The Press Box - Do I Have to Go Back to the Newsroom? Plus, Bloomberg’s Justin Sink on the Jobs Report.

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss The Washington Post's op-ed piece written by the CEO of Washingtonian Media, Cathy Merrill. They discuss the pros and cons of going back into an office versus working remotely, and further break down how Merrill approached the topic (4:20). Then, last week CNN released a job's report citing far fewer jobs were added last month than expected. White House correspondent for Bloomberg, Justin Sink, joins to help break down what we saw (31:01). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Justin Sink Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor, and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, Kentucky Derby-winning horse Medina Spirit, failed a drug test, and his trainer Bob Baffert chalked up his predicament to cancel. culture. What I want to know is, what are some things in your life that you'd like to blame on cancel culture? We're not going to fine line there, because on the one hand, many, many things.

On the other hand, you just have to, like, every time you Googled my name, cancel culture would come up very quickly. I'm not sure how into that result I would be. I should say, off the top, that I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Actually, to be clear, born and subsequently raised in Louisville, Kentucky. It took a couple years off in North Carolina when I was really little. And one, I am the first place winner in the Kentucky Derby illustration contest for public school first graders. What? When I was there.

Yeah, it's true. I didn't know that. Yeah. It was, it was something to be proud of for sure. My mom still has that framed pastel illustration in her house. But to go back to the original question, uh, dang.

I, I think, man, I think right now I'm good with no cancel culture excuses, but I, I don't think I'm, I don't think I would totally like to relinquish the option to have that in my back pocket for the future.

Yeah. You never know where you're going to need it, right? Never know one of my horses is going to test positive or doping. I was at the dentist like a week and a half. ago and I had the kind of disappointed dentist conversation because it was clear I was using those

throwaway flossers, those one use flossers instead of the floss you pull out like a rope, like the regular floss. The throwaways are frowned upon? Yeah, it turns out. I would have liked to blame cancel culture for that.

Yeah. I guess to the right audience, you're right. Cancel culture is a great defense, right? If you're talking to your doctor, your dentist, the mechanic, Anything like that. The mechanic's just like, dude, you haven't changed your own oil. It even added oil to your car for like two years. And now you're trying to come into for an oil change.

Like everything's okay. Dude. Enough of this cancel culture. You all share a big laugh and you move on. Yeah. You resolve to do it right the next time. Couple of things on this particular story before we move on. The New York Post says this on the Dan Patrick show.

Bob Bafford claimed that a groom urinated in the horse's stall after he had been taking cough medicine. And Medina Spirit, that is the. horse ate some of the hay. So that's how this substance wound up in the horse. The groom peed in the stall and the horse ate the hay. Just want to throw that out there for all time excuses. And number two, doesn't the horse itself have the best claim for cancel culture here? Not the trainer.

Like the horse didn't knowingly ingest a substance. That's a good point. The horse is not Raphael Palmero. Yeah, the horse really had no choice in the matter. And then the horses went out there and did his best. Exactly. His name's being dragged through the mud. He's a victim of all these expectations that sports riders and sports personalities have.

And the best case scenario, he's still a victim of having to eat pee covered hay. Next thing you know, the horse is going to be on Gutfeld next to Cat Temp and Pete Hegson. What a show that'll be. Coming up on our show today, do journalists need to return to the newsroom after the pandemic? and what's the absolute wrong way to get them to do it. Plus, Bloomberg reporter Justin Sink tells us what to make of last week's very confusing jobs report. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer.

Podcast Network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here along with Erica Servantes. David, why don't we start here? Last Thursday, Kathy Merrill, who is the CEO of Washingtonian Media, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the, benefit of workers, and in her case, that would mean journalists, coming back to the office after the pandemic is over. Now, as we'll see, this op-ed turned into an absolute cluster.

But before we get to that part, can we have the general discussion about journalists coming back to newsrooms? Because that's something people are thinking about right now as we sort of get to the tail end of this thing. have you missed being in the ringers east coast bureau i have i mean i miss specific people obviously a whole bunch um and and some of it's a little bit more well i mean sometimes it's you know you realize how much you miss somebody when you you know i hear my co-workers my co-workers will talk about like their kids on slack or something you know just something that

sort of like places it where you realize how long it's been, you know, or, God, you see like a bar that we used to drink out after work is closed or, you know, whatever, just something like that. I mean, there are, there are a lot of moments where you missed a whole lot. I miss, I miss, you know, taking trips to L.A. about as much as I miss going in New York in some sense. New York office gave me structure, but when I would take my bi-monthly or whatever triped out to L.A., that was basically like, that would be four days of nonstop FaceTime. You know, and big think conversations and, you know, whatever. It was like that you would kind of distill six months of work

down to a few days of just staring at people in the office. And so, and that also provided a sort of broader structure to my life, right? Like every couple of months, you get on a plane, you go out and do that. And that's, so I actually miss that a bunch. But I do. I miss the folks in the East Coast Bureau and I miss, I miss, well, I mean, the craziest thing about this is we've talked about before, We got acquired by Spotify like moments before the pandemic.

And we would be in a different office now had this whole thing not happened. And we still don't actually know exactly what office space we're going to be returning to. So there's a whole bunch of, you know, there's a lot of variables. So it's all sort of hard to digest. Yeah. I do miss you coming to L.A. for the version of the ESPN Bristol Car Wash. It's like, now Bill's going to get David. now Sean's going to get David.

