Draft Four: Be meaningfully inefficient
And why “caring with” is an approach to strive for.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve taken on the role of host, facilitator, and moderator a few times: for diners with journalists, for a training done by my former colleague Oana Sandu on interviewing people from vulnerable groups, for a conversation with another former colleague, Ioana Burtea, in which we talked personal storytelling, and this week for a gathering of investigative journalists from across Europe who met in Bucharest.
I was nervous about the latter: I am not an investigative reporter, or, to put it another way, I’m more interested in investigating the human condition than corruption. Second, there were multiple stakeholders in the room, with different needs, who also didn’t know each another. Add to that my worry that journalists have a hard time dropping their guard and engaging in collaborative conversation.
But it went marvelously well. As the event wrapped up yesterday, and I walked around the room gathering some insights and takeaways from participants, one of them said the good energy of the meeting was also because of me, and how I created a space for them to be together. Applause followed. All of this was immensely flattering, I have to say. Another told me over lunch: “You are a good moderator. Kind, not confrontational”.
This is how you know you’re among journalists: the expectation, often times, is of confrontation, rebuttal, skepticism, engaging with anything from a critical standpoint (to the point of engaging from a standpoint of criticism).
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I often ask myself why I keep saying “yes” to these: public speaking, getting groups together, creating opportunities for pop-up communities etc. I am terribly anxious before it all takes place: I don’t sleep well, I fidget, I over-plan, I obsesses over the little things I can control (does the projector have an HDMI or USB-C plug?) because I know how little one can control things as people bring their whole selves into a space. During the thing I am there, but I am sometimes hi-jacked by stress if I see people drifting away or pulling out their phones. You might often see me binge on the available carbs to get through the day. (What’s wrong with stuffing a fourth mini-pain au chocolat into one’s mouth?)
And when it’s all done, the introvert in me melts: Friday night, as were packing up glasses after a talk we hosted on media financing, I got a nosebleed; two weeks ago I fell asleep on the office couch. All of this to say, that trying to do any kind of hosting as someone who’s first visit to therapy more than a decade ago was about “social anxiety” is taxing. And, as mentioned, I’m an introvert: large groups of people are scary and often draining.
Yet, I do this because it fulfills both a need for connection and belonging, and also a duty of giving back to the tribe.
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These past letters have been about ways of creating experiences that bring people together to discover information or stories or tools to make their lives better. They have been about practices that can center conversation as a more democratic and liberating form of engaging. And I am especially interested in seeing how far I can stretch the boundaries of journalism to make room for more of this: more roles that have to do with facilitation and moderation (as opposed to simply extracting from interviews), more formats of engagement, less obsession with scale etc.
I am writing to think through things I’m reading and conversations I’m having, so if it’s not coming together for you, it’s because it’s still coming together for me.
I see it with my mind’s eye, I have a picture of interconnected notes and theories of change, but I can’t articulate it in a simple sentence.
I also don’t think we should.
This is part of this paradigm of experiences, and engagement, and ecosystem discovery – it doesn’t conform to the way we’re used to getting outputs and outcomes and deliverables. This is not generativeAI planning your next trip, this is not a product tailored to a specific need, this is not an efficient device for solving a problem.
I love how Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar describe it: „meaningful inefficiencies”. Their book of the same name talks about civic participation and civic design done through a lens that encourages connection, care and conversation. Imagine a city wanting your feedback on a park it wants to remake: it can do it, it can give you choices (better), it can consult you before designing some choices (even better), and it can create the entire process together with you (wow, crazy!).
It’s meaningful because we’ll be closer to one another when the job ends, and we’ll be more invested in the outcome and the future of the park. It’s also inefficient, because by the standards of how we expect life to work, it’s slow, contradictory, and won’t surface easy answers.
Now move this into a newsroom. The authors describe newsroom projects on incarceration and low income housing that were not interviews with experts, or analysis, but rather “story circles”, gatherings where different groups sat together and shared life experiences, building knowledge from lived experience. The designer of the project on the reintegration of prisoners, the authors write, “at first believed the main goal was educating the public about the state’s correctional system. She later realized that the primary goal was actually creating basic human connection”.
