by Cam Rodriguez
Karen Ho first popped onto my radar six months ago. At the start of a pandemic that has irreparably changed our lives, I found myself increasingly pushed online for long stretches of time – logging on for class at 9 a.m. and not stepping away until late in the night, after remote work shifts, Zoom happy hours and homework was done.
What started as an act of self-care and a practice of accountability for Ho became a series of daily reminders for Twitter users about the importance of taking care of ourselves in digital spaces. Through her account, Ho reminds herself and her followers to avoid the dangers of “doomscrolling,” or continuing to aimlessly browse online on platforms that incentivize bad news.
“Are you doomscrolling?” a tweet asked meekly, tucked between reports about rising coronavirus cases and anxiety about the then-upcoming election. “Maybe you should stretch, drink some water and go to bed. This scrolling isn’t productive.”
It was the reminder I needed, at 1 a.m., nudging me and others to take care of myself and take a moment – offline. And it was a reminder I and nearly 40,000 followers have gotten since then.
Ho is well-known outside of her ubiquitous reminders. An economics and finance reporter at Quartz, Ho has continued to establish herself in the business beat, fascinated by the role that money plays in society. After stints in print and web reporting, as well as traveling, being a bank teller and dabbling in design, Ho settled on business reporting in her 20’s, realizing there weren’t many reporters on that beat under 25.
“I realized everything had to do with money, and it was sort of like if you knew how to understand money, it was like the Matrix,” Ho said. “You could understand sports, culture, restaurants, industry… fundamentally, it was about power – who’s making money, who’s losing money, and who are all the key characters?”
She made the decision to start the reminders after dealing with her own anxiety and stress online. The tweets, she said, were ways to hold herself accountable in completing the goals for drinking water, taking medication and going to bed early that she had set for herself.
To Ho, this is service journalism. “I’m helping people go to sleep every night. Just like if you write a really good recipe, that can be a bedrock memory for people to take care of their families, celebrate a positive event – people remember really good recipes, and they pass them onto friends. That can change people’s lives.”
Broadly speaking, her reminders are also an indicator of the way journalism is changing, and how both online platforms and newsrooms alike are adapting to virtual worlds. And even past that, the influx of reporters of color who are pushing to be “in the room,” a room historically dominated by white reporters.
“Journalism is going through a moment… young people are really challenging not just on the newsroom side, but from tech and engineering – people who gave up really well-paying jobs – to challenge how things are done,” Ho said, citing a story released earlier this week by New York Magazine, which outlined the shrinking divide between engineering teams and journalists when it comes to newsroom discussions about journalistic ethics. “Fundamental processes, like ethics and style, and other stuff as well. And also, who gets to be in the room – who gets to accumulate power? And what does that mean?”
Earlier this year, Ho attended the virtual 2020 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, where Bob Woodward spoke. Famous for Watergate and, at the time, infamous for failing to disclose damning quotes from President Trump about coronavirus, Woodward spoke on a panel with a Q+A component that Ho engaged with.
“So in your explanation, to be clear, you did not consult with people in the medical community, or in the international health community regarding the possible release of this information?” she asked Woodward repeatedly, referencing his failure to publicly disclose that President Trump may have been aware of coronavirus as early as January of this year.
“There was no information to release,” Woodward shot back. “Can you understand that?”
Online, journalists jumped to Ho’s defense, calling out the long-held icon of investigative reporting for being condescending and rude about a topic within the scope of questioning. Ho agreed.
“Relative to him, I’m a nobody. I didn’t expect it would resonate,” Ho said, laughing. “I’ve been in this business long enough to not be patronized to, or at least I thought I was. But the important thing here is that journalism is supposed to be speaking truth to power.”
“I had never revered him in the same kind of way that I think a lot of American journalists do,” Ho, who hails from Toronto, said to me, commenting about how she didn’t grow up revering films like “All the President’s Men.”
“When it comes to heroes, the interaction really taught me about how, as journalists, we can’t be making assumptions about work… to be a good media critic means that fundamentally, there isn’t anybody that I think is outside of critique, and reassessment of process and ethics and values.”
“And also – I’m a minority. No one’s going to give me the benefit of the doubt. So why should I give it to other people?” Ho asked. “The only person who looks like me who’s been around as long as Woodward is Connie Chung. You can count them – Black, Latina and Asian women – who have been around as long as Bob Woodward on two hands.”
Ho discussed opportunity as a gamechanger for other journalists of color. “Who gets the opportunities to be on Pulitzer Prize-winning teams?” she said. “I don’t consider myself as a candidate for something like an investigative reporting team, because there are just so few of them when you go to a conference like IRE in person and you see people like me. I had nothing to lose. It’s not like the club was going to invite people like me anyway.”
Regardless of not being invited to the club, Ho has staked a claim for herself in the journalistic community. Whether it’s reporting on finance, writing TIME cover stories (“I have it framed above my desk,” she said with a laugh, “like, ‘Oh yeah, I did that!’”) or holding power to account, Ho’s ability to stand her ground and make space for herself like others have had to do before her is inspiring.
And with her reminders? “It’s just nice to help other people. Everything felt like crap for a really long time due to the pandemic. And if I could do, like, one good thing consistently, I felt less useless.”
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