Now Brian's going to get David. We all got to like share you over the course of a day while you tried to do your job. But I totally miss the office. And I say this is someone who was up there once or twice a week because of how far away I live from it. But I have hated not having that there. I have missed the team aspect of it. I miss seeing my coworkers. I shared an office with Kevin Clark and Kevin O'Connor,

which was like sharing an office with Adam Schaefter and Woj. There's always stuff going on in there. Lots of just stuff being written and reported in there. I felt very important being in that office with them. And I think I said this now and scary almost a year ago, but this has been such a professionally lonely period of my life this last year. Yeah. There's just the work is totally doable.

but what's irreplaceable is the newsroom aspect of it. Yeah. And just being surrounded by people doing work and having conversations that make you better at what you're doing because I always think journalism is benefits from human contact. Not just with your subjects, but with other journalists. It's true. I mean, we've had formal and informal discussions at the ringer about that

because, I mean, I immediately realized that the bar between or the distance between thing I'm willing to say out loud in someone's doorway and thing I'm willing to put into writing on Slack, there was a pretty big chasm between those two things, right?

Because I would walk up to somebody and be just like, all right, best 80s TV nanny bracket, you know? But you would never like write that down. And probably that's a bad idea. But like one out of a hundred, it's a publishable idea.

And one out of a hundred of those is a great traffic idea. And that's how a lot of good things happen, right? Or just, like you said, overhearing somebody else's, you know, wild idea and deciding like, well, wait, I have a better way we can do that. And then just saying, no, no, I was joking. Don't put that into print. Like, don't worry, we're not going to credit you, but we are going to publish this. You know, I mean, those things are really important. And certainly we've evolved into a place where some of that spirit

is still, still exists. We found a new way to, you know, get there. But, and we, I mean, broadly, it's not like there's any lack of content on the internet. But yeah, I mean, that's an important part of the process that I think everybody misses. So there's lots of good things about being in a newsroom together. Now we get all the complications after the pandemic. Number one, genuine health concerns for employees and management alike, which may differ between certain people, depending on your health status, your age, all kinds of things like that. There's stuff about over the last year, lots of people have changed their lifestyle,

change their parenting arrangements, change the place they live over the course of the last year. Here I am looking into the Zoom camera at David Shoemaker. And, you know, then there's, I think, the larger question, which you just hit on, which is, we're all kicked out of the newsroom, but the websites and podcast networks and newspapers and everything we all work on were still really good. in some cases really, really good. So that begs the broader question of, if you didn't need to be in the newsroom

and you still put out the good thing, why do you need to come back to the newsroom at least full time? Yeah, you're right. That's the question. I think there's a slightly bigger question too. I mean, not a bigger question, but the bigger issue, which is that, like, I think that, well, I mean, I think we were propelled by complacency.

We're compelled by compulsion, you know, to have the office exists in the way that it existed for so long. And I think there's probably a semi-justifiable fear that's absent in a non-COVID world, there's an increasing pull every day to have a less centralized office space, right? And to have like a digital office and whatever else. But I think for a lot of employers, it's like, why mess with a good thing? You know, I mean, that we know that this works. Why risk this other thing that then we'd have to, like, walk back and that would be a huge mess. It's like pivoting to video and then finding out that nobody wants your, you know, nobody wants video anymore.

And, you know, I think that for a lot of people, for a lot of workplaces, it was almost, it almost came as a pleasant surprise after six months of quarantine that things still functioned relatively normally. That there are certain advantages to being in person together. but I think that the fact that the wheels didn't fall off of many, if any, places I think for a lot of bosses, like I said, was a pleasant surprise, right?

I mean, like, oh, this thing works. This thing, we can manage this thing without kind of overbearing in person management. Totally. And I think that would have been shocking even two months before the pandemic started. Like, not only at the ringer, but just everywhere. Hey, you're going to have to put out

the exact same publication, just as good or maybe even better, given the economic circumstances of the period, but you're not going to be able to work where you were working. You're not going to be able to see those same people every day. Everything's going to have to be over Zoom or over the phone. And you're right that it would turn out was sort of a miraculous. Part of its technology. I mean, when you and I started doing this podcast,

almost every single time you were in the New York office of the Ringer in a studio. I was in a studio in the LA office. Erica and then Jim Cunningham before her were sitting next to us recording a podcast because that's the way you did it. Now we've done it via Zoom for more than a year. And it turns out it sounds fine. Yeah, there were people,

we definitely had podcasts that were using video technology before that, but it was always, it seemed to look a little bit separate. Erica, you might want to jump in and correct me. It seemed like a, you know, kind of necessary, evil at times. You and I, and I, we had conversations. Like, you and I did the podcast in person. We also, I mean, at the beginning, at the very, very beginning, right? And then, but we knew each other forever before that. And that was always kind of the presumptive, like, how we were able to do

this without seeing, looking each other in the faces. We know each other. We've done this. Like, we've had a billion conversations in our life, right? I can tell when Brian's going to stop talking five words before he does. I can jump in. But yeah, I mean, but the video component now is like such, it just seems so wild that we weren't here already, right? The amount of time that even just like you and I, let alone a more frequently published, more important podcast, has spent with just scheduling its principles, you know, I mean, it's sort of crazy to think about now, right? The amount of times you're like, oh, I'm in traffic or like, oh, like, I'm in a meeting or like whatever. It's like, can we just do it tomorrow? Like, instead of just being like, when can you

turn on your computer? Are we all free now? Okay, let's go. it's kind of crazy the amount of stuff that we just put up with based on this is how things are always done. One of the points in this op-ed was that there is a difference from what you say about not being together and never having been together.