“This is not about building compassion, but about creating a collaborative process, one that begins with empathy, but that results in a distribution of caring responsibilities to the inmates, the community and the prison staff”.
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This is another important aspect of this idea: it involves care, and not just any type of care. You can care about improving prison conditions, you can care for the people involved, and maybe give money and empathize with their stories, but how can you design an experience that involves caring with? One that involves distributing responsibilities of care within an entire system:
“All people within a democracy need not only be responsible for caring for others, but also are on the hook for assigning caring responsibilities, for determining what matters, when, and for whom.”
This is where it gets messy, and I get why this can be scary territory for journalists. Some of us got really good at the caring for part (especially those telling longform intimate stories) – arguably we’ve even helped others out of a caring about stage to one where they contribute through individual actions – donations, spreading the message, volunteering one’s time – to a better world for others. But getting them to go one step beyond means engaging with difficult realities: does it turn our work into activism? Can it still produce stories for us to publish? What if nothing comes out of it? What are we measuring? Who the hell do we need to bring on board to do it?
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Let me pause for a moment.
I wish the day to day work was about answering the questions above. But it is still a privilege to get to spend time thinking about them.
Earlier this week we had a ceremony in the journalism community here in Romania – the yearly Superscrieri prizes. It was great to see colleagues celebrated, as it always is; I do think prizes have a role of validation that many of us crave. It was a moment when the community focused on a sore spot – funding, or the lack of it, and even our own strategic failures at getting it. It was also a celebration of accountability journalism and investigations and holding power to account. The brooding watchdog is the king of our world. The hopeful service dog? Less important.
The social fabric breakdown in this part of the world, the opaque governments we have, the complete lack of decency on the part of many politicians has us in fighting mode. When institutions crumble, citizens are often hoping a Batman-like figure emerges, and some newsrooms unwillingly take on that mantel. No wonder we fetishize (and fund) investigative journalism to the point that those who just want to chronicle the inner worlds of fellow humans start asking themselves: “what’s the point? My work doesn’t matter.”
But it does.
This is probably the complicated conversation we should be having among ourselves in Romania (and probably beyond), ideally alongside facilitators and moderators that are not confrontational or all-knowing: what is journalism for? It is for accountability. It is for updates and information. And it is for connection, belonging, and community.
And we ought to give the latter more resources and time on stage because they are better at creating the conditions for collective action. Thus, journalism as a meaningful inefficiency, centering care. Quoting from Gordon and Mugar again:
“It is an attempt to intervene in the way that news gets produced by designing a system wherein a multiple of publics come together with some flexibility to play, to explore, and to encounter the unexpected, as a means of not simply drawing attention to an issue (what the press usually does), but in creating the conditions for people to care. Caring in this case is the ability for people involved to distribute caring responsibilities collectively.”
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I’m stumbling and stressing my way through hosting events – especially for journalists – for two reasons. The first is because I believe these are spaces where other voices about the work can emerge. The second is because, very selfishly, I’m trying my best to model a different way of being in the profession: less confrontational, more open to collaboration, more careful about people’s needs. Worst case scenario, people will go through an experience that starts and ends on time, where they have something to eat and drink, and a chance to exchange ideas with colleagues they know or have just met. At best, they will feel connected to others, feel less alone in their struggles, and empowered to take on the challenge of designing spaces for caring that might also result in good stories, but that can also lead to action and change.
SIDE DISHES:
Here is a question I’ve obsessed over for many years (in which I tried many things that failed): What does it mean to grow an organization as an infrastructure of care?
The Search Engine podcast returns to the media apocalypse and asks this indirect question: if Google turns search into AI generated responses, should more of us be considering a shift from providing information to providing guidance and experiences?
One surprising story about creativity, ingenuity, and algorithms, featuring a guy whose song catalog is closing in on 25,000.
The Superscrieri winners, in Romanian. (Scroll for the entire list). Really happy for my friend Sorana Stănescu who’ve amazing newsletter got the recognition it deserves. This year’s prizes do carry a shadow – a journalist who came out to tell a story of being raped a decade ago by a man who was later the editor-in-chief of VICE in Romania. This raises a lot of question about the gender dynamics in the profession, and I hope that’s another conversation we can have.