Ta-Nehisi Coates’s advice to young journalists: get off Twitter

News reporters look to Twitter as their professional bloodline. It’s not just where they make job connections, follow the work of their peers, and now even learn the latest from the country’s president-elect — it’s where they make their names as young journalists.

Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks that’s a problem. The Atlantic writer joined Ezra Klein on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, where the two went deep into what’s changed about our news media from the days, just a few years ago, when the blog was king. (They also talked about much, much more — you can read more from their discussion here, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.) Coates said he worries that writers used to have more freedom to toy and experiment with ideas than they do in today’s media ecosystem.

“I didn’t write too much during this election cycle. One of the reasons I didn’t is because I didn’t want to play this oracular role. There was no space to figure it out, to think about it, or go through the arguments if you’re writing,” Coates said. “Where you’re tossing off opinions and not exploring — that scares the hell out of me.”

In the interview, Coates also talked about his eagerness to go back to academia, why he thinks young journalists should get off Twitter, and how having a wife and kid at a young age helped his professional life. Here’s an edited excerpt from that conversation:

Ezra Klein

Lets say you’re a college student interested in becoming a writer — what is your advice to someone who wants to do this in this era? I don’t mean tactical; I mean how to do a good moral job.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think you should learn a foreign language. That’s really important. You can see more of the world, and that’s so crucial to it.

And I think — and I can’t believe I’m going to say this — that you should not be on Twitter. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think it’s true.

You should also watch drugs and alcohol. You don’t want to form habits.

What all of this leads to is being able to see as much of the world as possible, but you need time to see the world. You so need time. And you don’t want to cultivate things that rob you of time. You should have a tight group of friends — just as many as you need to see, not too many. God, I’m giving the most conservative advice in the world. A good, consistent monogamous relationship.

I think it was Julianne Moore who said, “Be regular and ordinary in your personal life so you can be wild and creative in your work.” And I’m a big, huge believer in that. You need as much personal life discipline as possible, because that allows you to wreak havoc in your work.

I had a child at a relatively young age, and that had the beauty of clarifying things for me. This is the one thing I do: I write. And some of the money from that hopefully allows me to feed this kid — it’s just that simple. (Laughs.) It eliminated so much out of my life, and it gave me — it sounds crazy; kids take time and money — but I think because I was relatively conservative in my personal life, I could be flagrantly radical and liberal in my work and go all over the place.

Ezra Klein

I want to focus for a minute on the Twitter piece of it. I think if you’re young and starting up — and I hear this from people coming into Vox — there’s a feeling that Twitter is where you make your name; Twitter is where the people who might hire you are; Twitter is where the other journalists are; news happens on Twitter. Donald Trump ran his whole fucking campaign on Twitter!

How could you be off of it? And you’re on Twitter!

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am. But every day I wake up and hope I have the courage to leave, and I think someday soon I’ll get it. I think about the writers I admire. One young writer I admire the hell out of is Sarah Stillman, and I don’t know that she made her name on Twitter. She just won a MacArthur [fellowship], and I don’t think she got that on Twitter. I think she got that by being a tremendous reporter.

I came up in this period where people were deeply skeptical that investigative, longform reporting had a future. That proved completely untrue. Some substantial portion of people actually do want that. If you can cultivate the skills to do that, you got a bright future.

I know at the magazine where I work, folks are always on the lookout for that particular kind of talent — telling stories in that longform way. What we find is we have a tremendous online presence — I started out blogging at the Atlantic — but there is some sense, if I may be self-indulgent, who are we without this Obama story? That’s what we live for. That’s not all we are, but if we lost that, we would have some deep identity crisis about what we’re actually doing. We’re here to push out big pieces that are reported and have ideas to them that have heft. I think there’s a real need to that.

Twitter can help like any other tool, but I’m not sure you need it. I’m not clear on that.

Ezra Klein

Why do you think your career has trended toward traditional — books, magazine articles? You do a lot less blogging than you did, and I’m curious if that felt conscious to you.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

That’s actually how I started. The first thing I ever published was 5,000 words in 1996 at the Washington City Paper when they were publishing tons of longform journalism. That’s how I was trained. I’m doing what I was always doing.

Blogging was the deviation, weirdly enough. For the first four or five years of my career, I wrote really long and reported in depth. That’s how I got started. This is returning to who I always was. This feels like coming home, like what I’ve been training to do.