I was actually talking to Trey Wingo, former ESPN announcer about this the other day. He was saying, you know, it was really cool when I was on ESPN I had like Herm Edwards right next to me on the set or the guys from the NFL draft show right next to me because I could look over at him and say, oh, that guy wants to make a point.

He's waving a hand at me or kind of giving me that look, hey, I want to jump in here and kind of read their body language. Now, he could do that remotely now if he was doing a show with them because he knows them like you and I know each other. But if he had never been in a room with them, that would have been a much steeper learning curve on a podcast or a TV show or whatever. So we are, you and I are benefiting from having done it together for a long time, which might not be the same as somebody which just went remote from the beginning was remote forevermore. That learning, that just they would not have that sort of storehouse to build. Let's talk about this op-ed for a second.

Yes. Because that's the non-offensive version of this discussion. Kathy Merrill in the Washington Post said something very different. She said something that sounded a lot like a threat. You better come back to the office or else. I will read you the paragraph everybody seized on here. While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like.

I estimate that about 20% of every office job is outside one's core responsibilities, extra, quote unquote. It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone's birthday, things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to contractor. She continues. So although there may be some pains and anxiety about going back into the office,

the biggest benefit for workers may be simple job security. Remember something every manager knows. The hardest people to let go are the ones you know. Wow. This is one of those weird things where, well, first of all, this is a, you know, one of many stories that I was just reading about on Twitter before I realized what we were talking about for a long time. It was also one where you realize that there's a, there's a sort of Twitter etiquette that's, oh, that we've talked about before,

but it almost seems like formally codified that like so many people are not bothering to link to this or just doing screen grabs the piece, I guess, presumably because you like disagree with it to such an extent that you don't want to direct any traffic towards it, but then people like me find ourselves just Googling sentences to make sure that it's the piece that we think it is. But this piece is, it was just mind-boggling, right? I mean, I'm just like the existence of it on so many levels. The only part, the only like kind of, the only decision point to borrow a phrase from President George W. Bush that I can kind of wrap my head around is why the question of

why it was published and from the Washington Post's point of view, and if the answer there is because they knew it would get a big reaction, then I can understand that, right? If that wasn't the sole purpose or the driving purpose, I don't understand anything about the existence of this piece. It was poorly considered, poorly thought out, poorly written, poorly edited, poorly positioned. And frankly, like, there's not a lot of, I don't know, whose best interest it is in best and who's interested is in any part along the way for the chief executive of the Washingtonian to come off as like an evil bond villain like it's just not not that's that can't have been anybody's goal it had the whiff to me of a media executive wanting to

be a thought leader and in the process of trying to be a thought leader not thinking what will my employees think if they read this? To me, one of the great ironies of this thing is it was all about office culture and teamwork. And yet, Kathy Merrill of the Washingtonian is taking this thought to a larger publication with a bigger audience. She could have written the story presumably for the Washingtonian's website. But what bigger F you to office culture and teamwork is there than having an idea and taking it somewhere else. I mean, that to me right off the bat is like, wait, wait a second. And I've worked for people way before Ringer and Grantland, people who ran publications that were freelancing. And I'm always like,

what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You were trying to tell us, everything is for the team. And then you are going and doing something for somewhere else because I guess you're going to get paid for it. You're going to think it's going to get a bigger audience or whatever. That was my first alarm bell about this whole up-ed deal. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of alarm bells that go off really quickly. Just from the part that you read out loud, to talk about, I mean, obviously, she's trying to be a thought leader to some extent, but to try to be a thought leader and then say, what was the quote about the 20%? I estimate the 20% of every office job is outside one's core responsibilities. So can we all just, if your response is, no, no, no, no, I've done the math.

it's 17% does that does that does that render her entire argument moot then I mean if we're just making up numbers here to try to like

drive a silly point home I mean it's just I mean if there weren't enough alarm bells in the piece that you everyone saw the alarm bells

almost simultaneously with its publication when every Washingtonian staffer formally declined to work the day that this piece came out in protest to its publication

which I guess proved that office culture can still be very strong and very very interconnected even, you know, in the winds of a of a quarantine when like every single member can manage to put out the exact same tweet at the exact same time, you know, in relatively short order after this piece is publication. I think she sort of made the point, made the, made the counterpoint herself in that, you know, and having that, having that be the fallout. but to go to your point about the freelancing and the leaders and stuff i mean i don't know what kathy merrill's relationship is with the the washington newsroom um but in terms of alarm bells i mean i can't say that i've worked in a bunch of different fields but in my experience chief executives when it comes to journalism and publishing chief executives are about as detached more detached in that field than they are in any other field imaginable i mean people running numbers and sort of like setting direction and stuff, but like, I mean, how many people do you think that we

