Rory Gilmore is a terrible journalist

Brian’s note: This is the first in a series of posts about the fictional portrayal of journalists. Now, this is not about a sports journalist, but it captures what I hope will be the vibe of these posts.

Background: My wife Jen and I tag-teamed this post almost eight years ago for the OG Sports Media Guy site. We were watching the Gilmore Girls “A Year in the Life” reboot on Netflix when a scene made us both yell at the TV and grab our laptops. You’ll know it when we get there. My wife, who is far more steeped in Gilmore Girls lore than I am, helped me with the factual content and the tone. This is mostly the original post, with some tweaks and a few things about “why this matters” taken out. I’ve added some footnotes for context. Anyway, enjoy. 

Rory Gilmore is a terrible journalist. Can we talk about this?¹

To be fair, the revival already does a pretty good job of making it clear that her big-time journalism career isn’t going to happen. Instead, she’s probably going to run the Stars Hollow Gazette—which is great! Thumbs-up, always, for community newspapers. But the entire pre-revival series, and much of the revival itself, goes on and on about Rory’s very serious, standout journalism career.

Except … Rory Gilmore is a terrible journalist.

Season 1 Rory Gilmore. From Wikipedia.

For as long as we know her, we’re told she’s essentially a prodigy, a brilliant soul and a sparkling writer. Which, honestly, goes against what we’re shown. After a lot of fumbling, she earns a journalism degree from Yale, which doesn’t actually offer a journalism undergrad. (OK, let’s suspend disbelief.) Her career, as far as we can piece together, is exactly one talk-of-the-town piece in The New Yorker a full decade after graduating from college. Everyone raves about it and one dude seriously compares her to David Foster Wallace — and then we eventually find out the piece is about a feminist activist with a relevant and not-so-secret drinking problem that Rory neglected to mention. And she was trying to write a book about her. Without a contract. Long distance? And then got fired. I don’t know.

So the New Yorker piece is the basis of her career, along with some freelance pieces in Slate and The Atlantic and hey, what about all that time she covered Obama on the campaign trail? Nobody mentions it, even though it would have to be easily the most impressive item on her resume, so let’s assume it was mediocre or didn’t last long.

From what we actually see on screen, Rory’s a terrible journalist. And the revival did a great job of cementing it in one yell-at-the-screen scene. 

A side note from Jen: Before we talk about that (and now that we’ve had a few years to have a healthy think about this), let’s throw this out there: The only way Rory’s career trajectory makes sense is if Amy Sherman-Palladino knew exactly what she was doing and wrote “A Year in the Life” as a Rory takedown. I don’t hate it. Because I kind of hate Rory. Anyway.

Midway through the spring episode, she gets a vague spec assignment from GQ to write about people who wait in lines. Think cronuts, rainbow bagels and Nike drops. And look, I get that this is a story, but it’s not a story for a prodigy who’s being heralded for Pulitzer-worthy pieces in The New Yorker. It’s a piece for Andie Anderson before she figures out how to lose Matthew McConaughey in 10 days.² It’s a terrible assignment for anyone other than an intern or a rookie, but a good journalist can find a good story in just about anything. And remember, we’re told that Rory is a good journalist.

She hits a few lines of people, with her mom in tow. (Wrong.) She interviews a few line-standers and never asks their names. (Wrong.) She falls asleep during an interview. (Do I need to say “Wrong”?) She doesn’t even have a bag with her. WHAT IF YOUR PHONE DIES, RORY? WHAT’S YOUR BACKUP PLAN? (So, wrong.) 

And then she comes to a line where the people actually don’t know what they’re waiting in line for.³ They’re just there. Waiting in lines is trendy, and someone is waiting in a line, so they need to be there, too. Turns out, the front of this line is just three dudes eating their lunch on a stoop and people have lined up behind them. Everyone’s in line for nothing.

Let’s pause for a little pop quiz. What’s a more interesting story?

Option A: These people waited in line for six hours to buy new sneakers.

Option B: These people waited in line for six hours without realizing it wasn’t really a line. Our societal obsession with being a part of whatever is happening at any moment has gone so far that people are wasting hours of their lives for literally nothing. 

Rory Gilmore, prodigy journalist, picks Option A. She WALKS AWAY. Giggling with her mom. (I think.)

Guys, she’s 32. She covered a future president, I guess. I can’t remember if they ever bring it up again, so I’m really starting to assume that, much like her journalism career, that didn’t work out like she had hoped. In case you hadn’t heard, she was published in The New Yorker one time. Ten years into her career and she should be a seasoned journalist by any standards. She was doing a story about people waiting in lines, freshman stuff. She found people waiting in line for nothing, with a hook journalists would be giddy for … and walked away. (And then maybe came back and slept with a source wearing a Wookiee costume. Wrong.)

So this is when my wife and I, former journalists, current editor and journalism professor, sat up and yelled “THAT’S YOUR STORY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

This is undoubtedly how doctors feel when they watch “Grey’s Anatomy” or the Archangels feel when they watch “The Good Place.”

But here’s the thing. Writing 101: Write what you know. If you don’t know journalism, don’t write about it. One of the Gilmore Girls’ shining moments was watching Doyle — Paris’ former better half — rattle off his big movie writing accomplishments, something the actor has done in real life and Sherman-Palladino and her writing partner/husband Daniel know a thing or two about. It felt real because for them, it is real. It’s what they know.

They don’t know journalism and therefore, neither did Rory. A little job shadowing, a few questions to someone who actually does the job and it’s an easy career to mimic. Again, some credit that maybe this was always intentional, that Rory is supposed to be a terrible journalist and the joke’s on her, not us. But that feels a little too introspective for this show and the layers and layers of praise piled on her. To that point, the only character who ever had an appropriate reaction to Rory’s journalism skills was Mitchum Huntzberger,⁴ who nailed it when he told her she didn’t have what it takes. Before the fade to black, he was villainized and disregarded.

The point is that Rory Gilmore is a terrible journalist. Maybe she’d have been a great English-major-turned-essayist, a fiction author, a writer at large, a blogger. I’d absolutely follow her BookTok. 

But at the end of the day, we were given a saving grace as the revival wound down and managed to right itself a bit, forcing Rory to change course, take the reins at her small-town paper, and write a book about — wait for it — what she knows.

1.  I get a decent amount of Gilmore Girls content served to me on Instagram, given the amount of it I share with my wife, kid and sister. And it’s truly wonderful to see the consensus opinion take shape that Rory truly is the worst. 

2.  Jen wrote this line, and I hate her for it because it’s so good.

3.  It took a minute, but we’ve finally gotten to the point. 

4.  We can all agree that Logan is the best match for Rory, right? Like, OK, maybe Jess is the best possible boyfriend. But if we are talking who is the best fit and match for Rory as she actually is, it’s 100% Logan.