Deez Interviews: Meet the defense reporter who’s fighting for government transparency & refusing to chase eyeballs for eyeballs’ sake

Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Caroline Houck, who covers U.S. security and national defense. She talked to us about dealing with the Pentagon, knowing your audience’s needs, and the one big natsec story we should all be following more closely.

Enjoy!

//

The interviewee: Caroline Houck (follow her @carolinehouck)

The gig: Staff correspondent at Defense One

The daily hustle: I'm in the process of defining my own beat, which is super exciting (and not stressful at all, it's totally fine, everything's fine), and it's shaping up to be something like national security/defense politics.

So sometimes I spend my day on Capitol Hill, listening to a general testify, or, say, chasing down lawmakers to ask how they think the US should respond to Syria's use of chemical weapons.

Or I might be at the Pentagon to talk to someone about legislative reforms to foreign arms sales. Or maybe I'm looking into what the lawsuits against the travel ban can tell us about those against Trump's ban on transgender service members.

I also run Defense One's Twitter account, occasionally help with news production, and generally write about random fun things that come across my plate that maybe have nothing to do with politics.

National security sounds like it’s insanely complicated (and so high stakes!) to cover. What are some of the unique challenges that come with this beat?

Classification. Because #nationalsecurity. But really, there's been this push at the Pentagon to lock down the information that gets out.

The Defense Secretary and others in the building are worried that by, say, providing data on the number of troops deployed in Syria or talking in detail about problems with weapons, they'll give potential enemies valuable intel.

And look, I get their point. But a) a lot of this information has been available for years and they're only now pulling it off the web/behind closed doors, b) it's U.S. taxpayers' money they're asking for to buy new weapons, and c) there's this feeling that it's spread and created more general reticence to talk to the press.

Idk, dude. It's a fine balance to walk, but it's part of a worrying trend of less government transparency — I know we're not the only ones, but it's definitely something on the Pentagon press corps' mind.

You’re the only female reporter at Defense One. Is that typical for this field in journalism?

Journalism as an industry can still be a boys club sometimes, can't it? I've never been a professional journalist outside the natsec beat, so I don't know how it compares. And I'm not going to tell you everything's hunky-dory with gender equality in this part of the field (it's not).

But there's a coterie of badass female reporters at the Pentagon. If I start name-dropping, I won't stop. But there's the fixtures in the Pentagon briefing room who always ask the toughest questions, the reporters so seasoned they've lost limbs covering the wars, the relative newcomers who know more about military aviation than anyone else — I could go on. I'm the only woman on Defense One's reporting/editorial team, but by no means the only woman covering the military.

What kind of audience are you writing for?

We try to straddle this line between being niche and mass-appeal. So the bulk of our audience is in some way connected to the natsec world — they serve in the military, work for a defense contractor, are on the Hill for a member or senator on a defense or foreign policy committee — and we write stories that give them what they need to be informed decision-makers. They're already interested in the world, you just need to find the news or unique angles that add to what they already know.

But we also write knowing that some of our audience doesn't live in this world. I try to reach them by tying smaller news items into the bigger trends. Nationally, I think we're all subconsciously worried about security, evidenced by all the talk about nuclear war, Russia, terrorism, etc. These are the things the Pentagon is concerned about too, the things I write about. I've just gotta link them up.

You began at Defense One before the Trump administration began. Has there been a noticeable change in the pace of your work since he took office?

Honestly, I don't know any different. Sure, the news cycle has only accelerated, like a vehicle with its brakes cut racing wildly downhill, gathering speed as it goes, but when I started in the summer of 2016, it was already crazy fast. I've never been a professional journalist in a time when news lasted more than a day (if that). What was that like? Was it nice? If so, don't tell me. I assume it's like home ownership or retirement — a nice idea for an older generation, not something mine will enjoy.

So yeah, burnout happens. The one thing I have in my favor is the Defense One ethos — we cover news, but we're not in the business of rewriting every scoop the NYT has or putting out 300 words on every vaguely nat-sec thing the president says.

We know our audience and what they come to us for — things that show where the future of defense is headed — and we're not trying to chase eyeballs on something everyone else has. I also give a lot of credit to my bosses for living that vision, recognizing the limits of our relatively small staff, and knowing we all have lives outside of work. That makes my workload easier than a lot of my peers.

What's the most interesting story going on in national defense that you think deserves more attention from the general public?

Dude, space force. No, I'm joking.

In actuality, I think it's a story that the general public's maybe just starting to engage with after the four soldiers were killed in Niger: The spread of US counterterrorism activities around the globe. In Africa, yes. But elsewhere too!

Top military officials are talking about the next phase of fighting ISIS as this global effort to go after them wherever the group metastasizes and links up with local extremist movements, and to cut the connective tissue between these networked groups.

I don't mean we should expect a new Iraq War wherever a group springs up, but small batches of US troops helping any number of countries' militaries fight local extremists? Definitely. We've already seen small numbers of US forces dispatched to help fight an ISIS-affiliated group in the Philippines. Where next? Is the US public ready to wrestle with that kind of global war?

//

And on that ponderous note is where we leave you for the weekend. See you Monday! And don’t forget to follow Caroline @carolinehouck!

Like Deez Links? Forward this to the space force though.