know that have like seen their chief executive or, you know, in any given month, see the chief executive of their company? It's not like they're out there like assigning stories or helping out with headlines or, you know, wiping the ink off their sleeves at the end of the night. You know, I mean, it's just why you would think you really have any stake in office culture, rather than just going directly to the managers, the people on the floor, the people that do sort of oversee office culture to have these sorts of conversations, to think that you have to go to the Washington Post or literally any outlet including your own to have to make this statement as opposed to just going to the, like not having a better concept of how to have

this conversation kind of tells you all you need to know. Yeah, Merrill told Eric Wemple, media reporter for the Washington Post, everyone needs an editor. I wish I had run my piece by mind. Interesting. Interesting. On that 20% you mentioned of extra responsibilities as a journalist in a newsroom. There was really good piece by Laura Hazard Owen over at Neiman Lab. She writes, possible labor law violations aside, it's no coincidence that these nice office extras, the things you'll rarely see listed in a journalism job description because historically nobody has considered them worth paying for, disproportionately fall to women and people of color.

Think back to the office you used to work from, who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes. Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of these things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? She continues.

There's another term for the extras, as Merrill mentioned, researchers call them non-promotable tasks, meaning you do them, but you do not get promoted as a result of doing them. Hazard, Owen also had something really interesting to say on this subject of mentorship, which was brought up in the op-ed. Hey, if we're not in the office, who's going to mentor the younger staffers?

She writes, mentorship goes hand in hand with staff retention and the creation of a pipeline of future leaders. It's a skill that connects directly to a company's bottom line and to its stated values. Not everyone mentors wants to do it or is good at it. It's work that should be stated in the job description, i.e. agreed to and reflected in salary and with other support from the company. meaning you don't just say, hey, you know what? If you're in the office, can you just be a mentor to everybody? Because then that whole idea is just completely haphazard. Well, who gets mentored, right?

Who's doing it? How much of their time they spend doing it? And then you run this risk that it just nobody gets mentored or certain people get a lot of training and mentorship and some people just get left completely out, which I think is a totally valid point. And one you can't just say, hey, if everybody shows up in the office, that'll just get done. Yeah. I mean, I don't think, I don't think there's a lot of people that would disagree that their advantages to being together in the office. I do think, but I think what you're getting at is if you start rattling off hypotheticals, hypothetical reasons that we all need to be back in the office

when your motive is something a more broad or suspect. just separate from those things, people are going to be suspicious, right? I mean, that's not like it's, I feel like it feels like it's just, it's, does it feel like the cancel culture conversation? Am I crazy to say this? And it just feels like somebody, it feels like somebody complaining about something that they, they kind of see the world changing and they just want to point their finger and say, this is why it's, this is, this is terrible. It's never been this way. everything's going to hell in a handbasket. With the implied threat attached to that, by the way.

Sure. It's not just complaining about the kids today. It's the kids today are going to get turned into contractors if they don't watch out. That's what this is. Yeah. I just think that if you're interested in people coming back to work in the office, and the wild thing is it feels very, it feels like you would think that the chief executive of the Washingtonian would have other means of getting people to return to the office other than writing an op-ed in the Washington Post.

Because that's kind of that, doesn't that seem like the conversation that we're having almost? Just like, well, here's some advice. If Merrill really wanted to, you know, repopied at the office, here are some things you or I would do. I mean, she could just tell everybody to come back to the office, presumably. I don't know if there's like a union issue or some sort of reverse squatters rights where people work away from the office for long enough. They're never expected to come back in. But, you know, but it just seems like, no matter what this situation,

is to resort to threats that blatantly and that quickly diminish the entire argument. I mean, yeah, there's going to be, no one is, no one is hanging around arguing that, like, construction workers can work on, can work remotely for the rest of time because of the coronavirus, you know, I mean, there's some jobs that it's going to make sense for and some jobs that it's not going to make sense for. And, man, if you're really convicted about the discrepancies, then maybe in future hires, you can adjust the salary. But good luck in that. I mean, the biggest fallacy of this whole thing was this contractor conversation because anybody that's ever worked, listen, I've never worked as a contractor. I've never been a full-time freelancer, right? I have done

contract work for people, but I've never been a full-time freelancer in my life. And a lot of that's because it's a big leap of faith, right? I know you've done it at times. But most people who've done it, or not most, but many people who've done it have had the experience that of getting paid from the same company you just walked away from three times as much to be a contractor. There are institutional reasons. You have to buy your own health insurance, et cetera, et cetera. But contractors are actually valued more highly than full-time employees because there's the implication of them being there every day has evaporated, right?

There's no like implied retention. And for this to be, oh, well, if you don't come into work every day, I might have to just, it's not you have to be contractors. It's like, I might just take away your health insurance. You know, this is like some pro wrestling stuff. You know, it's like you, you guys work at my, you know, you work for me. You work when I want you to work, where I want you to work. And hey, if you don't show up to work on time, then we're going to have to renegotiate these basic human rights.

It's just, it's, it's so silly. This is like, this is like what rich people grouse about over drinks. You know, it sounds like, it sounds like a, like a cartoon rich couple complaining about the hired help or something. You know what I mean, it's just so silly. These are not words that need to be ever voiced. All right, David, let's do the overword Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag. It was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

From the world of sports, David, the Detroit Lions waived a running back named Carry on Johnson. Carry on Johnson. You might be familiar with him from your fantasy football team. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, Carry on my wavered son. on my wavered song. Thanks to Charles Breyer the third and Jason Eckstein for that one. A headline from Forbes. I thought we'd never read, David.

