Dom Einhorn

I have never held one. My writing has always run alongside building companies rather than instead of it. The closest thing to a first commission is the one now in progress: a German-language essay on the Alsatian and Moselle Franconian languages, accepted by Die Rheinpfalz. Before that, everything appeared under my own name on my own terms, which is a different discipline, and an easier one.

Yes, in the late seventies and early eighties, on a French machine. Which means an AZERTY keyboard, and the specific misery of accented characters: é and è had their own keys, but circumflexes and cedillas involved dead keys and a certain amount of hope. The thing I actually remember is the cost of a sentence. On a typewriter you compose the whole thing in your head before touching a key, because correcting means correction fluid, a retype, or living with it. Writing on a screen let me start sentences without knowing how they end, which is faster and, I suspect, worse. There is a second thing. On a typewriter you cannot rearrange. The order in which you think is the order that appears on the page, and if the structure is wrong you retype it all. That produces a certain discipline about deciding the shape first. I would not go back. But when a paragraph is not working, I still find that the fix is usually to close the laptop and work out what the sentence is before writing it, which is a typewriter habit surviving in an unrelated machine.

Everyone talks about distribution. The change I have actually experienced is in collection. I published a short piece about a language disappearing, expecting a few hundred readers. Four hundred people replied, most of them in their seventies and eighties, and what they brought was not opinion. It was evidence: eleven separate accounts of the same slur, six accounts of school punishments, all six independently placing them in the playground rather than the classroom, one dated to 1949, one to 1956, one within the last decade. Four readers from Moselle corrected my framing and were right. None of that was hidden. It was distributed across a few thousand private memories that had never been assembled, because each person assumed their experience was a personal embarrassment rather than a policy outcome. No archive holds it. No historian could have collected it without years of fieldwork. That is genuinely new, and it is the good half. The bad half is that none of it is durable. A Facebook thread is unsearchable within a week and gone within a few years. I gathered a small original corpus on a platform that guarantees its disappearance, which is a strange thing to say about material documenting a disappearance. Everything of value has had to be moved somewhere permanent. So my working view: social media has become an excellent instrument for finding out and a terrible one for keeping. Journalism's job has shifted accordingly. The rare skill used to be access. Increasingly it is knowing what to lift out of an ephemeral place and put somewhere that lasts. The other change, which gets less attention than the misinformation argument: it collapses the distance between writer and correction. Being wrong in public used to take a week and a letters page. Mine took a day and improved the piece. I would not trade that back.

Rambert, in Camus's La Peste. He is a Paris journalist stuck in quarantined Oran, and he spends most of the book working every angle to get out, entirely reasonably, because his wife is elsewhere and the epidemic is not his story. Then he stays. Not out of heroism, but because at some point leaving stops being possible for him. I like him because he is the least admirable journalist in serious fiction and the most recognisable. He arrives as an outsider covering something that is not his, and the thing turns out to be his after all. That is roughly what happened to me with a subject I assumed was a personal footnote and which four hundred people then told me was theirs too. The obvious answer would be Tintin, and I did grow up with him in a French-speaking house. But nobody has ever seen Tintin file copy.

I hesitate to define a job I do not hold. But I can say what changed my mind about what it involves. I thought it was about finding things out. Then I published a short piece about a language disappearing, and four hundred people arrived with things they already knew and had never told anyone. Eleven of them had been called boche as children for speaking their mother's language. Six had been punished at school. One woman had asked her in-laws to speak Alsatian in front of her children and been refused. None of that was hidden. It was simply never collected, because nobody had asked and because the people it happened to assumed it was a private embarrassment rather than a policy. So my working definition is narrower than the noble one: journalism is the act of asking, in public, in a way that makes it safe for people to answer. The information usually exists already, distributed across a few thousand ordinary memories, worth nothing until someone assembles it. Two things follow that I did not expect. The first is that being wrong in public is part of the method rather than a failure of it. My framing was corrected by readers from Moselle within a day, and the piece is better for it. If I had got it right alone, I would have had one man's argument instead of a shared record. The second is that it requires being genuinely uncertain about something. When I wrote that piece I did not know what the answer was. That, more than any credential, seems to me the actual qualification.

