Transcript: Steven Scherer
An interview with the American journalist
We live in an age of economic precarity and journalists are not exempt from this. My guest on the program this week has written a powerful Substack essay about his path from foreign correspondent to Uber driver, and how his troubles have helped him to forge a sense of solidarity with the people he drives to work.
Steven Scherer is an American journalist and a former Canadian bureau chief for Reuters.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: The state of the media is something that we’ve covered a lot here. As you know, I’ve argued that the root of so many of our problems is economic precarity — on the level of organizations and institutions, yes, but also on an individual level. You published a Substack essay last week about your own story that has gotten a huge response. For listeners, you are a veteran journalist, a foreign correspondent. Until recently, you were the Ottawa bureau chief for Reuters here in Canada. To start today, Steve, give us a snapshot of your career history, what you’ve covered, and what you see as the highlights of those years.
SS: Sure. I graduated from college in 1992. It was a recession, and so I didn’t know what to do with myself. I decided I better get something together, some sort of skill that is marketable. So, I went to grad school for journalism, and I graduated in ’93 from Northwestern University. It’s just north of Chicago, in Evanston, Illinois, and they have a pretty good journalism school called the Medill School of Journalism.
I dabbled in journalism once I finished, but didn’t dive in head-first until later. I left the United States in 1997 to teach English and do some freelance writing in Romania. I did that for a year, and it was a great experience. But I realized I wasn’t going to make ends meet there, so I moved to Italy. I had been to Italy as a high school student. I was an exchange student, and so I learned Italian and lived with an Italian family. I thought, “Well, if I can’t make it in Romania, I’ll try to go to Italy and see if they need any journalists there.” It turned out they did. Within about three months, I found a job with an international news agency in English, [doing] financial news predominantly. It was called Bridge News. It was what had been Knight Ridder. I started working for them in Rome in 1998 and essentially never left Rome for 21 years. I moved to Bloomberg shortly after. I worked at Bloomberg for more than ten years, and then after that I moved to Reuters, always in Rome, and stayed there. Ultimately, it was about twelve years, but I was only in Italy with Reuters for about six years. Then I was promoted by Reuters to become the Ottawa bureau chief and chief Canadian correspondent.
I arrived in Ottawa with my family in tow in 2019. Unfortunately for us, about eight months later, COVID hit. So, it was kind of a rough move. My kids struggled because at the time, they were in elementary school and then middle school. It was just a really tough time to be a journalist, too, to be honest. I was working constantly. I stayed in Ottawa for five years and then I got laid off in March of 2024.
During my career for the financial news agencies, I mostly covered economics and politics. That was my bread and butter, really, which meant policy as well — things like the big policies, elections, things like that. Reuters also did a lot of general news coverage. I covered the European migration crisis for about five years, and that shows up in the essay I wrote.
So, I’ve covered lots of different things, and worked at pretty high levels. I’ve interviewed prime ministers. I’ve interviewed central bankers. I followed the Bank of Canada for five years. I was the bureau chief, so I was in charge of our coverage of it. I had a pretty good run. It’s a difficult job. I recognized that while I was doing it, and I still do — very long hours and sometimes not a lot of appreciation. But I consider myself a journalist and I had a really good run as a foreign correspondent, for twenty-five years.
That brings you up to where we are today. I was laid off in 2024 amid budget cuts in the industry, and I had a hard time staying in Canada. Which is something I wrote about in the essay as well. I had a work permit, but it was tied to my job. After I lost my job, I wasn’t allowed to work legally in Canada. I eventually had to leave, so I sold the house and tried to let my kids finish the school year there, and we left Canada. My family ironically left Canada on July 1st of last year, Canada Day, and I left three days later, July 4th, to move to the United States, on Independence Day.
That brings us to Washington. Here, I’ve been looking for a job and writing off and on for myself, for Substack — not for money, just because I like to write. This essay has been fun. I tell people that I think it’s a great story, I just wish it weren’t mine. That’s still how I feel. You do whatever you can for your family, even if it means driving a taxi or an Uber. But I knew it was a good story and I knew I wanted to tell it in a compassionate way and in a way that would make other people understand that there’s a lot of people like us out there. I didn’t want to be angry about it.
I came back to a country I didn’t recognize. I hadn’t lived here for 28 years. I had visited. But now coming back to live in the United States, I felt very isolated, very alienated. It didn’t seem like the country that I remembered when I came back, and that struck me. I tried to put a lot of those things together in a personal essay, and I’ve had a lot of feedback. I really touched a nerve. I’ve heard from dozens and dozens of journalists since I put it out, a lot of them in a really precarious situation like me.