NFL superstar Tom Brady adds laser eyes to his Twitter profile pick, teasing support of Bitcoin. It was an upward Twitter joke to write the last time Tom Brady fought inflation. He won the 2014 AFC championship. Next to Nels McLaugh. And finally, David, last Monday, Bill and Melinda Gates announced they were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. That was an absolute, a sad occasion, we should note, but an absolute just red light for green light for jokes to just come on Twitter. My favorite of them. Clippy, you know, that famous Microsoft paper clip saying, yes.

I see you're trying to conceal some assets. Are you going through a divorce? Yes, no. Thanks to Scott Tobias. If you resurrected Clippy one more time, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump.

So speaking of things I saw on Twitter, but didn't click through, everybody was mad or confused or just befuddled in some way by the jobs report last week. I think I was even just reading Chris Hayes' mentions to just try to figure out what was going on. You brought in an expert.

Yes. To help us figure this thing out. Well, it's not just an expert, but a member of the Press Box extended family. You know, the diehard listeners that listen to episodes even without Brian in them might remember that last episode, we had Claire McNair on the show. And after the show, or the next day,

we were DMing about the show, and the job reports came out. And I'm like, Claire, you live in D.C. Do you know anybody that can explain this to idiots like me? And she said, well, Justin can do it. Justin being her fiance, a long-term partner and the person I think she mentioned on the show as the person she would be married to right now had it not been for coronavirus. So Justin Sank, White House correspondent for Bloomberg, really there's no better person

for it because he can talk about the politics and the economics of it. So I called Justin and, well, hopefully didn't make too big a fool of myself. Here's Justin Sink. On Friday, the April jobs report came out. And according to CNN, the U.S. economy added only 266,000 jobs in April. That was far less than forecasts of economists who had predicted America would add a million jobs last month. I'm joined now by Justin Sank, White House correspondent for Bloomberg, to embark with me on a slightly embarrassing, but I think overall helpful journey right now. I'm sitting at home on Friday, and Friday's a weird day for cable news, but I had this

moment of, I've been here before, and it's because once a month, like on a Friday, we get the same news cycle, and it's everybody unites and saying, holy crap, or like, look at this nice thing, or we're utterly unsurprised by this in unison. And I, but this time, I think it was because the numbers, like, you were lower than expected or whatever that I just kind of started shaking my head and I'm like, why, why am I watching this? Like, why am I watching this on three channels, four channels, five channels? Why is this the thing we care about? Because, listen, we would all like there to be a lot more jobs.

But I don't, but the conversations that are going on are not concrete in that way. They're all just sort of very, very, very, very ephemeral, like ephemeral to the fifth, to the end's degree. And so I thought, who do we know that, that not just understands economics, but also understands politics and journalism and how these things are covered. So you were at the top of the list, and I'm just going to put you in an uncomfortable position here, Justin. Why do we care about jobs report's numbers?

What does this even mean? Sure. Well, I guess I would start by saying that as somebody who writes for Bloomberg, of course, you should care very deeply about every job's number and go to Bloomberg and read about them every single month. Yeah. But to take your point, which is, and I think is actually something that economists, when you talk to them about the jobs

reports, numbers will say is, you know, this is a snapshot in time. It just gives us a look at where in one week of one month the jobs numbers are. You shouldn't overinterpret any single month's jobs reports that much. It is something to be sort of looked at within a broader context of trends and that sort of thing. Now, with all of those caveats, the jobs report, on Friday was really exceptional. You mentioned the median estimate of a million jobs added. That's an estimate that we here at Bloomberg put together each month by surveying dozens of different economists. And just in terms of the scale, so we missed it by 734,000 jobs this month. And in a normal month, you might miss it by 100,000. And if you go back through all the data,

we have our data since 1997. This last month was the biggest gap between, you know, jobs created and what the estimate was in a downward way. It was the biggest miss that we have in our data going back to 1997. So, you know, as much as, yes, there is a little freak out every single month about the jobs, this one was kind of a really eye-popping number. Can I interrupt really quickly to ask, when you guys compiled this estimate or the forecast, is it only based on other people's

sort of independent projections as opposed to there's no exit polling, right? I mean, there's no, I mean, or is there, is there, I mean, is it, have no one seen like 50% of the results and we're just waiting to see for the other 50 to come in, right? Is it all conjecture based on previous months and, and parallel years and whatnot? Yeah, so the way that we put it together is, uh, it's a survey of kind of dozens of economists that are at big banks, you know, Morgan Stanley, that type of place that each month will give to us what they're kind of projecting. And they base that on weekly data that's released by the federal government and by state governments. So that gives you kind of a hint at where things are going, which also kind of explains what's going on. But it's

also to, I think, important to note. And what may have been at play here is that the federal numbers aren't sort of, you know, they don't survey literally every single person in the country to be like, do you have a job? Are you going to work right now? So they both, you know, take this snapshot survey of just, you know, a few thousand people to make the bigger extrapolated guesses about where the economy is. But they also layer in expectations. So, you know, in spring and summer, where we are right now, you normally see a surge of seasonal hiring, especially, around summer vacations, travel, those sorts of things. And that was built into the data.

