His first byline: Ryan Teague Beckwith explains why he’s so driven
The creator of the Your First Byline newsletter is a journalism lifer: “They’re gonna have to drag me away from the keyboard.”
When Bloomberg laid off DC-based politics writer Ryan Teague Beckwith in fall 2023, he decided he needed a new project to keep himself occupied. “I didn’t really want to create something that was about politics,” Beckwith tells Depth Perception. Instead, he sought inspiration from his job teaching journalism at the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies, a graduate program.
“There was always one class each semester where I say, ‘We’re just going to set the syllabus aside and talk about how to get a job.’ Let’s talk about getting clips and networking and all of that,” he says. “That was always the best-received class of the semester. So I asked my students, ‘Would you subscribe to something that told you how to get a job in journalism?’ They were like, ‘Oh, heck yeah.’”
So in November 2023, Beckwith launched Your First Byline, a newsletter best known for its recurring interview feature My First Byline, in which professional writers and editors talk about how they got their starts. There have been entries from big names — Beckwith cites Karen Tumulty, Chris Cillizza, and Taylor Lorenz — but even more with folks you’re probably not familiar with. “One of the goals here,” he says, “is to show that this industry is so much more than the 250 or so people that you hear about who work at the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
In January, Beckwith started a new job as newsletter editor and columnist at MSNBC. But he continues to put out Your First Byline every day. Depth Perception recently turned the tables on Beckwith, asking him to sit for our own recurring interview feature, Leading Questions. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm
I’m going to steal the question you ask in your newsletter: What was your first byline?
My first byline was not mine. It was my sister’s. She is five years older than me, and she went to the University of Oregon, where she majored in journalism. On one of her trips back home, she asked if I wanted to go for a ride, and we were driving around town. She handed me the student magazine for the journalism school, and there was an article by her about students planting trees. It was the first time that I’d actually seen something in print by someone I knew. It just made it feel like a real viable career path.
On an earlier trip home, she’d asked if I wanted to go for a ride with her, and I said no, I was busy doing stuff. She was involved in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury, the effects of which took a while to show up. She was able to graduate on time, and she even had an internship at a magazine in Seattle, and eventually ended up going into PR before the effects of the traumatic brain injury surfaced. She’s still around; she’s just not the same person.
I think I probably would have been someone who was very driven in journalism, regardless. But there’s a sort of funny side effect of survivor’s guilt that you feel like you need to live for two. So I think the reason why I do this job, and this side hustle where I tell people about how to do this job — and then I also teach journalism and help my wife run a hyperlocal news site and have four kids — is that I’m probably trying to compensate for feeling guilt over that. Hopefully I’ve channeled it into something that’s been a net positive for the world.
What story of yours are you the proudest of?
When I was a small town newspaper reporter, I was at a city meeting and they were discussing the new water supply system. There was this briefly awkward moment where a guy said, “And this is where you would have fluoride, if you were going to do that.” And they all just kind of looked at each other. I asked my boss about it. He said, “Oh, a few years ago, the neighboring town was going to have fluoride and this chiropractor showed up and opposed it, and it became this whole thing, and they actually had a fistfight in the city council meeting. And so that’s why it was awkward, and that’s why they’re not doing it.”
So I wrote a story about how this came up and how they’re not doing it. I got some experts to weigh in. And my boss was like, “Oh, you just wait and see, there’ll be a bunch of angry letters.” But there weren’t. At the next city council meeting, one member looked at the others, and he goes, “I proposed we add fluoride.” And they all quietly said, “Yea,” and no one said anything else about it. But it was clear they would not have done it if I hadn’t written the story. That’s an impact that you can have as a small town reporter that I just don't think you can have at any other level of journalism, unless you are writing Pulitzer-winning exposés that take months and months to put together.
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What is a widely accepted journalistic rule or norm that you hate?
There are a whole bunch of things on which journalists disagree, where I really see both sides. And it’s in part because I’ve worked in so many different kinds of places: at a fancy city magazine, at an alt-weekly, at a small town newspaper, at a big city newspaper, at a national weekly news magazine, at a cable network, at a chain of newspapers, at a wire service. There’s lots of places where people would say, “We don’t use anonymous sources,” and other places where they’re like, “We couldn’t survive without anonymous sources.”
Pick a rule, and I’ve seen places that played by that rule or broke that rule. Ultimately, society is served by all of these people doing their own thing and doing it in their own way. If that means that this place does access journalism and just gets all the quotes from the people but doesn’t really do very good analysis of it, and this place has no access but regularly explains those quotes, then together those two things help society.
Journalism school: yea or nay?
It depends. I went to Columbia Journalism School. I have taught at a community college, two state schools, plus Georgetown’s graduate program and another private college. So obviously, I’m not opposed to journalism school. I don’t think it’s necessary, but I can see circumstances where it might be your only way into the industry. It’s possible to break your way into journalism through internships or freelancing, but to do that, you need to know how to do journalism, which you may not be able to figure out on your own. So if going to journalism school will help you break in when you can't figure out another way in, then I think it can be beneficial.
It can also be a way to level up. A lot of my students have been working in the field for a few years and feel stuck. They come back to journalism school to try to get some different skills or network or get some references from professors in order to break out of the box that they’re in.
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What’s the worst piece of journalistic career advice you ever received?
I was at my first job, at a very small newspaper, for about five years. I remember meeting with a recruiter once, and she was like, “You stayed there too long.” I was like, “There’s actually a lot of complicated reasons why I stayed, and I think I actually got a lot out of it in the long run.” But she was just very dismissive. I really, really disliked that interaction with that particular recruiter. I don’t like anyone who tries to tell you that there’s only one way to do this job, or that there’s only one way to get into this field.
One thing that I have learned from all of the people who I’ve interviewed for Your First Byline is that there is definitely a Type A path where you work on your college newspaper, and then you do several internships, and then you get an entry level job as a reporter somewhere and work your way up. But there are also a whole bunch of bonkers stories about people getting a job in journalism that have just blown me away. Ruth Graham told the story about hanging out in a bar in New York. Someone else in the bar turned out to be an editor at a paper, and they got talking. The editor was like, “Why don’t you drop by my office on Monday?” Somehow that became a job.
It gives me so much hope for the future of journalism that there’s still people out there with really good jobs who got their start in the most insane way possible. Because it shows that, at some level, we are still a meritocracy. You can still get a job in journalism by just being good at it and wanting it.
What would you do if you didn’t have this career?
I’ve thought about that a lot. Other than working in an Italian deli and selling classified ads, I basically have not done anything other than journalism and teaching journalism. And all I’ve ever wanted to do is journalism and teaching. Honestly, I can’t even picture myself doing anything else at this point. They’re gonna have to drag me away from the keyboard.
Further reading from Ryan Teague Beckwith
“The Craziest Stories We’ve Heard From Journalists About How They Got Their First Byline” (Your First Byline, Dec. 15, 2024)
“Should You Create a Portfolio Website for Your Journalism?” (Your First Byline, Dec. 29, 2024)
“The Remarkable History of a Bladensburg Church” (The Hyattsville Wire, Sept. 10, 2018)
“The New Rule of Politics Is Never Bothering to Say You’re Sorry” (Bloomberg Businessweek, March 20, 2021, via Medium)
“America's most misunderstood region has lost its bard” (MSNBC, Feb. 12, 2025
“Elon Musk's new look sends a message” (MSNBC, March 1, 2025)
I met Ryan way back about 2004. I was busy establishing a nonprofit to help people living with mental illness. He wrote an amazing story & helped me get the word out. I will always remember him. Thank you, Ryan.