Draft Four: Creating experiences of care

Shifting the paradigm from informing, to connecting

Before we start, some notes, and Happy Easter to those celebrating. I’ll call these appetizers that will replace side dishes in this edition:

1. An essential survey. Together with Peter Erdely, Patrick Boehler, and Boryana Dzhambazova, all people wiser than me, we’ve begun asking questions about what newsrooms in our region (CEE) need to make products people love, and build cultures in which people thrive. (Yes, and make money, I know). So, if you’re tasked with overseeing people or processes or projects in newsrooms, please take 5 minutes for our flash survey / needs assessment.

2. Questions for Romanian journalism (in 🇷🇴). I surveyed the state of our industry 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.

3. Ioana Burtea talks shop (🇷🇴). And I’m lucky to ask the questions. If you’re in Bucharest, if you’re interested in Ioana’s work and her debut collection of essays, or if you just want to get some inspiration for writing, join us May 13. Tickets here; the wine is on the house.

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What is it about turning 30 that’s so special?

It’s a question that has always interested me and it was the backbone of a DoR project I keep coming back to. In October 2019, we asked our community if they knew anyone born in 1989. That December was going to mark 30 years since Romania’s brutal regime change, so it was a chance to do two things: tackle the symbolic anniversary of our post-Ceaușescu life alongside people who haven’t lived under communism, but also tackle this particular age, arguably the most obvious modern marker of adulthood.

We got almost 200 replies: architects, copywriters, consultants, poet, writers, sex educators, entrepreneurs, physicists, public servants, journalists, doctors, therapists, technologists, and more. We asked them who they were, what they did, where they lived, what it meant to turn 30 alongside the Romanian democracy, and how that reflected in their lives.

We created multiple stories from our engagement with them: a series of portraits, a word cloud of the phrases that marked their upbringing, a collection of life stories, and a collective poem assembled from people filling in this prompt: „30 is like when you…”. (H/T to my then colleagues Nicoleta Rădăcină, Anca Iosif, and Anca Vancu for taking the lead on this, Silvia Grădinaru for assembling the poem, and Bianca Dumitrașcu for her elegant type work).

You’re an adult-adult and you don’t quite know what that means.
Like when you trade a night out for an afternoon nap.

(That's all)

You open your eyes, it’s a beautiful day, everything ordered in your life.
Nothing more, nothing less. 30 years old, that’s all.
Taking a break, breathing, understanding what’s going on with you.
You don't know what you want, but at least now you have an idea,
a slight form of control.

The thing I remember most fondly from this project is a gathering we hosted at our newsroom with maybe more than a dozen 30-year-olds. They gathered together with our two Ancas – who were also of that age –, and swapped stories.

I couldn’t get in, of course, but I stayed late at the office and heard the silences and the laughs, saw people coming in groups to smoke on the balcony, and realized that although the gathering had officially ended, people had a hard time leaving. I later learned some of them went to a bar. Sometime later, maybe even a few years later, we heard five of the women connected so deeply at that gathering that they kept seeing each other, travelled together, and became close friends.

The questions I still ask myself about that night is: what was this? We were a newsroom, so was this journalism? Nothing was published, so could it be journalism if there’s no traditional product (a story)? We did it solely because we wanted people to connect and see one another; is that something newsrooms do, could do, should do? It worked because it was intimate, and done at human scale; is there any public service value if it can’t be bigger? In the end, some people stayed friends because we brought them together; is that impact?

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As I wrote last week, I am asking these questions with more intentionality this year, as part of my CUNY capstone project: exploring the outer limits of community engagement and public-oriented journalism, understanding what communities of place or practice need from journalists to create more connection (which could, in theory, lead to co-creation and action), looking at care-informed storytelling in various forms, asking questions about the relevancy and impact of journalism at a human scale, and finding how it can inform community and belonging.

For those that feel this sounds too “out there”, know that this is not new: engagement in journalism has been around for a while (MPP has made a bible from it), and it’s been more and more present over the past decade. The idea is simple: citizens should have a say in what journalists produce, and journalists should share some of their power to decide with the communities they serve.

There are moral imperatives of service underpinning these ideas, but also practical considerations: engagement practices boost trust, and also boost reader revenue. (There are more and more studies validating both ideas). I recently wrote about Sue Robinson’s excellent How Journalists Engage, a book explaining the history and the research behind this ecosystem. The main points are the following:

1. Trust in newsrooms is built through engagement.

2. Engagement means better and closer relationships with the community.

3. These relationships require us journalists to be more aware of our own identities (and their baggage or blindspots), be more caring, listen better, and learn.

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So what does journalism look like at human scale? Can it be infused with generosity and care, built for connection and belonging, and shaped as an experience? Can it be a product that doesn’t make us even angrier and more polarized, but instead enhances people’s pro-social behaviors? And can it still be called journalism?

A caveat I’ve delivered before: I believe journalism can be a huge tent, fitting mainstream holdouts (ideally quality public media), big independent players with large reach, niche players who doggedly hold power to account, social media news-curators, YouTube essayists, cultural critics armed with Substacks, and more. And also human-scale storytelling, done with care, something that might not even involve the act of publishing, but which can create some of that magical connection and belonging that happened when we brought the 30-year-olds together.

