Draft Four: 4 metaphors for journalism
Designing the future with Jennifer Brandel.
This weekend I hosted a bunch of young journalists (the majority under 30) in our office in Bucharest. The space is the last newsroom we had with DoR, and even though it’s been 18 months since we closed, our lease is only now winding down. We’ve used it as an informal co-working space, an archive, we hosted workshops, and some dinners.
The latest of these dinners was Friday night. Their purpose is an informal gathering to meet colleagues from different newsrooms, share experiences, and talk about needs. I’ve designed it as an experience, but I’m still nervous after all this time about hosting and facilitating. It’s a series of steps that create a structure, but which then we’ll hold lightly as the night progresses. Here’s what we do:
Send an invitation;
Follow up with an onboarding form to learn about dietary restrictions, and beverage preferences, but also ask some journalism-related questions;
Create a temporary WhatsApp group to send reminders and coordinate;
Order food from a local business (Frog in our case), get wine and beer, set up a dinner table;
Host: one hour of intros on our couches, another 90 minutes or more around the dinner table, desert included (did I say Frog make a mean portokalopita?).
What we’ve found thus far is that journalists enjoy spending time with colleagues they’ve only seen on social media, they say they are buoyed by feeling they are not alone, get ideas for things they can co-create, and are excited about the potential to of solidarity in various forms. We can build a “network of benevolence”, one of them said on Friday.
We also tackle some tough questions a lot of them struggle with, and don’t have time to unpack in newsrooms: what does success look like outside of traffic numbers (and getting public officials fired)? What will our newsrooms do if we don’t train a new and different generation of media managers? How can we create more transparency and equity when it comes to payment and contracts? How do you start something new and is there space for other media models – in tone, in behavior, in subject matter, in format?
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This Friday I felt something more powerfully than before. A change is coming. Not necessarily one that will sweep our local industry, but one that might give rise to alternate ways to be in journalism.
It made me think of an article that I linked to before, and that I’ve shared with numerous people over the past year. It’s by Jennifer Brandel, one of the original thinkers in the engagement journalism space, who built a company around a method of doing of people-powered journalism (Hearken). I love it when Jennifer introduces herself not by claiming a work identity (“journalist”, let’s say), but through the activities she does: “designing systems that listen, respond and evolve in order to better serve people”. That’s a pretty good definition for the work.
In the piece I’m thinking of, Jennifer asks: What Could Happen If We Give Up Saving Journalism?
For journalism – the signs are obvious and grim for what was once the dominant system and distribution of news. The attacks are coming from all angles – cultural, political, technological, economic, and personal. Combined, this toxic stew serves to poison the trust in the institution of journalism and in the newsrooms that remain. It’s hard to come back from that. Frankly, I don’t know how it can.
So I have to wonder: if journalism, as we’ve known it, is clearly descending in some kind of hospice, then what if we accept that, and give up trying to save it? What could and should we spend our energy on instead?
What Jennifer argues for is a re-imagining of our roles starting from a core idea of journalism: to be of use to people in their daily lives. To be a provider of civic information, one that is community-oriented, that aims to both impart knowledge, but also facilitate experience and connection. Arguably a form of journalism that makes us better, together.
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Jenn is, without a doubt, a big inspiration behind our dinners and our conversations.
The loop below, also borrowed from her, is a visualization of transitioning between systems: an old one, traditional and struggling to keep going, and an emergent one, incubated in networks and communities and practice. Over the years I’ve learned to be comfortable with emergence – both as an editor, and when designing events for our readers – but this is my biggest stretch: asking younger colleagues, who definitely see the flaws of the current system in starker contrast than my generation did, to come together and let something new emerge.
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I talked about this imminent change with Jennifer recently for my CUNY capstone project, and I also asked her what new modes of understanding journalism we have. (She also proposed four metaphors, which you’ll find below.)
“When you come up during a certain era, each generation has its own water it’s been swimming in, where it just feels like this is how the world works in their own perception of reality. And I think that some of the leaders who are either literally running newsrooms or on the boards or governance structures that are running newsrooms are still in an old world that doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s not that they're bad people or anything. I think, you know, if given time and education and ways to discuss and figure it out, they could move on it, but that’s really hard.”
What this existing and maybe dying system is about: seeing the journalists (not the public) as the experts, maintaining and perpetuating a company’s existence rather than empowering people to make change in their community, thinking of published stories and news broadcasts as the only possible products, holding on to idea of scale and growth, measuring impact in clicks and awards etc.
Change is scary for anyone. But it’ll come. And one question this begs is how can we be better equipped to serve and connect communities? “I keep thinking about different industries and fields where they've figured something out and where we haven’t yet figured it out in journalism”, Jenn says.
So here are four new metaphors, in Jenn’s own words:
THE LAST MILE
Urban planners often think about the last mile problem, where there’s so many people who live a mile or more away from where a bus stop service line will end, or a train service line will end. And I feel like journalism so often drops people off in the middle of nowhere with the articles, where they don't know where to go or what they can do about it.
