Truesee's Daily Wonder

The Politico

Losing a job to get ahead
Keach Hagey and Daniel Strauss
July 9, 2010 05:22 PM EDT

Two weeks almost to the minute after he resigned from his job blogging about the conservative movement for the Washington Post, David Weigel was back on the Washington Post Company payroll Friday morning, writing about the tea party for Slate

In the interim, Weigel himself noted in a piece in Esquire Thursday, more than 500 articles were written about him, his downfall after the leak of his emails disparaging some conservative leaders, and what it all means for journalism.

Whatever conclusions were drawn from these musings, the digital mob turned into a kind of digital mosh pit that carried a crowd-surfing Weigel on to his next destination. MSNBC immediately snapped him up as a contributor. Poynter brought Weigel together for a live web chat with Jay Rosen Friday afternoon. He’s writing a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, and guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan next week.

Which all begs the question: Did this whole thing actually help him? Is spectacular firing – or in this case, embattled resignation – possibly the best way to advance your journalism career in the digital age?

A string of recent comebacks by writers suggests this may be the case.

Take the case of Spencer Ackerman. In 2006, while at The New Republic, Ackerman wrote a blog on the side called Too Hot For TNR which used to sometimes criticize the magazine. According to Michael Calderone, then writing in the New York Observer, Ackerman once wrote “TNR’s webdesign software, very appropriately, is called Coma” and “all the cool kids hate TNR.” The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had clashed with Ackerman in the past, and after reading the comments set up meeting where he fired him on the spot.

Less than a day later, Ackerman was hired by the American Prospect as a senior correspondent, and the trajectory has been upward ever since. He’s had a blog at the Center for American Progress and FireDogLake, was a national security reporter for Talking Points Memo and the Washington Independent, and was recently hired for Wired’s Danger Room.

Or how about Christopher Buckley? The son of National Review founder William F. Buckley and the author of numerous books including “Thank You For Smoking,” Buckley wrote a column for the National Review until he wrote a piece for the Daily Beast titled, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting For Obama.”  Soon after the piece was published National Review received a flurry of criticism and Buckley was forced out as damage control. Buckley continued writing books and at the Daily Beast, his credentials, with liberals at least, greatly enhanced.

David Frum provides one of the most recent examples. After serving as editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as well as a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, Frum became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. While at AEI he founded NewMajority.com –now FrumForum.com – a site “dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement” which includes political reporting and analysis.

During the healthcare reform debates, he wrote a post called “Waterloo” in which he criticized the Republican Party’s obstruction of passing a healthcare bill. The post garnered a lot of criticism from the right and soon after “Waterloo,” AEI fired Frum. Since then, FrumForum’s traffic has continued to grow and the site has increasingly become one of the primary destinations for conservative news and analysis.

And it’s not just writers. Cable news, the first venue to publicly scoop up Weigel after the Post debacle, has a long and storied history of rehabilitating careers. Where else could Mike Barnicle, who resigned from the Boston Globe amid plagiarism scandals, be reborn as a permanent fixture of the political American morning through his contributor position at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”? Or could Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who resigned after being caught using prostitutes, become the co-anchor of CNN’s plum 8 p.m. hour?

Modern media is vicious, but sometimes also curiously forgiving.

Weigel, who is coy about where he’s headed for more permanent employment, is careful not to count his chickens just yet.

“I’m not doing a touchdown dance,” he told POLITICO. “I was much happier just keeping my head down, doing good work. But I’m lucky that people are coming to me, asking me to write stuff.”

Sometimes, as in the case of the Esquire piece, that stuff is about him, not his beat. Moments like these can make dizzyingly self-referential reading: “I had ceased to be a head-down reporter, I readied for my new life as a political football. This was Stage Two of a Media Firestorm,” he wrote in Esquire.

Stage Three, necessarily, involves a bit of over-sharing. But Weigel’s Stage 4 looks bright.

He admits he is enjoying his new life as “a Washington-based reporter and contributor for MSNBC,” as his Slate bio states, but adds, “It’s been tiresome having to talk about myself.”