Draft Four: Why does our newsroom exist? (1/4)

Building blocks for a journalism of connection and hope.

This is the first of four letters in which I’ll be sharing a complete working draft of my capstone project for the CUNY News Innovation and Leadership program I have recently finished. Any feedback, thoughts or ideas are welcome, encouraged and appreciated.

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Introduction: Emergence

This capstone started with the question of what could journalism informed by the needs of communities (and done at a human scale) could look like in a moment when the business model is crumbling, distribution enters a post-social and post-search world, GenerativeAI promises irrelevance to those engaged in delivering information, trust in media keeps plummeting, and our publics are polarized, isolated, and disconnected.

I envisioned doing interviews with thinkers and innovators mostly in the engaged/civic journalism space, and compiling a list of best practices, roles, or skills that we need. As I read and conversed with others, two things became apparent: the reasons to buy into a journalism informed by the needs of the community have been chronicled, as have the benefits. Community engagement roles are still being tried out and defined, but there is plenty on them, as well, especially when it comes to differentiating them from audience engagement. 

There is no need to re-pitch a call for producing civic-centered, or public-powered, or community-driven journalism.

What is more interesting is the emergence of new metaphors for what this work could be if we allowed ourselves to ponder the frightening thought of our irrelevance (of even the death of journalism as we've been defining it for decades): different ways to articulate what it could be for, who it could be done alongside with, how it would come about, what other stories would it tell, what might possible new metrics etc.

As this project became more of an overview of ways to re-birth journalism from its ashes, it also took on a side mission. I didn't feel it was enough to talk to (mostly) Western media innovators. I wanted to know whether the people engaged in trying to build a more equitable and empathetic society back in my home country of Romania even had a need for journalism anymore, especially as many have started to fill a gaping void with civic information and guidance produced and distributed directly by them (from guides to voting, to explainers of income disparity, to data collection on campus harassment).

All of the above – the theory, the lived experience of trailblazers around the world, and a sketch of the civic sphere in Romania – shaped the outline of a new project I'd love to try. It's early to tell what it'll be. By old standards it could be a digital magazine, an engaged journalism play, a platform for civic information. But what if it's more – not in reach or scale, but in depth, in meaning, in its intrinsic utility to the human soul?

All of this to say, this is what you'll be reading:

• An in progress overview of new ways of thinking and working;

• A rough first draft of what a new project in Romania could be;

• Next steps aimed at developing both.

My friend, artist, runner, gardener, citizen, Mircea Drăgoi, made a series of illustrations inspired by this project. You’ll see them throughout the next weeks.

How to read this

I owe a lot to much wiser thinkers about how to change journalism, and to my colleagues in the CUNY Executive Program, alongside whom we could safely entertain questions such as “what if we just let journalism burn?”

Which is partly why this paper will lean into subjectivity, and take existing ideas as natural starting points. As expressed by Jeff Jarvis this year: “I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news: It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry.”

And Jennifer Brandel, in an essay that has been haunting me: “As we now reflect on the loss of journalism, it may be useful to revisit: What was journalism for, anyway? The answers often include: bearing witness, holding the powerful to account, providing context to current events, and helping people understand what's at stake so they can make the best choices. In reality though, those idealized purposes of journalism never manifested consistently. And for so very many people and populations, journalism never fulfilled that promise or served those purposes.”

Shirish Kulkarni expressed some of our failures more directly: “If society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, that is a failure of journalism. At least partly, like not 100%. But for me, that is a failure of journalism. And we don't take responsibility for that. But we are responsible for it.”

So I'm writing this under the paradigm of “something is dying”. I'm also writing under the assumption Jarvis expressed as early as five years ago regarding what could replace it: “journalism [that] exists to be of service to the public conversation”, a journalism which needs to rise from communities.

As trust in the profession tumbled in the past decade, the journalism ecosystem was flooded with small newsrooms and projects trying something else. They emphasized mission, engagement, community, care, collaboration, and other ideas that are not in the traditional toolbox. They expanded the existing traditional roles with some that seemed closer in scope to community organizers, activists, or social workers: conveners, mediators, facilitators, and so on. Their aim was to take journalism down to human scale, make it relevant to their communities, build from their needs. 

