The Writing Life
by Karim Bardeesy on March 11, 2009 in Features
• Getting a platform but losing the cash post-HKS.
Few people attend a school of government only to leave government, but that’s been my post-Kennedy School path.
I’m now at The Big Money, Slate’s new business website. We launched on September 15, the same day that financial ruin befell Lehman Brothers (with other financial concerns and soon the entire economy to follow). In professional rank, it’s a retreat of sorts: once a political staffer to a powerful finance minister in Canada, I am now an editorial assistant, the most junior member of a four person editorial team. The work makes it up for it though – I’ve got a front seat at the biggest economic story of our time, I work with a fun bunch dedicated to making the site bigger and better, and I get to say I work at Slate, a publication of which I was a huge fan for years.
In most journalistic work we don’t use the language of leadership – I have yet to convince my colleagues or interview subjects to join me on the balcony, or tell a Story of Self – but we try a kind of mirror-holding, reflecting current events and trends back to the audience, that we were taught good leaders should do. For me that means a lot of reporting on and explaining of what the U.S. government is up to: how can President Obama cut the budget deficit in half? Why are some policymakers calling for “a new Bretton Woods” agreement?
And I’ve been able to deploy some of my public policy learning pretty directly: we’re even running a simple API-202-style regression (with fellow MPP ’08 graduate Bulbul Kaul’s help) for an economic analysis of the New York Times wedding section. The fact that I was able to get such a piece published speaks to one of the great appeals of writing for The Big Money: it allows me to indulge in whimsy, insight, and geekery in equal parts. (The punchline, by the way, is that fewer male bankers are in Times’s wedding pages, post-recession, and we can say so with 95 percent confidence.) A majority of politicians, media outlets, and independent bloggers control the market in angry bluster and outrage: so we’ve got the thoughtful, and hopefully witty, analysis corner more to ourselves.
Sometimes the Kennedy School learning can apply even more directly. There’s a lot of excitement in the NGO, political, and business worlds about Barack Obama’s electoral success, and interest in how he pulled it off. Prof. Marshall Ganz’s public narrative training, which he captures in PAL-154, a class I took and CAed, was instrumental in helping volunteers communicate their values to potential voters. I helped lead a training session (with co-facilitators Roshan Paul, Uri Leventer, and Charlie Anderson, all MPP ’08) in public narrative for Youth for Understanding-USA, an international student exchange program, using many of the techniques and materials that Prof. Ganz had developed. Without the Kennedy School experience, there’s no way I would’ve known the impact that values-based communication could have, let alone how to teach it.
Two things I dearly miss: a government pay check (the private sector does not always pay better), and my friends and co-conspirators. But there are new common causes to take up, and apart from lacking macroeconomics training (we as first year MPPs had to take that second, dastardly micro offering known as API-102), I’m ready to use my platform to help others fight for those causes.
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