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This week I started interviewing my favorite innovators around the ideas above, and what follow are excerpts and ideas from these first conversations. (jesikah’s quotes are from a longer conversation we’ve had, and I’ve edited some for length and clarity.)

We start today with jesikah maria ross, who has been working for years at the intersection of journalism, art and community development. She spent the last decade coordinating participatory media projects “with a path and a plan that changes how we collect, tell and share the stories of our communities”.

jesikah is also one of the hosts of the Care Collaboratory, a gathering of people interested in care-based storytelling practices (which I’ve been fortunate to join for their current season.) Check out this wonderful zine they’ve put together, which explains more about how care and community work and journalism intersect.

WE WANT TO CONNECT

I do think that there’s a way in which the pandemic has rewired us: I think we’re fundamentally more afraid of strangers. My feeling is we’re more afraid of people we don’t know, we’re less inclined to even go out, we’re less inclined to try new things, which really just supports fragmentation, loneliness, and isolation. And so, wow, no amount of sharing text and images are going to really penetrate. I think we need the antidote to that: connection.

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THE INDUSTRY IS UNRAVELING

I think everyone in journalism is on board with “the industry is unraveling”, and it’s unraveling faster and in ways we couldn’t have imagined and so the models that we learned, and the way we learned to do it, that is like water flowing under a bridge. And that bridge is down, so we now have to either reimagine a completely new way, which would be really fun, or we need to reinvent what we are doing.

And both of those things are happening, and I just think that one innovation is “let’s experiment with how we can provide journalism differently, so that it meets people’s experiences so that they then engage with us and each other, and build communities where more people are getting what they need.”

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WHY SERVE THE AUDIENCE’S NEEDS

I think that making journalism relevant, building from community needs and making it local – where impact is felt on a human scale – is really important right now, because I feel like all I see around me is the world falling apart.

We need to understand where people are at. We need to help them understand where each other are at. We need to figure out how we can help them build bridges so that they can work together on shared concerns, and be empathetic and civil around different perspectives, and create communities where everyone has what they need to thrive.

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CARE IS ESSENTIAL

For me for me to get people to even talk to me, much less talk openly and honestly to me, much less talk openly and honestly in a group of different diverse people, they need to feel that I care about them and their community. They need to trust my intentions, and they need to have a sense that I’m going to be fair and treat them with respect and dignity, and that, ultimately, I have their interest at heart.

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DELIVERING INFORMATION IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE

What I’ve come to think over the last few years is that it’s hard to meet people’s information needs until you meet their experience needs.

We need information, we need relationships, we need a sense of feeling that we have our own agency, that we can do something about it, and that there are people we can do that with and be supported by. And I think all of that can happen through journalism if journalism expands its lens to not just reporting out information, but bringing people together to understand what information is needed, why that’s important, provide that information, make meaning of that information, and then decide what to do with it.

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FROM INFORMATION TO EXPERIENCES

So, the old theory of change is I give you information and that will make change. And I think what is new is that if I create and design an experience where you participate and out of that, you will be able to bring something – knowledge, empathy, new relationships, motivation – that will move towards making things better in some way.

If we create experiences of care, empathy, belonging, and possibility, then people will be able to feel that and, in turn, co-create that with other people, so that there’ll be a ripple effect.

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WHY DELIVER CARE THROUGH JOURNALISM

I think that this absolutely does not need to happen through journalism. I don’t think it needs to be called journalism or happen through journalism.

But I think why journalism is a useful field is because it’s broadly understood to try and reach people. It really does reach policy makers and decision makers and power players, and journalists are trained in the craft of boiling down big gnarly things into very accessible language and stories. And if it’s a public media system, there’s already an infrastructure and a network and a mission. So I think that, for me, journalism is really set up well if we can find champions inside newsrooms that are willing to incubate projects and if we get savvy about how to institutionalize those projects.

If we could get the resources and if we get a beachhead or a toehold, something like that, for the next five to 10 years, for good and for weird, the foundations agree, the academics agree, so I think the wind is behind us. Not that it’ll be easy.

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ON WHAT THE PRODUCT IS

So, I don’t think there has to be a product, but anytime you’re bringing people together intentionally it’s a gathering, and a gathering can be a product, and if you don’t feel comfortable thinking about a gathering as a product, then you could certainly have content that is pulled either in images as a photo essay or Instagram series or a digital story.

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JMR’S THEORY OF CHANGE

I think my theory of change is that you get people to care with each other by bringing them together and sharing experiences in a way in which they feel such care that they open up to connecting, and by connecting they see their common humanity or where they have common values or needs, and they like each other or something happens that they’re willing to care with each other, do stuff with each other.

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I want to close with a fragment from another poem, that one of the participants in the Care Collaboratory read the last time we met. It’s called How to Listen, by James Pearson.

I’m not asking you
to come down here
and clean out the muddy
corners of my life.

(…)

I’m not asking you
to hold me together.
I’m asking you
to open so wide
there’s room for all the ways
I come apart.

PS: After some pestering from friends, I’ve turned on Substack pledges, as a first step in introducing a paid subscription to Draft Four. Pledging is a commitment that when I turn on payments, you’re willing to pay that amount. I don’t want to paywall writing, so consider any pledge a potential future donation to support the work.