Photo courtesy of Jelani Cobb; Book cover courtesy of One World
In March 2012, Jelani Cobb published his first of many pieces for TheNew Yorker. It was an essay on the recent killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager whose death helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement. “[Our] worst problem is not cynicism,” the author, journalist, and historian concluded in the piece, “it’s the frequency with which that cynicism proves accurate.”
“In the book, I cover some of the things related to the rise of white nationalism, the rise of the kind of truculent populism that Donald Trump mainstreamed, and the political tributaries that fed into the moment,” says Cobb, a former associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “You have to connect the dots. You’ll be like, ‘Oh, I remember when this happened,’ or ‘I’d forgotten that this happened with Charlottesville’ or so on.”
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In 2018, Cobb, by then a staff writer at TheNew Yorker, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary for his work at the magazine. Then in 2022, after six years as a professor at Columbia Journalism School, he became the dean of the institution. He calls Three or More Is a Riot, released in October, “an appetizer” for his book-in-progress, The Half-Life of Freedom, which covers similar terrain: “race, democracy, and demagogues.”
In this edition of Depth Perception, Cobb discusses his growth as a writer, some recent controversies at Columbia, and why he considers journalism school perhaps more important than ever. (Full disclosure: I am an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School.) —Mark Yarm
Why did you become a journalist?
There’s probably a throughline with people who are journalists to curiosity, or a less charitable version of that would be nosiness. A love of finding out things — your job being to get smarter. If you’re out working every day, you should come back with information that you didn’t have before and be able to share that with the public.
I tell my students this all the time: “We can talk about these weighty, ethical things and this responsibility to democracy until the sun goes down, but fundamentally, we all do this because it’s fun.” We like doing it — putting together a story and fact checking it. There’s a particular kind of masochistic joy that comes out of that.
What piece of yours from Three or More Is a Riot are you most proud of?
It’s probably the first piece that’s in the collection, which originally ran as “Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope” in The New Yorker. The reason I say that I’m particularly proud of that piece is that it’s the first thing I ever wrote for The New Yorker. I was so anxious about it that I went to the Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture] in New York and wrote the piece there. My logic being that since I had written large portions of my doctoral dissertation there, I should be able to write a thousand-word Comment [essay] with no problem.
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In the book’s epilogue, you write that reading your old pieces “inspired a reckoning with not simply what I wrote, but with who I was when I wrote it.” How have you seen yourself change as a person and as a writer in the last decade and a half?
I have a more seasoned perspective. I was probably more idealistic then than I am now. I certainly didn’t have the vantage point of what it has been like for the past decade that our national affairs have been guided by Donald Trump, a man who was wholly unfit for the presidency, and the kind of destruction and wreckage that he’s brought to American civic life.
I had one child 15 years ago. I now have four. I talk a little bit about my children in the collection. As children are wont to do, they give you a different understanding of the importance of the things that you’re doing and the subject that you’re writing about, and the world that you would hope that they inherit. Also, though it’s kind of weird to say, while I was more idealistic then, I think I’ve developed a more intimate relationship with journalism — my love for what it is and what it can do and what it can achieve.
You mentioned having four children. You’ve been a staff writer at TheNew Yorker since 2015 and the dean of Columbia Journalism School since 2022. How do you balance all these demanding jobs?
I really don’t. I just work until I pass out. No… interestingly enough, here’s something that people outside of this building may not have noticed, but the last three deans of Columbia Journalism School have all been staff writers at TheNew Yorker: Steve Coll before me and Nick Lemann before him. I talked to both of them about balance and still wanting to do my work and be actively engaged. Both of them said that they had done large chunks of their journalism in the summer and winter breaks. So I have a reporting trip planned for spring break to knock out a story that I’ve been working on for a while. And a Comment, you know, I can work on that over a weekend.
One of the questions we ask a lot of our interviewees is, very simply, Journalism school: yay or nay? You’re biased, of course, but what are the arguments for attending J-school in 2026 when the profession feels like it’s in freefall?
I think the argument for attending journalism school becomes more clear under these circumstances, not less so. Lest I sound like a salesman, let me say more about that. We have a cliché in every movie that involves a newsroom or a reporter. There’s the grizzled city editor who has known the mayor since he was a fresh-faced law student or an intern somewhere and is on a first-name basis with everyone in the city. This is the person that is the heart and soul of the newspaper. That person doesn’t exist anymore. That person took a buyout years ago, and the kind of mentorship that was available through the auspices of those people who’ve been in the newsroom forever is not easy to come by. Journalism school is really increasingly necessary because there are fewer sources for people to get that information from.
The other thing is this, our graduates consistently outperform the market. In a market like this, people tend to hire the people who they think are most highly qualified and most highly trained, and because of the reputation of the school and the tradition of excellence at the school, that translates into significant advantages in the labor market.
“There’s a particular kind of enjoyment that comes from getting lost in a story. And that doesn’t really happen until, like, the 3,000-word mark…. There’s the appeal of the epic in fiction or in cinema or epic poetry, and long form journalism is our equivalent.” —Jelani Cobb
What are the biggest challenges of running a journalism school in 2026? I don’t know the statistics, but I’m guessing enrollment is down at Columbia Journalism School?
