'm that's, that's a white issue. I don't deal with that I'm dealing with racial justice. He's the one that woke up at the Wait a minute. If the planet disappears, I'm on the planet. So that means I can't do my work. So he became part of that movement that he saw is very racially divided. And so on that way, there really isn't interconnection of all things. And the racial reality of the country is so determined in so many things that we're only now starting to see how determinate it is, we can see very starkly now. Now do you believe us? I keep wanting to say now, do you believe me? No.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 27:02
So anyway, sometimes I just make a column out of how tired I am, I'm tired, I can't write anymore. And then, you know, that becomes that's an issue. So everything is worth my friend. It's and I would say to Ed, my mentor, what we know what's a good story, and I get asked this a lot. What is a good story, Edie would always say, if it matters to you, it is a story. He's talking, he's talking about not just opinion pieces, but really issues. You know, there are writers who cover the environment writers who covers science writers who cover criminal justice, all that matters to them, it has to matter to you to really write about it. Now, sure, it's a job, but it has to in some way, move you. You know, otherwise, we just have I don't know. We don't have cheerless. We have hacks we have. I don't know. I one thing I was griping about last class, was this the shift of you're calling everything in or hauling news content? That sounds like you're just filling up? Filling something up with nothing? I know, it's just a word of language is everything. So content, to me is frightening. It's like just stuff with no value or just filler. Right. And I just refuse to call them news content. Or it's, you know, I think we should stick to specifics.
Erin Aubry Kaplan 28:19
So I think that I will stop there, and maybe open it up for questions, or comments. Okay, give me some story ideas. Maybe we'll read about you all. I'll leave off names. But I do like to write about things that inspire me. I often forget to do that. There's so much. There's so many problems and so many things that need fixing that we forget about to write about the things that work. That's a very valid story, by the way, the things that work, you know? Yeah.
Student 128:48
So for me, I'm from the East Coast. I was curious, can you talk about your experience in the mindset of working on the East Coast or so working on the west coast,
Erin Aubry Kaplan 28:57
But I don't work on the East Coast. I'm, you know, I'm just all tall remote now. But let's put it this way. You know, there's definitely an East Coast bias towards the west coast in terms of important writers and things happening. Nothing ever happens in California. It was interesting to me how they don't distinguish cities in California, just California. And so there, but interestingly enough, I was tapped by the New York Times because they realized they weren't, they weren't covering it well enough. They were not covering the West is particularly California, with any depth with any regularity. So I was happy to help them out. But I don't know if there's a bias. I think actually, in some weird way, working with editors at like, say the New York Times is just easier, because I'm sort of an unknown entity. And so it's kind of like being able to talk to strangers easier than being able to talk to friends. I find it I find it pretty easy. At least just in my in my sort of lane of opinion writing, and there are lot more West Coast correspondents in New York and the LA Bureau and the West Coast bureaus. And there used to be because it's finally dawning on I'm on the East Coast establishment that important things happen over here west of the Mississippi, you know, but it's a long standing bias. But I haven't found that to be the case in the people I work with. So that's a good thing. I got to find out, you know, they don't know the geography. So they they need clarification. If I'm talking about a street in LA, they're like, What, huh? So I mean, you know, that's, that's okay. That's you writing for general audience. So, but they've been pretty, they've been pretty cooperative, I would say.
Student 230:33
With all these principles, what would you add on to the advice from your father?
Erin Aubry Kaplan 30:37
I would say that's a hard thing to do. But go but but it's really good advice. I don't always live up to it. But I often I recall it, I don't know if I would add anything to it. Because what he was really saying, his sort of what he would add to that statement, is the struggle is too important is simply too important. To turn away from or to give up. He just was not, it was not an option for him. I tell you, it's felt like an option to me, you know, because some, you know, somehow I know, this sounds really, really, really telling on myself, sometimes, you know, the idea of doing of just unplugging, sitting in front of your TV and watching reruns of law and order or whatever, is really attractive, like just not being involved. I know, there are people who say, Oh, I'm not political, you know, I'm like, You're not politically not paying attention. What do you mean? And then, so I can't really take that road. But you know, I just don't think I don't think that being neutral. I don't even know what that means. I don't think that's even true of any body. You know, you know, I think that's just one of those stories we tell ourselves, like, that's part of the American exceptionalism. Like, we don't have to be involved. We can just, you know, in America, a lot of Americans buy into that. And it's, it's really, it's just not true, very clearly not true. So my father's right. And I just battle that sort of, I guess, struggle fatigue, as best I can. And in my way, you know, realize that I'll never be Harriet Tubman. And I won't be those people who were extraordinary, I would like to be extraordinary, it's hard to figure out how to be that these days. But, you know, think about those people. And what they did, against great, great odds, you know, so it's always inspiring. The hallmarks of your favorite opinion pieces, either your own or those written by others. Great. The hallmarks of great opinion pieces. Okay, so like, what, what, what distinguishes them from, you know, other funding fees? Yeah. Oh, my goodness, that's that that's a real alchemy. I don't really know. You know, there's no, here's the thing I get asked this a lot, like, kind of like, what's not the formula, but what is the what is the common thing? Gosh, I don't really know, I'm sorry to say, but I have to say, I don't really know, I've read things that are really knocked me out. And I couldn't end I'd have to go back and look at them. I think I think what happens is, there's always some kind of surprise, in the writing some kind of surprise in the conclusion, it goes from a to b and then to Z or you go, it's it, it moves. It's not what you expected. And there's some some, there's something that the writer is risking something is there revealing that's not normally revealed, I guess. I mean, a lot of really good opinion columns that are really sturdy, that make good arguments, and you agree with them, and then you sort of forget about them, but there's some that tell a story that, that you just don't forget, or that really make you sit up. And sometimes it's very intimate stuff. But sometimes it really is big, political, you know, matters. I think, I think the common thing is, that writer just really feels it. And you feel how it matters to that writer. That's the Hallmark, I think, you know, I've already given I've given this example, a million times, but I think one of the most effective pieces I ever wrote was not about what about my dog? It was bound to happen, that I lost in 2020. And the got, you know, just, it just resonated very deeply with a lot of people.
Student 334:11
What's the one thing you would like everybody to leave with from your visit here this week?
Erin Aubry Kaplan 34:18
Well, I hoped I hope, I hope you all get a sense of how important not just important but how necessary great journalism is and how you can do it. And you should and you know, it's it's, it's a great thing to do, and it is much needed and no matter what happens with the economy, a journalism reporters and writers are just are so essential. They are really essential workers. And I've always I'm always inspired to see in students all over how interested people are in this like we keep hearing this thing of, you know, journalists print journalism is dead. Nobody's interested in newspapers. Nobody reads them. I find that not to be true. Maybe People read them differently. But there is great interest and there is great passion. I think there's great investment in doing this work and I really always glad to see that and I hope it continues with you all because, you know, it has to, it has to without without reporting without the press, we are really lost. So thank you