TH: I want to come back to that, for sure. I think it’s something that we all relate to right now in this industry. I do want to just fill in a few gaps for the listeners. When you left Canada, your wife is Italian and she chose to go back to Italy so she could live rent-free with family there. Initially, your kids were there too.
SS: Yeah, for six months we were separated. That was really hard. I chose to go to Washington because I felt like it was the place where I could find a job. Most of the journalism jobs in the United States are in Washington. And also, there’s all kinds of other things that involve writers — there’s research, there’s think tanks and policy and so on. So, yeah, we separated and I left them for six months. I didn’t see them. That was probably the hardest part of my journey so far.
TH: What did that mean for you to have to go through that?
SS: The hardest part was not knowing when I’d see them again. I was here in Washington sending off résumés, trying to meet people, living in a basement apartment. It was just really miserable, I think, to have to separate myself from my family. I know lots of people do it. I wrote about immigration, and a lot of people were travelling without their families and trying to move to Europe so that they could bring their families with them. I had a hard time understanding some of that when I was covering it, because I just wasn’t in that position — desperate, essentially. When I was covering it, I would see people with their children going on these boats, which are clearly unsafe, and putting their lives at risk, and I had a hard time understanding why a parent would do that.
So, it was enlightening for me to be at a point where I was willing to separate — where I had to separate myself from my family for practical reasons. I don’t think I’m at that point where I’d be willing to get on a boat yet, like they were forced to. But I’m not living in Libya either, so there’s a big difference.
Anyway, it really did bring home to me the feeling of having reversed my role. I was the one collecting stories and putting them out there for people who couldn’t tell their own stories. That’s one of the things that journalists, I think, do well — they tell stories for people who can’t tell their own story, disenfranchised people maybe who don’t have a way of getting it out, or maybe don’t know how to express it or don’t have an outlet. For many years that’s what I did, and then I found myself — no pun intended here — being in the same boat as them. Having to try to put down my experience in an honest but also somewhat dispassionate way. Because the last thing I wanted was for it to sound like a “poor me” essay. I wanted it to relate to other people, and I wanted other people to see themselves in it. I didn’t want it to be just about me.
The last thing I wanted was for it to sound like a “poor me” essay. I wanted it to relate to other people, and I wanted other people to see themselves in it. I didn’t want it to be just about me.
TH: I think that’s one of the striking elements of the essay — that there’s an absence of self-pity. Your essay is oriented toward those that you interact with now on a day-to-day basis, and that empathy and connection that you feel. I see echoes in the essay with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, where she went and reported among workers in the States. I thought that was a really powerful book. I want to read a quote from your essay: “I see my own fragility reflected in the people climbing into my back seat before dawn — widows, migrants, parents, workers stitching together lives on the margins. We are all improvising, all one broken transmission or missed paycheque away from something worse. For the first time in my life, I am no longer observing this precarious world from the outside, notebook in hand. I am inside it, dependent on an algorithm, measuring my worth in five-dollar increments.” So moving. Talk about some of the people you’ve encountered and the stories that stand out to you.
SS: The shocking thing to me when I started driving was that most of the people I encountered were low-income workers. They were people in the service industry. The first three people I picked up on my first day were schoolteachers going to school. None of them were white Americans. They were all either Latino or South Asian. Everybody else was going to work in the early morning hours. I was really struck by the fact that all of them are using Uber to get to work. I mean, it’s a service for them. It’s a service for the service economy.
I commented to one person — an Uber driver who saw the essay and reached out to me — I said, “I feel like we’re the grease on the wheels of the service economy.” We get them to work and get them home. While they’re at work, they’re feeding us breakfast or they’re taking care of us in the hospital. I’ve taken nurses to the hospital. Or they are fixing our cars. Pretty much anything you can imagine that you would do in the course of your day. Go to the grocery store and they are the cashiers. So yeah, that’s the thing that has struck me the most. [Uber] is not just for people who go out and party on a Saturday night and don’t want to drive, or for businessmen flying in or out. It’s a lot more than that. My average rider is going to or from work and is a low-income worker who for some reason can’t drive or doesn’t have a car.
TH: I want to talk more about this theme of precarity. I think there’s a real perception in the public that we in the media are part of the elites. At the uppermost echelons, that’s true. But for those of us that are rank-and-file, I think you do a good job of driving home how close to financial chaos so many of us are, with the state of our industry right now. What do you think the consequences are of this level of precarity on the business, and on us as journalists?