I am not really a hashtag person, which probably disqualifies me. But the funniest thing in this line I have come across is not a hashtag at all: it is that the Deutsche Bahn spent the 1880s replacing French words with German ones by decree, so Billett became Fahrkarte and Perron became Bahnsteig, and now sells you a Ticket. A hundred and forty years to complete the circle, one language further along. If that had a hashtag it would be #Sprachreinigung, and it would be ironic in about four directions at once.

Email, and nothing else. Not LinkedIn, not X, and please not a phone call. Say the argument in the first two lines. Not the topic, the argument. "European regional languages are under threat" is a topic and I already know it. "A commune in Moselle voted last month to run its nursery school bilingually and three neighbouring ones are copying it" is a story. The distinction is whether something happened. Tell me why it has to be me. I write on language policy and minority languages, European history, quiz and trivia design, and occasionally on investing and alternative assets. I write in English, French, German and Spanish, which is genuinely useful if your story is not in English and everyone else needs it translated first. If the pitch would have worked equally well sent to twenty other people, I will assume it was. Give me the primary source. A document, a name, a number I can check. I would rather have one verifiable fact than four paragraphs of framing. What will not work: anything about my company rather than my writing; crypto or token projects; product placement dressed as a story; embargoed announcements; and any pitch that opens by telling me it is a perfect fit for my audience. On timing: I am in Central Time in Texas and most of my sources are in Europe, so my useful hours run early. One follow-up after a week is fine. Two is not. And if you are writing to me in French or German, do. It tells me immediately that you read what I actually write.

For research, mostly free reference tools that nobody mentions. The DWDS for German etymology and historical usage, and the Trésor de la langue française informatisé for French. Both are excellent, both are public, and a surprising amount of what I write comes straight out of them. Légifrance for the actual text of French laws, which matters when the whole argument turns on what a 1951 statute says rather than what people remember it saying. For the Alsatian material, the OLCA studies and the ORTHAL orthography published by the Cercle Edgar Zeidler in Mulhouse, which is what lets you write a local dialect variant in a way other people can read. For gathering, Facebook, which sounds absurd and is the single most productive research tool I have. The people who hold the history I write about are in their seventies and eighties and that is where they are. For drafting, nothing exotic. Plain text, then whatever the outlet requires. I keep a running file of verified facts separate from the draft, so that anything with a number or a date has to be pulled from the checked file rather than from memory. That habit has caught more errors than any tool. I use AI models daily, and I will be specific about how, because the vague version is useless. They are good for stress-testing an argument, finding the objection I have not thought of, and checking whether a claim I am confident about actually holds up. They are unreliable for facts and I treat anything they assert as a lead requiring a source, not as a source. I deploy them in production on the company side, which is precisely why I do not trust them here. And a character counter, because most European comment sections cap you at 600 or 750 characters and the discipline of cutting to fit is better for the writing than it has any right to be.

Facebook, which is not the fashionable reply and is true anyway. Everything I have written about the disappearance of Alsatian came from there. The people who hold that history are in their seventies and eighties, and they are not on X and they are certainly not on TikTok. They are on Facebook, in village groups and family threads, and when you write something that matters to them they answer at length, under their real names, with dates and place names. A post of mine in July drew over four hundred comments, almost all of them testimony rather than opinion. The oldest witness was born in 1947. That does not happen anywhere else. The trade-off is that nothing there is findable afterwards. It is a superb instrument for gathering and a terrible one for keeping, which is why the material ends up on Mediapart and, shortly, in a German newspaper. I use X for the industry conversation and LinkedIn because I have to. But if the question is where the things I care about actually happen, it is the network everyone under forty has written off, full of people who were there.

The people already writing the thing I stumbled into. Yves Bisch, who has kept a dialect column running in Alsace for years, and the researchers at the Cercle Edgar Zeidler in Mulhouse who built ORTHAL, the standardised spelling that lets everyone write their own local variant legibly. I arrived at this subject as an amateur with a Facebook post. They have been doing the work quietly for decades and I would rather be corrected by them than praised by anyone else. Beyond that, the Moselle and Flanders equivalents, because the strongest evidence I have came from readers in Sarreguemines and the Westhoek who told me the same law had done the same thing to them and that I had left them out. I would like a permanent line to those people rather than an accidental one. And, less romantically: German and Swiss editors. My material sits on a border, and the readers who most need to hear it are on the other side of the Rhine, where the dialect still lives and where nobody assumes it is safe. Anyone from Castroville, Texas would also be welcome. It is forty kilometres from my house, it was founded by Alsatians in 1844, and almost nobody there knows the language they lost was the same one I am writing about.