Many call the outputs “civic information”. As Brandel writes, there are several actors who also deliver “civic information”, sometimes better or more directly: from citizens themselves, to artists, sociologists, teachers, healthcare workers, community organizers, and other change agents. This means that whatever the future of community-centered journalism is, it has to be interdisciplinary, relational, and collaborative.

 Journalism doesn't hold a monopoly over information anymore, and it might be time to also reckon with how it turned that monopoly into power, and built yet another system of oppression that prevented communities to build better futures.

These ideas dovetail with existing conversations in journalism, some framed as smart business propositions (centering “user needs”), others framed as collective endeavors (engagement leading to mutually beneficial outcomes), others as resistance to the dehumanizing attention economy of capitalism, or acts of restoration and liberation (think of justice, equity, belonging, hope, agency as ultimate metrics of success). 

Which leads me to a final note. As Jarvis puts it: we need to acknowledge the impossibility of “building a new house while the old one is burning down around existing newsrooms”. This project is not the answer, it's not even a roadmap, and it's most certainly not a checklist. It's an exploration on a long journey and an act of planting a few seeds. I don't know what's next and what will take root; all I can hope is that it ends well – for us who believe in the work, and the people we serve.

New definitions

From the conversations I've had with journalism innovators and community stewards, there are a number of answers I extracted to the question “What is journalism for?” Here are a few, and then some discussion, a format that'll be recurring as you read on.

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

• Sense make and connect;

• Distribute responsibility for care;

• Create and nurture relationships;

• Belonging;

• Confidence building;

• Capacity building and solidarity for people to act to change their lives;

• Systems change;

• Conversation and action around a common need;

• Bringing people together to negotiate what's important, and build together;

• Instilling hope, agency, dignity.

Journalists often make people hopeless about the world.

One way I know that is by looking at my own news consumption, which has plummeted over the years, because most of it is a litany of doom: war, crime, corruption, too, and other things we try to get the public angry about.

But my day-to-day life is not like that. There is sadness, disappointment, sometimes anger, but there is also joy, beauty, generosity, contribution, and awe. It's not that the media don't spotlight the latter: but the ratio doesn't match our life, and the execution often doesn't reflect lived experience.

The second reason I turn away is to preserve agency. News avoidance has been on the rise, and it's getting staggering to look at in reports. The main reason people turn away? We make them feel bad. We rob them of a probable future where things might be different, and most importantly, we rob them of a sense of agency and participation in that future.

One of the definitions of journalism I subscribed to was from The Elements of Journalism: to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing. One can interpret “provide” and “information” generously and pursue a journalism that is done together with or at least informed by a community. But for most of us, this just means: provide the information, let people sort it out. 

That's not enough, says Shirish Kulkarni, a British media innovator. If the product is supposed to make your life better, then why are so many turning away? “If there is no route to systems change in the journalism, then that's an empty product”, Kulkarni says. “It doesn't change anything, so it doesn't offer anything that makes your life better or easier.”

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, by convening people to hear one another, be with one another, and identify necessary changes together.

Yet part of the challenge is that coming together to solve collective problems has become harder and harder. It's the rise of individualism, it's the polarization, it's the loneliness, it's the effects of the pandemic, and many other factors. 

But it's brought us to a point where this is felt everywhere. “I see the multiple expressions of yearning, of longing, of loneliness, of seeking connection, community that is a response or a reaction to the beyond human scale [we're living in],” the therapist Esther Perel has said in an interview. “Are you there? Or are you not there? This is what's happening in many of the interactions at this moment. And that creates a particular kind of loneliness. It's not the loneliness of being alone, it's the loneliness of being with people next to whom you should not be feeling lonely, but in fact, you do. It's not about being physically alone, it's about being misunderstood, unseen, rejected, ostracized.”