So one problem that we might have been seen this year is because the government baked in those seasonal adjustments, and I know this is already kind of making people's eyes glaze over. It might not have actually been as bad as it seems because we were expecting a big jump, but a lot of those jumps were already baked in the cake in a way that they might not, they might not normally be when you come out of something crazy like the pandemic that we just saw. You mentioned eyes glazing over, and I don't want to make this too precarious. But it does seem like, well, when we're talking, when all these arguments start happening on cable news.

Yeah. And then immediately, you know, obviously they're happening on Twitter as well. I immediately thought, let's talk about this in the podcast. And this is something I want to know about. And this is something I want to learn more about before we have in this podcast. And then I find myself, I found myself specifically in a Twitter conversation between Adam O Zemmock, who tweets at Model Behavior, and Austin Goulsby, formerly of the Obama administration,

and Tim Doi, D-U-Y-Homis, hoping I'm saying his name right, who I, all three people I see retweeted and a lot over, at various times. But they're having a conversation that I understand about 3% of, right? And I deeply want to understand, but it does seem like we get very quickly, and this is not a thing that's exclusive to economics, but it does seem like we get very quickly

into this sort of economics porn where everybody wants to be everybody wants to be real deep in these sort of highbrow conversations that again it doesn't feel like it seems like we've kind of immediately lost our moorings in any kind of concrete discussion

yeah and I think what's what's especially interesting about the jobs the numbers is it can be kind of a Rorschach test one of those ink blots where you see what you want to see in it. And so you get that immediately on Twitter, immediately on cable news, and it's something that we're picking through as we cover the White House, right? So, Republicans kind of see that number and jump on it and say, you know, this is proof that we've given too much stimulus. We're helping people out too much with unemployment, so they don't want

to go back to work. And this is an argument against the president's policies. And liberals and Joe Biden would look at it and say, well, you know, this is actually in fact an argument for why we do need more programs. We need to spend more to convince people or to help people out as they're struggling to get back in the jobs market after this crazy pandemic that we went through. And in fact, you know, it's an argument for how we still need to address things like child care, still need to get restaurants back open. Bars are just partially reopened, why we need to do more to vaccinate.

And so it does quickly turn into this thing where you can get really deep into the data if you want. You can pick out how it impacts your pet issue or thing that you're concerned about and pull that out. But it also makes for kind of instant debate on TV in the way that you could pick out a stat line from a basketball player on a given night and start to have a broader argument about,

you know, Steph Curry lit up the Sixers. Is he the greatest player of all time? When it's, it's really better to kind of look at his season as a whole and then his career as a whole. Yeah. I mean, and while they're having this sort of battles,

I mean, they're not really talking even about the, the numbers, right? Like you just pointed out, it's sort of a battle of, like, primacies, right?

I mean, it's like whatever, like, like, do we, how are we going to read these things? I guess when you're talking about stats and, and making the basketball comparison, yeah,

one game is a really hard thing to judge by, even though that's the game that's going to get the conversation on first take or whatever else, right? I mean, John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker this week, um, that these jobs reports numbers are just like laughably noisy. I mean, noisy is the economic term, right? I mean, there's so many contributing factors to, that it's just hard for really, to glean anything really concrete based on one month's numbers. Um, he points to May, the, the made, what was it, 2016 report that said, had like 30,000, 38,000 jobs I'm looking right here, which was just like gallingly low. It helped the Trump campaign a great deal. It ended up not actually being significantly meaningful or statistically meaningful

when you looked at the surrounding months. I guess the thing is like these are, we're arguing about sort of the unknowable, right? And, and, you know, maybe it's too easy to pat to spin this out into a broader discussion about the journalism world or the media world that we're in. But it seems like we spend a lot of time trying to parse out what that what these jobs numbers mean in a very definitive way when I think almost everybody having the conversation would agree that they don't mean anything definitively. Yeah, and I think that that is especially true in a weird time like right now. So, and to your point, and a point that the White House is making a lot right now,

when they took this survey that came out on Friday, only 18% of the people in the country had been vaccinated. Now we're at 50% of people have gotten at least a first shot. And that is such a dramatic and rapid change in circumstance that it's not really telling you a whole lot about where the world is now. It's barely telling you about where the world was a month ago. But in a little bit of defense of these numbers, I do think that in normal times, there actually is a story that you can tell, especially over a few months period, about where the economy is because you're not seeing these wild swings that you are. in the pandemic. I mean, to your point, there was a month, I think it was June of last year, where the economists expected a loss of 2.5 million jobs because we were kind of in that,

the beginning of the summer of the pandemic, everything was bad. And the economy actually added 7.5 million. It was huge. I mean, it was a huge swing there. But that tells me more about the economy than it does that this entire system is broken, right? So in a little defense of the system, I do think that in a normal period of time, you can look at a month's jobs numbers and get a sense of the general trends and shapes of the economy and where it's going. And when you are somebody trading on the Bloomberg terminal or even just kind of a normal person trying to get a sense of what the economy is like and how you should be feeling about things, I do think that there is, you know, within the proper context, some usefulness for these numbers.

