Draft Four: Building something new

A summary of my CUNY capstone project.

Welcome to my new readers. These Sunday letters are about transitions – personal and professional –, a subjective blend of my thoughts on where journalism might go, alongside musings on life in your forties in Bucharest, Romania. Spoiler: it’s usually less exciting than it sounds.

This letter is a little different. (It’s shorter; for once!)

I’m writing from New York, where I just graduated from CUNY’s Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership, a program I’ve been in since September. (It’s mostly online, with three week-long New York residencies spread over the 10 months.)

I learned tons about how messed up our industry is, but also about strategic ways to reinvent it. I am also lucky to have met incredible colleagues, kind, generous, supportive, who relieved some of the pressures I had been feeling as a former newsroom leader plagued by feelings of deficiency.

I’ll write more about them next week, and then, through the following Sundays in July, share my entire CUNY research project. What follows is the cliff notes version, which I delivered as a final presentation on Thursday.

My friend, the artist Mircea Drăgoi, drew some illustrations based on my project ideas.

I am Romanian, and since this story is told during the UEFA European Championship, I have a patriotic duty to the boys to wish them well in the last 16.

Let me take you to Bucharest. We’re in an Uber. The driver is a nice guy, rated highly for conversation. He asks if I work in IT.

I wish, I reply.

I try to explain my work, which back then was editing DoR, a narrative nonfiction magazine. We write about people’s lives, I tell him, the whole complicated mess of it.

“So, like stories”, he says.

“Yes!”, I exclaim.

“So, how do I know they are true?”, he counters.

He insists all stories could be fabricated. I agree, but we don’t do that, I say. We have photos of them, video sometimes, and we’re transparent about the reporting process. We even bring the people we write about on stage at live shows.

“Yes”, he says. “That’s better.”

But, he adds, they could all be in on the scam.

*

He’s not alone: add him to the growing list of people distrusting news in an environment where all else is falling apart. (Romania ranked 44 out of 47 countries surveyed on trust in the latest Reuters Digital News Report – I wrote last week about why people avoid us).

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of our problems: the business model is crumbling, we’re burnt out, pay is horrid, distribution is entering a post-social and post-search world, GenerativeAI threatens us with irrelevance, and our publics are turning away, lonely, and disconnected.

Looking at this wreckage, many smart journalists, including current and former CUNY exec program graduates, have asked we turn toward a journalism informed by the needs of our communities. Engagement efforts and their benefits – from loyalty, to sustainability – are well chronicled. There is no need re-pitch this call. (Here are clear-eyed 10 pieces of advice for doing it.)

But what if we did allow the current house of journalism to burn down?

*

Credit to Jeff Jarvis and Jennifer Brandel for encouraging us to think of letting nature take its course: systems transform, sometimes they crumble. But new systems always emerge, new definitions pop up, and that’s what I am interested in.

For this project I interviewed a handful of media innovators who don’t freak out at the prospect of journalism looking radically different that it does today. From these conversations I’ve extracted more interesting answers to the question “What is journalism for?” than those we usually supply. These include:

• Help people connect, understand each other, and navigate their shared lives;

• Distribute responsibility for care;

• Have conversation and facilitate action around a common need;

• Bring people together to negotiate what’s important, and build;

• Instill hope, agency, dignity.

Most definitions above presume participating in change. They call for direct engagement with the community, with their needs, and finding ways to meet them – if not directly, then at least by reducing the tension or cost or distance to action. You might think this sounds like activism, but what if that’s the community service we should provide in times of societal crisis?

So what would journalism in community look like if we thought of it as:

• An act of service;

• A way of holding space;

• Empathy training;

• Community healing;

• Connective tissue.

*

If journalism is to help people lead better lives, it needs to be trusted. But there is no trust without connection, and what we need for connection is to design human scale experiences. That requires us to upgrade our skills – especially listening to learn – as well as our roles. We could become or bring alongside us people that can be

• Experience designers;

• Conveners;

• Facilitators;

• Mediators;

• Relationship builders;

• Industry networkers;

• Guides;

• Cheerleaders for change agents;

• Story librarians;

• Identity builders.

H/T to Sue Robinson, who lays many of these out in her spectacular book How Journalists Engage.

Of course, the way we create products will also need to change (what if the product is not something we “publish”?), and much of our offering should be around convening:

• Actual Experiences (AE);

• Conversations;

• Live events – from journalism on stage, to plays, to exhibitions;

• Public square events;

• Spaces to connect around the news;

• Living libraries.

And don’t even get me started on how much we need to upgrade our current metrics of success. Metrics for connection, shared reality, and for works of “meaningful inefficiency” have to be different than traffic, conversions, or social media engagement.

*

So what now? I don’t know if we can convince that Uber driver to trust that our journalism is real.

But we can bring him into the conversation, listen to him, and connect with him. Maybe we’ll better understand his needs, then deliver explanations of what systems have created his current woes, and what solutions he can try out. We’ll guide him.

My thought at the moment is to run a pilot project back home that tries something that doesn’t exist on the market. This would be foregrounding a kind of journalism that:

• Listens to communities together with other civic actors;

• Creates experiences to create relationships;

• Believes in convening as a tool for collective sense-making.

• Can guide people to make choices that improve their lives;

• Is built for connection and hope.

If you have any feedback, or interest to join or support a future adventure, do reply. It’s been tough to keep up with messages over the past insane couple of months, but I’ll catch up over the next few days when I return home, so please hit me up.