If journalism is to help people lead better lives, it needs to be optimized for connection. And it has to build a different rapport.

“We shouldn't start from the position that journalism is the most important thing, and we just need to persuade people how to consume it”, says Andrew Losowsky of Vox Media. “What does this community need or these communities need? What kind of information? What kind of interaction? What does it mean for people to own their own stories? Which stories? Why does that matter? And then what are the tools we can use?”

We connect around what people need, and see if and how we can provide it. “If that is journalism, great”, says Losowsky. “If it isn't journalism, then why are we holding on to journalism as the essential piece here?”

New beliefs / paradigms

If we answer the question of “what is journalism for?” with some of the definitions above, it goes without saying we need to approach the work with a different set of beliefs:

• Trust needs to be built and cultivated;

• Care matters;

• Dignity is paramount;

• We should orient towards solutions;

• Have awareness of complexity;

• Be comfortable with uncertainty;

• Have benevolence;

• Humility;

• Help the soul;

• Togetherness;

• Forego power;

• Illuminate;

• Encourage flourishing.

How Journalists Engage is a spectacular book by Sue Robinson, a former practitioner, now a journalism professor. In it, she makes a powerful argument for a journalism meant to do its part in healing some of our broken social fabric. The crux of Robinson's book is this definition:

“Trust building happens through the nurturing of personal, organizational, and institutional relationships that people have with information, sources, news brands, journalists, and each other during what is commonly referred to as engagement. For trust building to occur, engagement needs to be practiced with identity-aware care and enacted through listening and learning.”

Let's break this down:

1. Trust is built through engagement.

2. Engagement means better and closer relationships.

3. These relationships require you to be more aware of your own identity, be more caring, listen better, and learn.

This is a different way of showing up than most journalists are used to. It involves less ego, less power, less certainty, less extractive practices, less of an assumption that our work is intrinsically valuable because it props up democracy. It also shifts the frame of reference from conflict, to co-creation.

Amanda Ripley is an American journalist who, for the past few years, has argued for complicating the narrative on the issues we cover, for understanding how we are often “conflict entrepreneurs”, and for updating our roles to include mediation, facilitation, and conversation. 

In a recent conversation for this project, she talked about journalist-to-citizen encounters as an essential building block of future trust. “In a world in which it will be very hard to know whom to trust – much harder even than it is now – it will be very hard to know what is real and what is not real. Barring a physical in-person encounter, it will be very tricky, I think, to know what is real.

When I'm just kind of musing aloud – I know this is impossible –, I often think that maybe what we need is for everyone to have their own journalist, so that it was like a one-on-one relationship.”

The point Amanda is making is that relationships are foundational, and not just for trusting information, but for insight, for hope and solutions.

In an essay from last year she talks about how sometimes journalists (and other professions) proudly declare that “we don't do hope”, as if hope was a ridiculous thing to aim for. But hope, as she defines it, is the possibility and practice of a better way to be, with ourselves, and with our communities. 

“Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion”, Ripley writes. “It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + will power.” She goes on to quote researchers who looked at how people with “stronger hope skill” perform better in school and at work, manage pain and loss better, and have higher self-esteem. “Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better.”

This is how many community organizers and civic activists define their work: bringing as many different people together as possible, identifying and negotiating what needs to be improved and changed, and then finding ways to solutions that can make life better for everyone. Done best, it leads to more self-aware and empowered communities.

Journalists could act this way, too – it would lead to a less neutral outlook on the world, a more moral and more involved stance, and better relationships. Writes Robinson: “When engagement toward trust building is embraced in full, journalists move away from an approach based in neutrality, where they operate from a distance with abstract, indirect caring for stories, democracy, and information. These engaged journalists instead become immersed in humanity, approaching people, communities, and knowledge with direct and explicit care. As such, this evidence leads me to argue that trust-building work is about relationship building guided by an ethic of care that results in a fact-based moral voice for journalists.”

Next Sunday, we’ll explore how a new way to see the world requires different metaphors for what journalism is, who journalists are, and what their work entails.

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