They have just been given a problem. Like their psyche has been dropped off in the middle of a burning canyon of trees, and they're just like “I don't know how we get out of this”, and there’s no bridging. We need things like: “If you're interested in learning more, here are local organizations working to solve this problem.” Or “here are solutions other places have tried to solve for this”.
We do this so people know where to put that energy, that angst, that confusion, that despair, that outrage, whatever it is they’re feeling. It just sits in them. So I also think a lot about like how do you convert energy into movement, and not just have it sit and stagnate, because I think that actually creates a level of dis-ease and actual disease, societal disease, if you're not letting that energy flow towards something more healthy.
COLLECTIVE SENSE-MAKING
The other thing I keep thinking about is collective sense making. I was at this great gathering last summer and someone said: “What does it mean that the entire product design of journalism is to be consumed individually?” So, if you think about it, you’re on your phone, you’re watching a video, you’re doing something, you are an individual choosing your own adventure, and taking in this information that is really difficult and complicated. And you’re often doing it by yourself.
You’re left to yourself to make sense of it or to just form your own opinions and not be informed by other people who are seeing a different angle of the same topic. And so how might newsrooms and journalists create spaces for collective sense making, where you can go “here’s this major issue, and here’s 10 different ways that it’s impacting people”, and hear from the people themselves who are being impacted in different ways. Thus you can get a more well-rounded understanding, and also understand where you fit in, and how you can do something about it, not just be informed.
HOW NATURE COMMUNICATES
I was at a conference and there was a woman who’s kind of the mother of biomimicry, which is a field in which we design things based on how the natural world operates, and she said communication in nature happens in three parts: there has to be a signal, so something being pushed out, there has to be transduction, so some kind of meaning-making from that signal, and then there has to be a response.
And without all three of those things, there is no communication.
And I think journalism is so obsessed with and so hyper-muscular about the signal, and not the transduction, and not the response. We’re focused on informing, but not engaging and equipping people for what to do next. So, to me, journalism is a failure of communication if you compare it to how communication actually happens in the natural world. It's just signal signal signal.
THE CONSTELLATION
The original sin or the biggest sin of journalism is not acknowledging that we need each other. There is this idea of individualism, and this culture of we should be self-sustaining, we should be able to do things ourself. Not acknowledging our interdependence is like what is also continuing isolation, alienation, loneliness that people are feeling. Because it feels like we’re not supposed to be interdependent, because our culture has pushed us toward a narrative frame that makes interdependence seem like you’re bad, you fucked up, you’re broken.
But interdependence is the key to a thriving ecosystem.
So even within a city, how can a newsroom look at itself not as a destination, as in a hub and spoke model, but instead as being a node in a network, a constellation.
If we stop thinking of our institutions as the end-all be-all, and frame our goal as actually making things happen in community, then I think people would be able to be much more creative in how that institution can operate and move. If you start to disaggregate things from just keeping a company alive, and instead have people paid and thinking about what are the talents and jobs to be done that are still needed in community, I think all manner of creative options become available. But that’s scary you know. Like who’s about to blow things up and be like: “we’re gonna become a distributed network coordinated interstitium of our city rather than a company with a label and a name that like puts things out on a signal.”
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Back to our dinners and these gatherings. My idea is similar to Jenn’s distributed models.
Our traditional professional ecosystem is a journalism world made up of a bunch of individual players/newsrooms/institutions, who sometimes think of themselves as being in direct competition, that have weak links between them, or none at all. (This certainly applies to NGOs and cultural institutions, too).
But especially Gen Z journalists don’t want to work like this anymore: they want more transparency, more collaboration, more focus on real-world impact on people. So we can start planting the seeds of the network in our current infrastructure, and, as the old-world crumbles, a new one could emerge in its place to keep playing the role of delivering information, connecting and empowering.
One can dream; after all, it’s what networks of benevolence encourage.
SIDE DISHES:
This other piece from Jennifer, on playing 2024 on “ultra hard more”, when you have to work, move across the country, and care for a young child with a leukemia diagnosis.
Trigger warnings don’t work, science says. At least not how we imagine them to work, as a way to protect people from what we think is harmful information. They don’t reduce discomfort, they don’t make most people turn away. But there is an element of informed consent in them that comes from an instinct of caring.
I miss magazines. I also miss the says when we sat around for days and nights thinking about building them. The Print is dead podcast is all about magazines, and this interview with longtime Wired creative director and editor Scott Dadich is a gem.
One more audio recommendation: on The Gray Area, Sean Illing talks to Kate Murphy about how we don’t listen, why we should, and how we can to do it better. You know that Kate’s book, You’re Not Listening has been one of my obsessions for the past few years, and you should most definitely read it.
This is in Romanian: I surveyed the state of journalism industry here, and listed our predictable woes (money, pressures, talent pipeline), but added a bunch of other questions that might be able to help us fix some things.
Dang! Thanks for writing up the things I've been meaning to Cristi! I'm so grateful to be on this adventure with you and hope to one day make it to one of your gatherings again IRL. You're doing the work that's needed.