I'm going to ask you to pull back the curtain a little bit for us. So given that you, and I assume everybody's sitting around you and that the White House press room know that there's a little bit of a, this is all sort of, this discussion is a little bit, you know, ephemeral, right? I mean, it's a little bit about an imaginary discussion about an imaginary thing. when you, if you were to stand up and ask Mr. President, what do you have to say about the jobs report? Like, what is the answer that you're looking for? Like, what, I mean, aside from, like, a sound bite that just randomly goes viral, like, what is an answer that is suitable for you?

Well, I mean, I think for us, what we're hoping is insight into what this means for the more tangible or concrete things that are actually going to impact people. And I think there's probably two lanes that you could look at that in. One is just a purely economic one, right? So even if we kind of properly caveat that the jobs numbers need to be read in context, they are incredibly influential to traders. So it was kind of counterintuitive, but what we saw was that the stock market really took off on Friday. And that was because the numbers were interpreted as so bad that the government would keep up stimulus programs,

would keep interest rates low, which matters to normal people because it means their mortgages are cheaper or their debt payments might be lower on credit cards or something like that. And so that really matters, as does their stock portfolios. Their 401K is, if you're somebody who has invested in the market and the market starts going up, that really matters to you. So that's one lane. But the other is what Joe Biden is going to do and what economic policies he's going to sue. So when he talked about it earlier today, he actually sort of called a press conference on his

own, which I think signals some weariness in the administration. You saw him really go after this Republican talking about expanded unemployment insurance. He made this argument that, you know, in fact, their data didn't show that people are not taking jobs because they're getting paid more. They're not taking jobs because they can't find child care or because they're still afraid of not being vaccinated, those sorts of things. But if it caused him to change his mind and say, hey, actually, we're willing to throw this unemployment plus up that's giving people an extra 300 bucks a month out the door, maybe trade that for an infrastructure bill, which is a bargain that Republicans have offered up, then you

start to get into the concrete political horse trading. And so you're right. I'm not interested in Joe Biden. necessarily picking through the data or projecting optimism, which of course he's going to, you know, any president's going to say, well, maybe we're disappointed, but we see positive signs here. I am interested in how it might impact the way his, the policies and the way that they're pursuing it at the White House. Thank you for that answer. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that you're, what you hint at is maybe something that frustrates a lot of like regular,

quote unquote, regular people who are trying to make sense of this conversation. I'm not quite sure if I'm in the stack or not, but to take something, which is, I think part of what my anxiety about this whole discussion comes from is this is a very tangible thing. It's a very concrete thing, and it's one of the most real parts about the past year that our world has experienced in terms of just the consistency of employment and lack thereof. And that it, but that the discussion immediately spins off into more abstract things like the stock market, like, you know, like, will politics broadly defined? And listen, if the answer, if this, if this, came out and the response from the Biden administration was, you know, we're going to restart

the Tennessee Valley Authority and hire a bunch of people. Like that, I could, I guess that would make, that would be a more of a, you know, like I said, tangible connection, right? But we, you know, cable news has a lot of conversations about the stock market. And it's not always, despite, you know, some very viable points of view, it's not always news for the mass audience, you know. Is that I don't know. Is that a justifiable point of view? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think what you're highlighting is something that we have to be really cognizant of as reporters. And this is especially tricky for somebody like me who works for Bloomberg. And, you know, we have two audiences, right? We've got hardcore financial traders

who own Bloomberg terminals and sort of follow all this in minutia. But we also try to talk to to ordinary people who are worried about, you know, their conception and completely understandably so of how the economy and jobs are doing has to do with whether they've got a job or how their paycheck is doing or how this might impact them. And lots of people don't own stocks. Lots of people aren't really impacted by the broader economic trends, except how it affects their pocketbooks individually. And as much as this is something that as journalists, we have to attend to and be careful about, it's also something that the White House and politicians as a whole sort of struggle with and work towards. And so, you know, Joe Biden today addressed the sort of big trends,

but he also spoke very specifically about how they're going to try to make it easier for parents to get daycare for their kids, because that's something that we see. saw as a potential cause here. He talked about how he wanted employers to help with vaccinations and how the government was going to offer tax credit so that if you work for a small business and you need to take time off to go get your shot or to take a day or two after if you're feeling side effects, that's going to help. And so, you know, for the White House, a big challenge is having that part of the message

breakthrough to be able to really tell folks that we're seeing this big number. We're seeing a debate on CNBC or Bloomberg TV that is economic in the abstract, but that this is how we're trying to translate it into regular life. And you have the same thing on the Republican side, which is they believe in smaller government and in fewer federally provided benefits. And so if they can sort of successfully make the argument that the plans that Joe Biden have pushed forward are restricting economic growth, that's going to be a big part of their message as we had into the midterms. And so they just really have to make that personal for people who aren't kind of looking at these broad, boring numbers as they come out. Taking this, zooming out a little bit from your perch as a White House correspondent, what are the other sort of stations of the cross?

news cycles that just sort of, I don't know, that you maybe prep for in the same way or roll your eyes at when you know they're coming. Don't have to betray too much. But what is your, what is your version of this that I'm feeling right now? For me, one big thing that the president releases a budget every year. And this gets huge coverage. They roll it out. They give us like an embargoed, you know, background thing. So everybody pushes out these big numbers. and here are the big programs that Joe Biden or whoever the President Trump wants to fund. These are the programs that they want to cut. It's you cover their projections for what would happen.