I don’t get into too much detail, but there’s a general declining trend in journalism school enrollment. So there’s that. There’s skepticism, [like in] the very question that you just raised, “Why should I go to journalism school?” And then even outside of that, it’s not simply a referendum on journalism education. It’s a referendum on journalism itself, because a lot of times people think this career is not a viable path for them. We have to grapple with having to create, or help create, courses and symposia and different kinds of programming that align with the needs of the market. You know, what are we doing with AI? Are we making sure that all our people are fully capable of utilizing it in the news gathering, in the ways that we want people to use it? And then staying away from the ways that we don’t want people to use AI?
Does Columbia Journalism School have any sort of guidelines on AI and journalism?
Yeah, we came up with an AI working group right after ChatGPT debuted, and we borrowed a line from the AP’s AI protocols, which is that “AI should be treated as an unvetted source.” Nothing can be turned in that is not 100% the work of the journalist in the class. But we also encouraged faculty to not adopt a fearful approach to this technology, because there are uses.
For instance, I teach opinion writing, and one of the things that I encourage my students to do is after they have finished a draft of their column for that week, they should request a counterargument from ChatGPT or whatever AI you’re using. One of my colleagues, Azmat Khan, who’s done really important work on civilian casualties of drones and other kinds of bombing, is utilizing AI to be able to recognize bomb craters that might not otherwise stand out on satellite imagery. So that will certainly expedite how quickly that work can be done.
Over the past couple of years at Columbia, you’ve seen student protests over the Israel-Hamas war and the university agreeing to a $200 million settlement with the Trump administration over accusations that the school failed to protect its Jewish students. Given that this is all happening in your backyard, do you think you’ll write about this?
My running joke is that whenever someone asks about what it’s like at Columbia, I would say, “Well, it will make an interesting chapter in my memoir.” But I don’t have any plans to write about it.
You made your thoughts on President Trump clear earlier. Did that $200 million settlement disappoint you?
What I would say is that my chief concern has always been not how we navigated the situation, but the fact that we were in the situation in the first place. I think probably all of the faculty, or all of the leadership of Columbia, takes the issue of belonging seriously. And the issue of dignity for students and equal treatment for students, we take that very seriously. At the same time, it’s very obvious that we’re being kicked around as a political football. But how does killing [$1.3 billion in federal] grants, most of which are medical, help us adopt new strategies to address antisemitism?
We’ve got some recurring questions we like to ask our subjects. Let’s start with, what is the best journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?
There’s a bunch of advice that I got from David Carr, who was the editor who gave me my first internship at the Washington City Paper and went on to become a legendary media columnist at TheNew York Times, and [was] an all-around character. Carr really drilled meticulousness into me. He would say, “How do you know this? Do you think it, or do you know?” His advice was basically double-check, triple-check. Be on top of your facts. Make sure that you have it right. If you don’t have it right, you apologize and you make it right. But really think about the seriousness of how you approach a story and what you give to the public under your name.
If you could write an all-access profile of anyone in the world who would it be and why?
I’m inclined to say Vladimir Putin. Even though I’ve not written a ton about it, I have these interests in Russia which are very longstanding. I wrote a doctoral dissertation that was heavily connected to Cold War history. So there’s that, but it also might be probably more efficacious to say the president. Part of it would be to have the fly-on-the-wall perspective. What does he do when nobody else is in the room, when he thinks that he’s alone? Is there any contrast between the public persona and the private person? What do the people who work for him really think of him?
What is the importance of long form journalism in particular these days?
Long form journalism is its own beast. There’s a particular kind of enjoyment that comes from getting lost in a story. And that doesn’t really happen until, like, the 3,000-word mark. Maybe it’s a dying pleasure, because the economics and the attention economy have pushed toward everything being much more succinct. But, with an all-access profile, if you’re talking about who a person is, or what their import is to life or culture or this particular discipline or undertaking, you have to build up a lot of context, and that takes some runway. There’s the appeal of the epic in fiction or in cinema or epic poetry, and long form journalism is our equivalent.
We’re talking not long after the bloodbath at TheWashington Post, which really depressed me and a lot of other journalists. What keeps you hopeful for the future of journalism?
Charlie Sennott, who is co-founder of Report for America, which is a great organization that helps embed journalists in areas where there’s a dearth of them, said something when he was visiting campus that I thought really registered: “Starting a publication is almost akin to starting a restaurant. It never makes sense.” You know, restaurants famously have the highest failure rate of any business. And at the same time, when you walk out your door, depending on where you are, you can find a restaurant — someone has figured out the formula to survive.
I think that we’ll figure it out, because so much rests upon our ability to do this job. I also think, paradoxically, that if we were to strip away the dark storm clouds, what would become obvious to us is the fact that journalism is more dynamic now than it has been in 50 years. We’re trying all kinds of things that, if we weren’t talking about the collapse of the business model and AI and lack of trust and all the other kinds of things that dominate the landscape, we would be talking about just how amazing the innovations in the field are.
People are coming up with new business models. We were previously lazy in a way that had been bred by success. But now we have different types of distribution, different structures, we have just a huge number of nonprofit news organizations that are coming online, and people are actively trying to figure out what’s the most sustainable format for us. When a lot of smart people are all dedicated to trying to solve one question, we tend to make a lot of progress.
A beautiful piece about the convictions of being a journalist, thank you for sharing
Anytime I see an interview with Jelani Cobb, it’s an immediate read or watch