A British crime reporter quit journalism to become a clown. My colleagues turned that premise into a radio interview. As I was writing the story for NPR.org, I fell down a rabbit hole researching adult clowning and its vocabulary: failure, laughter, performance, the flop.
What struck me was journalist John Simpson questioning whether he wanted to add to the “intellectual diet” of covering murder, crime and policing.
While I was working on the story, I went to a farewell party for a colleague. There, our Middle East editor offered another way of thinking about it, one I kept returning to long after the radio segment aired: Maybe this story was also about the afterlife of a journalist. And I kept wondering: Who are we when journalism is no longer the thing organizing our lives?
I know. News about the news business can get self-important. But this isn’t another story about how hard journalism is these days.
Most days, the stories we cover arrive with their importance already apparent: war, AI doom, identity, somebody acting or failing to act. Maybe what feels weirder now is how easily seriousness becomes a measure of what deserves our attention. Then there was Simpson: a man learning how to fail onstage and make people laugh.
And somehow that felt revealing, too.
A story does not have to begin with a death or end with a politician reacting to it to show us something true.
Simpson did not stop paying attention when he stopped reporting on crime, I thought. He changed what he was paying attention to.
That thought made me think of a friend who has been telling me for a while to read The Artist’s Way, a book about recovering the creative self. Maybe it is finally time. The world will keep giving us reasons to be serious. The least we can do is remember that laughter, art and other forms of expression beyond journalism can be forms of attention, too. | 