But it's all sort of a fantasy. It's literally just a press release from the White House that says, you know, if we were in England where I was a prime minister and I could just change whatever policies I wanted to with the support of my party, this is what I would do. But because we're in the U.S., it's really just a fantasy document that gets. it's completely kind of shredded up on Capitol Hill each year. But we have to kind of cover it with some amount of seriousness. And so there are definitely these sort of moments of political life.

The State of the Union is another great example where it's something where there's a lot of breathless anticipation. People watch it every year. Primetime news coverage. We all cut in. And when you go back through history, I think the last kind of state of the union or joint session of Congress that really changed. politics changed the political medium was right after JFK was shot,

LBJ went and pushed in that joint session for the Civil Rights Act. And that was a really memorable speech, and it might have pushed the Civil Rights Act over the finish line. But that was also, you know, 60-plus years ago. And these state-of-the-union addresses probably get an outsized amount of attention for what they are. But there's a little bit, and I think this is true, you know, in sports, right, people fight over who the NBA MVP is going to be every year for months. It's just like a lot of content.

But you look back 10 years ago and you're like, well, Michael Jordan should have won every year. And then LeBron should have won every year after that. But it just kind of there are these deadlines or events or things that we all look at that do tend to generate sort of an outsized moment. But I think it is also worth. you know, with this this jobs report number in particular saying, okay, this was a weird moment in time. This is definitely something that should at least be kind of flashing a light of we need to keep an eye on this. Because if we really are struggling to bring jobs back, I mean, we could be facing a sort of unexpected, longer, deeper recession from the pandemic than anybody has been sort of anticipating. Well, I'm still not sure I feel about this new cycle, but you've helped a lot.

One more question before we let you go. And we'll stop talking about jobs reports just for the remainder of the interview. Sure, yeah. How is the White House press briefings, how has it been in the White House press shop since Joe Biden's been president? How is the, how is the environment changed from one administration to the next? it's a little different I think I could fairly say I think

you know to some extent how you feel about how things have changed are going to be totally colored by how you feel about Donald Trump versus Joe Biden but in terms of the actual kind of physical elements of it I think the things that are most remarkable that have changed

one is that the Biden White House has taken our COVID safety a lot more seriously so everybody who comes in the press room is tested every single day. There's more spacing. There's more distance. Everybody in the White House itself is wearing masks, and a lot of them aren't coming in. They're working remotely. So that's just a physical difference, right? Where you get in the building a little bit less, you're more distance when you are, but there's a greater sense of physical safety,

especially before vaccinations really ramped up. And then the other is just in terms of, you know, the press operation itself. On the one hand, Kaylee and her predecessor is briefed infrequently where Jen Saki has done it every single day or nearly every day. She takes questions from everybody in the room. It's much more like when I covered the Obama administration a sort of regularity of that. And I think that something Jen's talked about and something that I think is definitely true is that when you have these briefings every day and you're committed to taking questions, it forces a president and administration to sort of come to answers on questions. And so there's a little bit more organization you see around policy in that extent.

But on the other hand, you know, a sort of an amazing part of covering Donald Trump was nearly every day you had a chance to shout a question at him directly and to ask him what he thought about the news of the day or frequently anything else he was interested in. talking to. And, you know, without kind of getting into whether or not that was good for the sort of political experiment as a whole, it was a really unique and interesting window into a president that I think we haven't seen before and are unlikely to see again because it just kind of breeds chaos, but it also gives what I think was one of his main political selling points, which is just sort of that unfiltered view into him. And so it's definitely been a dramatic change, a reversion a bit to how things were before. And it can cut either way. But I think it's a, it at least feels a little more normal or more what we're used to in the briefing room.

Well, thanks for that window inside the briefing room and inside jobs reports numbers. And we're going to, I have a feeling we're going to be. talking again soon. Thank you. Thank you for being the Sherpa on episode one of David Shoemaker tries to understand economics. My 11th grade economics teacher, I'm sure to be very proud of me. Justin Sink, White House correspondent for Bloomberg. Thank you so much for doing this. Have a good afternoon, man. Thanks for having me. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. Today's headline comes from Garrett Watson and Adam Cortez. It's from

TVO.org, which is TV Ontario's website. I will read you the subhead, David. If summer camps don't get some clarity soon on whether they'll be allowed to reopen, presumably this is Ontario summer camps here. Not that that's important.

Some may never reopen. If the summer camps can't figure out whether they're allowed to reopen, they may never reopen. What was TV Ontario's strained pun headline. Um, yeah.

I mean, I'm trying, I feel like I'm immediately going to like Camp Crystal Lake or something like that. Is it a fake summer camp that I'm looking for or no? Is this going to be like a canoe pun, a fire, campfire, can't, can't, uh, um, I think you should start with a famous kind of summer camp or genre of summer camp. uh like sleepaway camp or like uh one you and i never like fat camp or uh no i don't know one one you and i

didn't go to but maybe your sister uh went to at some point like girl scout camp we i don't know brownie what would the girl camp have been i have no no no what does she do what does this to do oh music camp yeah which is called we call band camp band camp so uh band camp uh canned camp uh canned camp can't What if we just spell the word slightly differently? A, N-N-N-E-D, Band Camp. Band Camp. Yeah, that's good. That's good.

Question mark in the original. Band Camp? Good work, TV, Ontario. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Thursday with NASCAR driver-turned announcer, Jeff Gordon. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.