Draft Four: Don’t be a cult, be of service

And other year-end thoughts about journalism.

On New Year’s Eve 2022, our magazine DoR posted its farewell on social media. There were many reasons – these letters have gone through some in the past couple of years, especially my personal failings. But there were also vibes I got about the media landscape – both in Romania and abroad –, that I was beginning to articulate, but couldn’t quite grasp.

Over the past year many of them have come into focus and have made it even more clear why sustaining a magazine devoted to longform writing, meant to foster empathy and understanding, embrace complexity, all while avoiding rage-bait and personality-driven storytelling just wouldn’t work anymore (certainly not at the scale it had). We were already tired – if we kept going it turns out it would have gotten worse.

What I’ll try today is to go through some of the forces shaping journalism and media today – at least those that are interesting to me. Do understand this selection is through the filter of a 43-year-old white man in Eastern Europe, a recovering-media entrepreneur, a perpetual journo-outsider in Romania, someone still naïve about the change journalism could bring about in the world, and simultaneously skeptical about much of what it actually achieves.

🔻 It's dark out there. Call it a perfect storm, but we’re doing terribly. I based my CUNY project calling for more human-scale media on this diagnosis: “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.”

🔻 We hang on to things that are no longer there. Channeling Star Trek, strategist Paul Cheung calls this a Kobayashi Maru scenario, a moment where typical solutions are useless. Your institution is no longer trusted, and trust is not coming back. Dividing editorial from business in a product-driven landscape is foolish. Scale measured by clicks still works for some, but what it does truly mean? Media innovator Jennifer Brandel (who’ll be in Romania again next March) has this great question: how about we contemplate our demise? Yes, the death of our way of working and thinking: what if we just accepted it and built anew?

🔻 What might we give up? For starters, the idea that we’re oh, so special that we need saving. Candice Fortman, a community media champion, recently wrote this on LinkedIn: “Journalism needs to decenter journalism. Saving journalism has never been the job. The mission has always been to protect communities from an onslaught of predatory, violent, and deeply unjustifiable policies, companies, and systems that exploit our neighbors and prioritize profit over people.” (Also read this post of hers.)

Here are more people musing about this. Political scientist Yasha Mounk’s plea – Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy – also reminds us journalists vastly overestimate their ability to influence their readers, so we often end up with a patronizing “we know better” attitude. The loss of trust in journalism has something to do with this, too.

🔻 Embrace a theory of service, writes my friend Patrick Boehler, who argues in a recent newsletter we should also drop the self-important Fourth Estate references, as they do little but underscore our proximity to power (and our desire to keep cozying up).

Clinging onto elite status means perpetuating systems that have gone bad. And defining oneself in opposition to them may be equally futile. What is the point of becoming operators, or even martyrs, of an ineffective craft? There has to be another way.

We’ve been maintaining relationships with power structures when we should have been building relationships with people. This realization isn’t defeatist, it’s a call to action.

Patrick illustrates what a theory of service would mean by using a bakery comparison: “Like any successful bakery, civic media organizations have a responsibility to their communities to understand their attention market, meet real informational or emotional demands, and deliver value – before considering secondary aspects like packaging or distribution methods.”

🔻 What is journalism for? I took on this question in my research paper this year, and while I stand by what I wrote and wish to see experiments come to life, doing that is even tougher in media ecosystems such as mine in Eastern Europe. For example, the way I’d answer the “what is journalism for?” question makes many local colleagues roll their eyes:

• 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.

This is what I wrote: “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?”

🔻 We need more than fact-checking. I understand why we cling to our status. In Romania we just had a disastrous election season, atrocious meddling – hybrid warfare by any definition –, and we’re in a deep political crisis. Misinformation and disinformation almost brought an extreme-right wing conspiracy theorist to power – and that danger is still here. But it’s not just that.

Misinformation is like a blanket that covers people that need emotional needs met. And journalism hasn’t been meeting many of those for a while. Plus, large scale misinformation has been a reality for more than a decade now, and our fact-checking has barely made a dent. (This recap of the Romanian landscape is both frightening and informative).

Also, we know from research is fact-checking doesn’t change minds – people don’t share lies and conspiracy theories because they think they are factually true; they do it because it matches the storyworld they have created for themselves. Our fact-checking is a threat to their world. What would you do if someone threatened your storyworld?

Here’s a sobering idea from a Nature paper, based on a sample of more than 35 million Facebook posts. Shares without clicks made up 75% of those that were passed on. We share without clicking or reading 3 out of 4 times, basically. Our information diet is junk: memes, headlines, and rage-bait.

🔻 The internet is full of garbage. Slop, Max Read has called it in a recent piece. A few years ago he was writing about the inversion, that moment in digital life where fake content will outgrow content made by humans. In the age of GenAI, we’re past that – arguably the majority of the internet will soon be made up of useless AI-generated slop, much of it fake, much of it worthless, all produced to meet algorithm needs and platform reward-schemes.

This is evidence, Read writes, “for the dead-internet theory, the only slightly tongue-in-cheek idea, inspired by the increasing amount of fake, suspicious, and just plain weird content, that humans are a tiny minority online, and the bulk of the internet is made by and for AI bots, creating bot content for bot followers, who comment and argue with other bots. The rise of slop has, appropriately, the shape of a good science-fiction yarn: a mysterious wave of noise emerging from nowhere, an alien invasion of semi-coherent computers babbling in humanlike voices from some vast electronic beyond.”