I did not, in the conventional sense. I built a company, and the writing came out of it sideways. What changed was noticing that a fact on its own is almost worthless. I spend my days constructing questions, and the ones that stay with people are never the ones with the most interesting answer. They are the ones where the fact sits inside a place, a story, a consequence. That is a writer's problem more than a quizmaster's, and at some point I started writing to solve it properly. The subject found me rather than the reverse. Alsatian was my first language, my father's language, and I grew up knowing it was disappearing without ever asking why. When I finally looked, the answer turned out to be a specific law, a specific list of four excluded languages, and a great many children punished in playgrounds for speaking what their mothers spoke. Nobody had told me any of this. That is when I started writing seriously. So: not a vocation, a debt. I write because I found something that had been done quietly to a lot of people, including my own family, and it seemed wrong to leave it undocumented.

No, and the question does not quite translate. I went to school in France, where the student newspaper is not a fixture the way it is in American high schools. There was no masthead to join, no faculty adviser, no route from a school paper to anything else. The idea that a teenager might practise journalism as an extracurricular activity would have struck everyone concerned as slightly eccentric. What French schooling did give me was the dissertation: a rigid three-part argumentative essay, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, drilled for years. It is a poor preparation for reporting and an excellent one for structuring an argument, and I still catch myself building pieces that way. Most of what I write ends up as a claim, the strongest objection to it, and what survives the collision. So no newspaper. A great deal of arguing on paper, marked severely.

A short piece I published on Facebook a few days ago, which is an unglamorous place to be proudest of. It was called Nous étions les Boches de la République, and it opened with two numbers: 91 percent of Alsatians spoke the dialect in 1946, and 43 percent in 2012. Then the 1951 Deixonne law, which let Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitan into French schools and excluded Alsatian, Moselle Franconian, Corsican and Flemish, on the grounds that those four were dialects of foreign languages. I expected it to be read by a few hundred people. It has over four hundred comments. What arrived was not agreement, it was testimony. Eleven people described being called boche for speaking Alsatian, the earliest in the 1950s and the most recent within the last decade. Six described punishments at school, and all six placed them in the playground rather than the classroom, which tells you the target was children talking to each other rather than schoolwork. A woman wrote that she asked her Alsatian in-laws to speak the language in front of her children and they refused. A man wrote that his mother was called boche by her own mother-in-law in 1949. Several people from Moselle corrected me, independently, for saying Alsatian when I should have said Alsatian and Moselle Franconian. They were right, and every version of the argument I have written since names all four excluded languages. I am proud of it because it stopped being mine. It became a small archive of something that is not in the history books, assembled by the people it happened to, most of them in their seventies and eighties. A German-language essay drawing on it is forthcoming in Die Rheinpfalz.

I am not the right person to advise anyone on a career I never had. But there are two things I have learned the hard way that seem to apply. Write in the language of the room you are writing about. Almost everything worth reporting in Europe happens in a language that is not English, and translated material is always a generation behind. I write in four languages, and the pieces that landed were the ones where I could read the primary source, the local paper and the comment section underneath it. That is not a talent, it is a tool anyone can acquire. And check the thing you are most confident about. The piece I am proudest of contained a mistake. I wrote about the Alsatian language and referred throughout to Alsace. Four readers from Moselle, separately, over two days, pointed out that Moselle Franconian was excluded from the same 1951 law for the same reason and that I had written them out of their own history. They were right. Every version since names all four excluded languages. Nobody caught that in the drafting because I was not looking there. I was checking the statistics and the legal citation, the parts I was worried about. The error was in the frame, which I had inherited without noticing. So: learn the languages, and assume your blind spot is somewhere you are not currently anxious. Those are the only two things I would put my name to.

Early. I am in Central Time in Texas and most of what I write about happens in Europe, so my useful hours are between about six and eleven in the morning, which is early afternoon in Paris or Berlin. A pitch that lands overnight European time is at the top of the pile when I open the laptop. Tuesday through Thursday. Monday morning is triage and nothing gets read properly. Friday afternoon is where good pitches go to be forgotten. On timeliness: I write about things that have been happening for seventy years, so almost nothing I cover is urgent. If your story depends on my responding within twenty-four hours, I am probably the wrong person. If it will still be true in a month, you have my full attention. One follow-up after a week is welcome and often works, since things do get buried. Two is where I stop reading.

