JournoList

~ the eulogy ~

in 2010 i was an engineer in ankara reading american tech news and almost no american political news. journolist was a private mailing list for people who wrote about washington for a living, which put it about as far from my orbit as an internet thing can get while still being an internet thing. i am writing it up anyway because the shape of what happened to it has since happened to every private group chat on earth, and this is one of the earliest times it happened in public.

ezra klein set it up in february 2007. he was in his early twenties and blogging at the american prospect, and the idea was a room where a few hundred left-leaning writers could think out loud without a reporter in the corner. it ran on google groups, which is worth saying plainly. the most talked-about back channel in american political media was a free mailing list with an archive nobody thought hard enough about.

membership was approved by klein personally and it grew to around 400 people, mostly reporters and magazine writers, with academics brought in when somebody needed a number. conservatives were kept out deliberately, on the stated reasoning that the thread would otherwise collapse into a permanent argument and stop being useful to anyone.

~ the dossier ~

~ off the record ~

the entire value of the list came from one rule: nothing said inside it left. that is what let people post the unfinished version of a thought, or the question they would look stupid asking in print. everyone who has ever been in a good working group chat knows exactly what that is worth and exactly how fragile it is.

the fragility was structural. four hundred people is not a room, it is a small town, and the rule was enforced by nothing except everyone agreeing to it. worse, google groups kept a complete searchable archive of every post any of them had ever made. so the list was simultaneously the most candid thing in american political journalism and a permanent record of that candor, sitting on a server, one screenshot away from anybody.

~ the leak ~

in june 2010 excerpts from dave weigel's old journolist posts turned up on fishbowldc and then on tucker carlson's daily caller. weigel covered the conservative movement for the washington post, and the posts were rude about the people he covered. he pointed out that he had written them before joining the paper. the post decided the damage was already done and he resigned on 25 june.

klein shut the list down that same day. his reasoning was that once the archive had been shown to be reachable, the promise the list ran on was no longer a promise, and a room where everyone is writing for an unknown future audience is not the room anyone joined. the daily caller kept publishing extracts through july anyway, and the story ran for weeks as evidence of coordination among journalists. what the extracts mostly showed was several hundred people disagreeing loudly with each other, which is the least conspiratorial thing a group of writers can do.

~ what replaced it ~

a successor called cabalist appeared almost immediately, started by jonathan cohn with michelle goldberg and steven teles, and had 173 members by late july 2010. the impulse did not die with the list. it just got quieter about itself.

what actually got inherited is the lesson, and it is one everybody has now learned the hard way at least once. a private channel with a written archive is not private, it is delayed. every slack workspace and every discord server with scrollback is running the same bet journolist ran, that nobody in the room will ever have a reason to hand the log to someone outside it. klein was unusual only in shutting his down the day the bet visibly failed.

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