🔻 It’s personality time. All this partly explains the rise of the content creator class, the influencer, the more-authentic seeming authority. “We cannot reverse the drift from institutions to individuals”, Helen Lewis writes. “[Joe] Rogan is the mainstream media now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both [US] presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs – the tougher, more focused accountability interviews – in favor of talking directly with online personalities.”

This happened in Romania, too: presidential candidates were guests on celebrity podcast shows, fielding softball questions. They were on TV, too – on shows that were mostly friendly to them, of course – but those audiences are shrinking.

On the night of the Parliamentary election returns, I joined more than 10,000 others to watch Silviu Faiăr, a Romanian center-left creator, on his Twitch stream. He talked about exits polls, politics, while together with his partner they read letters to Santa from children from vulnerable communities. By the end of the night they had raised 102,000 Euros for an NGO; a bank doubled that amount to 204,000 euros (yes, you read that right: two hundred thousand). Around the same time, two crusty middle-aged editors-in-chief of a news website went live on Facebook to discuss the election results – there were a few dozen of us watching, and it was cringe.

🔻 New Rules of Media. “Everything is a personality cult” is the first of 20 rules for succeeding in digital media today. The list is a tad playful, but also clear eyed about what “making it” means. We might not see the same reality in the day to day life of newsrooms of Eastern Europe, but it’s here, and many are taking advantage of how information and entertainment are consumed today, and it’s not just bad faith actors and influencers taking bites out of the journalism pie.

Some of best political coverage in Romania is done by Politică la minut, two twenty-something dudes with an Instagram account (OK, it helps they are really smart. And, full disclosure, I adore them). Some of the best gender equality coverage is done by NGOs. Much of the practical content – from cooking, to DYI home projects – is on TikTok.

So pay attention to these rules – if not because you want to be a personality yourself, then because it might help you decide why you don’t want to be one. Here are other ideas from the list of rules:

Surf new platforms aggressively and embrace multi-platform presence: Whether you’re a person or a brand, broadcast everywhere.

Make data portable and audiences direct: Avoid reliance on tools or platforms that lock you in; cultivate direct, portable relationships with your audience through channels like email and homepages.

Get social IRL: “The most compelling publications or media brands are the ones that can throw the best parties, because it shows they can mobilize an IRL group of interesting people, who are then consumers and customers and clients.”

🔻 “This is fucking exhausting, man.” (This was me trying to read your mind.) I know. It is. You don’t have to participate. You can opt out of news, take a news vacation. It’s actually good for you, as much as we journalists tell you it’s not. Or move to the other end of the spectrum – the one I used to inhabit, the land of longform storytelling, complex explainers, narrative podcasts, and painstakingly edited documentaries. (Embrace the barbell, Millie Tran writes).

That work is hard to make, and just as hard to monetize, but if short-form everything (video especially) is a niche, so is longform. (My friends at Recorder are proof of this – people watch one-hour long investigative documentaries, and donate to pay the salaries of their 20+ people team.)

🔻 Maybe stop posting. I remember that, in 2009, when DoR started, Facebook felt like a neighborhood coffee shop where you could greet your community every morning and ask how they were. We actually did that, they responded, posting online was fun. It’s not fun anymore.

One thing we could all do is post less, especially on social media – Anne Helen Petersen makes a great argument for it, especially given the vitriolic feel of modern online life. Writes Anne:

The audience will not respond to anything you post in good faith. They will weaponize it against you, and the platform itself will do nothing to protect you. If anything, it will accelerate and amplify the attack.

Whether you are a newsroom or a creator, Anne says you ought to ask yourself: “Does posting add more to my life than it extracts? In this iteration of the internet, in this ideological climate, with these platform-specific incentives – is social media ‘worth’ it?”

🔻 Question everything. “I’m at a place where I’m very frustrated with journalism and actively working to leave it”, someone told me recently. Given everything above, it’s understandable. If you are part of the group asking yourself this question – and I am, too – this podcast by Brian Reed does a great job at accelerating the inner monologue. Brian, the host and creator of the legendary S-Town, tackles topics like our profession’s potential to do harm (even unintentionally), our limits to making a difference, what the public’s distrust feels like and many others.

🔻 But don’t despair. Read this by science-fiction writer, Arkady Martine (who’ll join us at The Power of Storytelling in March). It’s a piece on how “everyone’s world is already ending all the time”. It’s about climate, our inability to comprehend its destruction, but also our fatalism when we do contemplate it. Substitute anything for climate – the demise of our politics, our institutions, our capacity to listen, our communities, our journalism:

I am not saying that we should not grieve. How can we not grieve for what we are losing, and what we have done to create that loss? But grief absolves us of action. Grief can so easily become despair, and despair creates inaction: what would be the point of trying, anyway? (…) But that is denial. And denial is a failure of imagination.

🔻 “You fight the long defeat”. This is from Paul Farmer, who was one of the world’s most hopeful people (and a doctor). I heard it in a speech by Ed Yong, one of the journalists I admire most deeply. I read Ed’s writing on the pandemic in The Atlantic religiously – he never shied away from the pain yet always kept the focus on the complexity and the systemic response that was needed. It was hope in the face of tragedy, hope as discipline, hope as storytelling to make sense and to heal.

Last week I watched this speech Ed gave about his pandemic work, the many accolades, the burnout, stepping away but not leaving the field, although he questions many of its “truths”. He is working on another book, takes photographs of birds, and tries to follow a set of simple rules – as a journalist, and as a human.

They are all worth following, and may they guide us through this dark night.

• No arguing with strangers online;

• Do not become a pundit;

• Cultivate readers, not fans;

• No savior complex;

• Acknowledge & uplift community;

• Act the part even if you don’t feel it;

• Use power well.

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