Katherine Boyle: evaluation

Transcript context

…When you made the choice to make that transition out to Silicon Valley, the choice to have the reaction to, ‘Well, shoot. Things are not going so well here. I'm going to go see what it's like on the other side,’ versus ‘I'm going to complain about it and bid on hope as a strategy and stay here,’ what did all of your networks in Washington say? That must have been a really very non-consensus choice to make. It's interesting because I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of myself a very long time ago. What I'll say is most people in Silicon Valley have not experienced what it is like to be in a dying industry. For one, I think people were happy that there were young people choosing to leave, because it was a constraining environment. It was like, okay, great, we don't have to fire this person now. It was really, really bad. I can't stress. There were these things called cake-ins. We even had a name for it. It's anytime that someone was forced to take a buyout or forced to leave, they would bring in a cake. They would wheel in cakes. Sometimes on Fridays, there would be just cakes going across the newsroom. People were crying and people were celebrating all these great colleagues who were more like winners of the Pulitzer Prize. These are not people who should be fired, but it was such a bad ecosystem. No one really said anything. They were just like, okay, at least you got out. It's like you found a life raft. Ihat's great. I will say, six months before I left, my editor took me to lunch. This is great management. She's like, it'll be painful for you to leave. I was one of the younger people on the team. I worked seven days a week. Sometimes I would write three stories in the section, and they were just bleeding people. She's like, it will be painful, but you are young enough to do something new with your life. I'm forever grateful to her for saying it. It wasn't that you're bad at your job. Actually, I was reflecting on this recently. Maybe three years ago, we went out to drinks. I visited the new improved newsroom. Now it's Marvel columns and Jeff Bezos. The Amazon-funded newsroom.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.