Thoughts on change for journalism graduates

I was honored last month to be invited to give the commencement address at the Missouri School of Journalism. Given the state of AI and the opportunities and anxieties it presents especially to recent graduates, it felt appropriate to use that opportunity to talk about managing change.

Here is the full text of the speech:

Congratulations, class of 2026!

It’s fitting that we’re on the floor of Mizzou Arena tonight because graduating from the world’s best journalism school is definitely a team sport. So congratulations, also, to your family and friends whose love and support helped you earn your seat here today.

I was promised when I graduated from Mizzou 20 years ago that in the real world, nobody would care about my GPA. Which must be true because otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here.

So thank you, Dean Kurpius, for the honor of speaking here tonight. And to the faculty and staff for not talking him out of it.

Finally, I’m going to invoke a bit of privilege and thank my own family, which is here. My wife, Torey, and son, Jack, and especially my parents — whose own love and support have provided me with strong values, a great education and an interesting life.

I’m not going to bore you with my resume, but in an effort to establish the bare minimum of credibility, I will offer you three highlights.

One: I have never been great at what I do. I was a mediocre student, for which I thank the Maneater. And I have been a perfectly fine reporter, editor, software engineer and executive. Somehow I have made a career out of being what the climber Yvon Chouinard would call an “80 percenter” — someone who gets B-minus good at a bunch of things because getting any better feels boring.

Second thing: I have taken a pay cut or a demotion for nearly every big job change I’ve made. I thought the biggest would be leaving a great job at The New York Times to help lead the transformation of my hometown newspaper in Minneapolis. But then I outdid myself last summer, when I left that job with nothing lined up at all.

Finally, you could argue that I’m unemployed right now. Because last year I decided to try being an entrepreneur, working with local newsrooms to apply emerging technologies in line with journalistic values we all learned here. Fortunately it’s gone well enough that I finally managed to pay off my student loans last month. The bad news for you is: Yes, it takes this long.

Suffice to say: If there is such a thing as a “path,” I am certainly not on it.

Now, normally they invite impressive people to do things like this. But I think there’s a good reason why you’re getting me instead. Because in one way or another, I have spent my entire career at the sharp end of journalism and technological change: as a journalist nervous about it, as a technologist excited by it, and as an executive who occasionally imposed it.

For those of you playing the drinking game, I’m sorry: this will be my only mention of generative AI this evening. I bring it up only as the latest reminder that journalism and strategic communications keep changing in dramatic and unpredictable ways. That’s been true for my entire career, and I suspect it will be even more true during yours.

So that’s what I’d like to talk about here: How to face the challenge of working in a profession that keeps shifting under your feet. Because whether you signed up for it or not, that’s what we’ve all gotten ourselves into.

Tonight I hope to offer a couple thoughts on how you might make the most of it.

But first let’s make this concrete:

One day you’ll wake up, make your coffee, and head into the office. And it’ll be just another regular adult day, until you look in your inbox and see a message from your company’s CEO with the subject line “Our Path Forward.”

And you’ll open this note, and it will start with “Team:” — which is never a good sign. And it will go on to describe, in language vetted by HR, the exciting “pivot” your company is about to make. Maybe you’re pivoting to video. Or pivoting to AI. Or pivoting to the Metaverse, which by this time will have become cool again.

And suddenly whatever comfortable routine you’ve settled into will be thrown into question by this jargony note filled with Oxford commas, terrible cliches, and other crimes against language your J-School professors would never allow you to commit.

Maybe you’ll be excited by this change, or see opportunity in it. Or maybe you’ll burn with the righteous urge to hurl your body onto the gears of capitalism.

Either way, you won’t get much done the rest of the day, so you’ll wrap up early and drive home. And in this first quiet moment you’ve had to process things, you’ll ask yourself: “What does this mean for me?”

And I don’t know about you, but I’ll tell you what I’ve done at times like this.

I’ve freaked out! I’ve wondered whether I’ll still have a job. Or whether the work that I’ll be asked to do is work that I’m passionate about. Or all sorts of other irrational things. Because change like this inevitably taps into our deepest anxieties.

But I would argue to you that most of the time, the real danger isn’t the change itself. It’s the urge to escape the discomfort that change brings. Because if we’re not careful, that urge can push us toward compromises that separate us from the life and work we actually want.

You hear this in the cliches. Adapt or die. Roll with the punches. The subtext is always the same: When change comes, absorb it. Accept it and rebrand it as resilience.

And there’s something to be said for that, sometimes. But what if the change you’re absorbing runs counter to your values, or your ethics, or pulls you away from the work that truly excites you?

We don’t always say this out loud, but every adaptation we make comes with costs. And a lot of the time they’re worth paying. The danger comes when we pay them unconsciously, without thinking, in exchange for a little safety when the world shifts around us.

I have made that bargain before. Plenty of times. It’s impossible not to.

But I’ve also figured out that there’s an alternative. And it’s this:

Treat every moment of change as a moment of choice.

That sounds much simpler than it is. Because there will be so many moments where it’s easier to stay the course, even when the course no longer suits you.

I’ll give you a recent example:

Last year I left a great job at a place I cared about with nothing lined up. I’d been there for a while. My gut had been telling me that it was time to go, but I had been putting it off because I didn’t want to let people down, the job market wasn’t great, and frankly I was a little scared.

And then over a short time, a couple of my bosses and mentors decided to leave. It immediately threw my perspective into question. And yes, I freaked out a little. But those moments clarified what months of overthinking couldn’t. And so I made a choice, and I decided to move on.

I wasn’t sure I made the right call, but I didn’t have much time to second guess it. Because a week later I was in Banff, Alberta, at the starting line of the Tour Divide — an unsupported mountain bike race that follows the Continental Divide for 2,700 miles from Canada to Mexico.

This is relevant, I promise.

Because when you spend a month biking through the mountains, you have no choice but to notice all the weird things your brain does under stress.

Like one minute you feel invincible. The next you’re miserable and want to quit. Even though, between those moments, literally nothing about your physical situation has changed.

And that just happens again and again. Hundreds of times. Enough that eventually you go from taking it seriously to realizing it’s just neurons firing. Making up stories. Trying to convince you to escape the discomfort because that’s what your brain is wired to do.

It felt like every big and stressful moment of change in my career, just condensed.

And what I realized is that for all their good intentions, our brains are so often trying to protect us from exactly the kinds of experiences that make our lives most meaningful.

Strange as it sounds, I find that realization deeply empowering.

Journalism and strategic communications are full of change and uncertainty. More than most professions. And especially now.

But if you can learn to meet those moments with awareness, rather than anxiety, funny things start to happen. Like, all of a sudden, it makes sense to take a demotion for a job that matters. To walk away from the wrong situation. To lean into risk. To make the foolish choice.

Journalism at its best has always required courage and creativity, independent thought and a maverick spirit. That’s why many of us got into it. But it’s hard to hold onto that spirit when you accept change passively, as a force that is inflicted upon you.

So instead, I encourage you to use it as a tool to refocus your attention on what matters. As a partner and ally in living a purposeful and values-driven life.

Thank you again for the honor of addressing you here. I’m so excited for you and your families. I’m proud to welcome you all as members of the Mizzou Mafia, which is a community that will continue to serve you well.

All of us here are confident your careers will be successful. My hope for you, class of 2026, is that each of your journeys remains unmistakably your own.

I wish you one hell of an adventure.

Thank you.