Aaron Robertson ’17 joined journalism students from the Class of 2025 for the program’s Senior Colloquium, held on April 30, 2025. He delivered a keynote speech with advice to young journalists. The remarks, as prepared, are below.
Hi everyone—thank you so much to the Journalism department, and especially to Eliza Griswold, for the invitation to be here today. It really means a lot.
I want to start with some context: I only took one journalism course at Princeton. But it was a great one—John McPhee’s creative nonfiction class. Every week, we’d climb the stairs to his office in the tower of Guyot Hall and watch him walk through our stories with a kind of surgical patience. He cared deeply about structure, pacing, and clarity—but what I remember most is how seriously he took our work. Every sentence got his attention. Every revision felt like an invitation to look harder, to think more deliberately, to respect the reader by being precise. That experience taught me something I’ve carried ever since: journalism isn’t just about gathering facts—it’s about designing meaning from them. And that design requires care.
Around the same time—late 2015 or early 2016—I took a course with Professor Ruha Benjamin here called “Black to the Future.” It was a class about race, design, and speculative futures. We discussed how systems get built, who gets to imagine the future, and how to create new societal structures when the old ones aren’t serving us. That class shifted my perspective. It made me more attuned to stories on the margins, to people imagining different ways of living and attempting to translate that imagination into reality.
These are experiences I brought with me when I started an internship at the Detroit Metro Times in the summer of 2016. It was a general assignment internship, but I quickly found myself drawn to arts and culture stories—stuff that felt less “urgent” in the traditional newsroom sense, but incredibly alive to me. I started asking to cover gallery openings, small theater productions, music collectives. Eventually, I worked on my biggest story of the summer, about ONE Mile Detroit—a kind of creative lab and gathering space in the city’s North End neighborhood. It was a home base for musicians, artists, architects, authors, entrepreneurs, and community organizers to dream big and build locally. The kind of place where, if you just listened long enough, you’d find someone reinventing the wheel in a way you hadn’t thought possible.
That summer taught me a lot about what I actually valued in journalism: patience, immersion, curiosity. I felt like I didn’t always know the right questions to ask, but I was learning how to recognize when a story had layers—and how to hang around long enough to understand them.
Now, fast forward two years. It’s 2018, and I’m interning on the New York Times Metro desk. Very different environment. High adrenaline, tight deadlines. It was a masterclass in how to report efficiently under pressure—and also, if I’m being honest, a moment of real clarity for me.
It became obvious, almost immediately, that some of my peers were built for that world. They loved breaking news. They lived for it. You could see them light up when a story broke at 9 a.m. (or 8, or 7…) and needed to be filed by noon, complete with on-the-ground interviews and a quote from the mayor’s office. And they were good at it. Meanwhile, I felt like I was sitting there Googling things like “what is a transportation committee meeting and what do they do,” trying to write something coherent before lunch.
It was a humbling experience. But also a useful one. Because it reminded me—again—that there are many ways to be a journalist. Some people thrive on urgency. Some people need time. Some want to hold power to account in real-time. Others want to unearth the slow histories that explain how we got here. Journalism needs all of us.
And that brings me to all of you.
You’re graduating into a challenging but absolutely critical moment for journalism. The industry is changing fast. Revenue models are collapsing, platforms are in flux, and public trust is harder to earn than ever. But maybe most importantly, we’re watching real threats emerge—again—to the freedom of the press. Here in the U.S., not just abroad. Independent journalists and massive news organizations are being sued, smeared, surveilled, discouraged. The chilling effect is real. And yet the work remains vital. In fact, it’s never been more vital in our lifetimes.
This is a moment that calls for courage and clarity. For a refusal to self-censor out of fear or exhaustion. That doesn’t mean being reckless—it means holding fast to the basic principle that the truth matters. Bearing witness matters. People deserve to understand the forces shaping their lives—and someone should be paying attention.
It’s okay to want a career. It’s okay to want recognition. But let your integrity guide your ambition. Let your care for others guide your storytelling. That’s not fluff—it’s the most important professional skill you can develop.
The best journalism, I think, is an act of empathy as much as inquiry. You don’t just show up and extract a quote. You ask questions that make space for people to be fully themselves. And then you shape those answers into stories that help others understand something essential—about a person, a place, a policy, a crisis. You hold up a mirror, but you do it with precision, and with respect.
John McPhee taught me to structure ideas with intention. Ruha Benjamin taught me to look at who’s designing the world around us. And journalism, at its best, lets us do both: tell stories that are architecturally sound and civically meaningful. You already have the instincts. You already have the foundation. Now it’s just about choosing how to use them—and refusing to settle for stories that make you smaller, or less curious, or less brave.
We need you, truly, and I’m so excited to see what you do next. Congratulations, Class of 2025!
Robertson is a writer, editor, journalist, and translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. His book “The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America” was a finalist for the 2024 LA Times Book Prize in History and was named among the “best books of 2024” by publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Essence, The New Yorker, and more.
At Princeton, Roberson concentrated in Italian and earned a certificate in African American studies. In addition to taking John McPhee’s “Creative Nonfiction” course, he was also awarded a Ferris Summer Grant from the Humanities Council and the Program in Journalism, which provided support for his internship at the Detroit Metro Times in Summer 2016.