I am on the wrong side of this question. Nobody pitches me, and the only pitch I have any real knowledge of is one I sent myself. I wrote to a German regional daily proposing an essay on the Alsatian and Moselle Franconian languages and the 1951 law that shut them out of French schools. It was three paragraphs. It said what the piece argued, why their readers in particular would care, since the Palatinate sits directly across the river from both regions and still has its own dialect, and what I could claim standing on, which is that I was born there and it was my first language. They said yes within a few days. What I take from that, and it is the only thing I would generalise: it worked because it was addressed to that paper and no other. The argument only makes sense to people who live on a language border and assume their own dialect is safe. Sent to a Paris outlet it would have been a regional grievance. Sent to an English-language one it would have needed a thousand words of background. So the best pitch I know of is the one that could not have gone anywhere else. Everything I have ever ignored had the opposite quality: it would have fitted anyone.

Again, I am on the wrong side of this. But I have sat on the other end of the same transaction for years, and the worst pitches I receive are the ones aimed at my company. The pattern is always the same. Somebody has found out that I run a trivia platform and nothing else. The email says "content partnership," it opens with a compliment about our mission that could have been written about any company in any sector, and it never once demonstrates that the sender has seen a single quiz. There is a specific tell: the ones that mention our player numbers back to me. They read a press release, extracted the biggest figure, and repeated it. It signals that the research stopped at the first search result. What I take from it is the mirror of the previous answer. A bad pitch is one that would have worked equally well sent to somebody else. The moment I can imagine the identical email arriving at three other companies, I stop reading, and I suspect journalists do the same thing faster and more ruthlessly. The cheapest fix is also the rarest: one sentence proving you looked at the actual work rather than the description of it.

A 1 liter bottle of San Pellegrino.:)

On a rugby pitch in New Braunfels, most likely, helping build a club from nothing with a coach who knows considerably more about it than I do. Otherwise walking the Hill Country, which looks nothing like Alsace and has grown on me anyway. And once or twice a year, back in the Outre-Forêt, in villages where people still greet me in a dialect I am watching disappear.

I read across four languages, which means I mostly read the same events described by people who disagree about what they are. In German, Die Zeit, for the length of the pieces. The habit of giving an argument six thousand words and letting it breathe has almost vanished elsewhere, and the Streit format, where two writers take opposite sides at equal length, is something I wish more papers had the nerve for. In French, Mediapart, which I also write on, so I should disclose that. What earns it is the funding model: no advertising, no commercial partnerships, subscribers only. Whether or not you share its politics, you always know exactly whose money is paying for the piece, and that is rarer than it should be. In Switzerland, watson.ch, which is not a prestige answer. It is fast, unpretentious, and it takes its readers seriously without being solemn, which is a harder combination than the serious papers admit. And the local ones, which is where I find most of what I end up writing about. Die Rheinpfalz, the Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, the Républicain Lorrain. Regional dailies still cover the things national papers consider too small to notice, and almost everything I have written started as a small thing somebody noticed locally. If I had to keep one, it would be the local ones. National papers tell you what a country is arguing about. Regional papers tell you what is actually happening in it.

That languages die naturally. The comfortable version goes: the world modernised, people needed a bigger language to get on, the old one faded, sad but nobody's fault. I believed a version of it myself before I looked. What actually happened in my case is a specific law with a specific list. The Deixonne law of 1951, the first to let regional languages into French schools, covered Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitan. It excluded Alsatian, Moselle Franconian, Corsican and Flemish, on the grounds that those four were dialects of foreign languages. Everyone had been flattened by the same machine. Only some were later helped back up. And the second misperception, which follows: that this was all long ago. Children were punished in Alsatian playgrounds into the 1970s. The word boche was still being thrown at Alsatians for speaking their own language within the last decade, by people born decades after the war. But the version I now think is most wrong is the one that blames the state alone. The law did the first part. What finished the job was ordinary people deciding, quietly and for entirely defensible reasons, that their children were safer without it. One man on my thread wrote that he never spoke Alsatian to his children in the sixties and seventies, for a reason he was not conscious of at the time. A woman wrote that her mother-in-law, who had lived through the annexation and therefore knew exactly what a language could cost, insisted on French for her grandchildren. That is the part nobody wants. It is not a story about villains and victims. It is a story about a policy that worked so well it no longer needed enforcing, and about a great many loving parents who did the rational thing.