Mixed Bag: Reflecting on 2024

My name is Ann Marie Awad. Hi. I’ve been a journalist for 15 years, mostly in public radio newsrooms. For the last few years in particular, I’ve been a full-time freelancer, mostly producing long form podcasts that you listen to sometimes while doing the dishes or maybe even some laundry. There’s a chance you know me from On Something, a podcast I used to host all about cannabis legalization. I even gave a TED talk once. Or more likely, you’ve never heard of me. Anyways, for much of 2023, I was unemployed.

At the start of 2024, it looked like things might be turning around. I had been freelancing as a producer for a few months with Our Body Politic, a weekly current affairs podcast that was also a syndicated radio show. I really liked this work. I felt like I was finally back in the game, producing interviews on topics that really mattered for a show that was geared specifically towards women of color. It was great.

Until I got canned.

By the end of January 2024, Diaspora Farms LLC, the company that owned Our Body Politic, had laid off myself and about 10 other freelancers. To this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever been done so dirty by an employer. 

Diaspora Farms was founded by journalist Farai Chideya, who you might remember from her days on MSNBC or at WNYC’s The Takeaway. When it came time to let us all know we were out of jobs, Farai conveniently disappeared. Instead, she tapped a consultant to deliver the bad news to all of us, and to give us the runaround for months about when our final invoices may be paid. On the cusp of summer, we all received letters from her law firm that basically said: tough luck. She was dissolving the business, which meant there was no money left to pay us.

I was out $700, which was a lot of money for me during a time when I was recovering from a year of unemployment. Others lost more, including our intern who had not been paid in months. Even all these months later, there is still no bottom to my disgust. I feel enraged when I think about it. Chideya has never reached out to me or any other person on the team to explain herself. 

The sudden setback meant that I had to grab a seasonal job at a local garden center. Listen, there are much worse things. I love plants. I got to work in their greenhouse, planting, repotting and watering all the live-long day. I got to be outside in the fresh air at a time when I could just as easily have withdrawn into a depression cocoon. I am grateful that the greenhouse (and all four greenhouse kitties) were there to catch me when they did. On the days when I wasn’t hauling dirt, I briefly taught an online journalism ethics course, which felt like a lifeline that kept me plugged into the work I love.

Here are two other things that happened while I was busy watering plants: 

• A podcast called National Emergency that I had worked on the previous year was nominated for an Ambie Award! Wow! I managed to go to the ceremony in LA with our team, most of whom I had never met in real life. There, Malcolm Gladwell of all people was honored with a lifetime achievement award. In 2023, Gladwell’s production company Pushkin Media went through three whole rounds of layoffs. Ironically Gladwell – who had previously pissed and moaned about people working from home – did not appear in person to accept his award. He instead submitted a twee little pre-recorded thank you video. I felt like I was taking crazy pills – you get special recognition now for overseeing mass layoffs? A gold star and a pat on the head for kicking talented people to the curb? In fact, the Podcast Academy (who puts on the Ambies) wasn’t even the first to honor Gladwell with an award like this in 2024. This year, On Air Fest also honored him with an “audio vanguard award.” There was no bottom to my disgust.
  
  (PS we didn’t win an Ambie but our show is very good and you should listen to it)

• Over the summer, Colorado Public Radio shut down their podcast unit, laying off all the employees plus a few others  – 15 people in all. I mention this because less than five years ago, I played a role in starting this podcast unit. CPR was the last newsroom I worked in. I won my bosses a $75,0000 grant from PRX in 2019 to launch my podcast On Something, all about life after legalization. The show was the flagship that the rest of the podcast unit was built on – and now here were my former bosses throwing in the towel on podcasting only a few years later. The “restructuring” as they call it was meant to address a longstanding budget shortfall that had much more to do with serial mismanagement than any single podcast project. Nonetheless, my friends were sacrificed to close the gap.
  
  Weeks later, another friend of mine asked if I wanted to attend a panel discussion about the future of journalism which included my former boss at CPR, executive editor Kevin Dale. Whatever I needed to know about the future of journalism, I knew I wasn’t going to hear it from him. There was no bottom to my disgust.

Eventually freelance work picked up enough and I was able to leave the dirty job behind. I bid farewell to the greenhouse and all four kitties and went back to working from home. Before I knew it, famine became feast and I was overwhelmed with work. I’m happy to say I’m ending this year in a much better place than where I started it, but I can’t help looking around at my friends and peers who are not. Those who have been laid off. Those who (rightfully) fear the hammer. And the many, many freelancers like me who haven’t been as fortunate.

And still, there is no bottom to my disgust.

Look I know some ancient, calcified newsroom barnacle out there thinks I need to toughen up and “pay my dues” or some shit but I am 35 years old, and I have been doing this work since I was 19 years old. The dues are long paid – now I’m wondering what I’m supposed to expect in return. I look around at the people who lead media companies these days and I am struck by how worthless most of them seem to be. Seat warmers who excel at failing up, know-nothings who gamble with the livelihoods of hardworking journalists, producers, editors, etc. And there is no bottom to my disgust. 

But it’s not all disgusting. When I started freelancing full time a few years ago, someone told me something that really stuck with me: freelancing is much less about who you’re working for and much more about who you’re working with. That shift made me realize that the real power is in us - those who not only create the work, but who go to bat for it every single day. Those of us who shed light, who speak for the vulnerable, those who let the sunshine in to all those dark and scary places. This shift in mindset made me double down on what I see as the beating heart of good journalism: service. 

We deserve so much more than what we get from our lily-livered leaders, who are just plain unprepared for what is to come. They’re not going to protect us. We are. 

So why did I start this newsletter? Man, because I can’t shut up about this stuff. After 15 years in this work, I have seen a lot and been through a lot and I feel like I need somewhere to unpack it. At the end of 2023 I thought maybe I had to get ready to leave journalism behind. I was in a bad place, trying to disentangle my identity from the work I had done for so long and struggling to imagine what other measly contribution I could make to this world. As I end this year, I feel like I have a great deal more optimism (somehow) powered by an ever-deepening well of righteous anger. 

I’m still trying to figure out how to make the best use of all that hope and rage, and this is the space where I’m going to do that. Join me as I try to sort it out. Or don’t. Either way, thanks for reading. See you next year.