Why does our newsroom exist? (in full)
Building blocks for a journalism of connection and hope.
This is a complete working draft of my capstone project for the CUNY News Innovation and Leadership program I finished in the summer of 2024. All our final projects, in short 5-min videos, are online. Any feedback, thoughts or ideas are welcome, encouraged and appreciated. Project illustrations below were all done by my friend, artist and illustrator Mircea Drăgoi.
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.
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:
Trust is built through engagement.
Engagement means better and closer relationships.
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.”
New metaphors
A new way to see the world requires different metaphors for what journalism is, who journalists are, and what their work entails. The “watch dog” or “the fourth estate” or “holding power to account” need companions; here are some options:
An act of service;
A way of holding space;
Empathy training;
Community healing;
Being a guide on the last mile;
Mimic how nature communicates;
Interstitium / Connective tissue;
Constellation;
Narrative change-maker;
A hub of resiliency.
Jennifer Brandel, the founder of Hearken, uses the illustration below to discuss transitioning between systems: an old one, traditional and struggling to keep going, and an emergent one, incubated in networks and communities of practice.
“When you come up during a certain era, each generation has its own water it’s been swimming in, where it just feels like this is how the world works in their own perception of reality,” Brandel says about the change we’re undergoing. “And I think that some of the leaders who are either literally running newsrooms or on the boards or governance structures that are running newsrooms are still in an old world that doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s not that they’re bad people or anything. I think, you know, if given time and education and ways to discuss and figure it out, they could move on it, but that’s really hard.”
This existing and dying system is about seeing the journalists (not the public) as the experts, maintaining and perpetuating a company rather than empowering people to make change in their community, thinking of published stories and news broadcasts as the only possible products, holding on to ideas of scale and continuous growth, measuring impact in clicks and awards etc.
Change is scary for anyone. But it’ll come. And one question is how can we be better equipped to serve and connect communities? Here are four of the metaphors above, in Brandel’s words:
GUIDE THE LAST MILE. Urban planners often think about the last mile problem, where there’s many people who live a mile or more away from where a bus or train service line will end. And I feel like journalism so often drops people off in the middle of nowhere with the articles, where they don’t know where to go or what they can do about it.
They have just been given a problem. Like their psyche has been dropped off in the middle of a burning canyon of trees, and they’re just like “I don’t know how we get out of this”, and there’s no bridging. We need things like: “If you’re interested in learning more, here are local organizations working to solve this problem.” Or “here are solutions other places have tried to solve for this”.
We do this so people know where to put that energy, that angst, that confusion, that despair, that outrage, whatever it is they’re feeling. It just sits in them. So I also think a lot about how you convert energy into movement, and not just have it sit and stagnate, because I think that actually creates a level of dis-ease and actual disease, societal disease.
COLLECTIVE SENSE-MAKING. The other thing I keep thinking about is collective sense making. I was at this great gathering last summer and someone said: “What does it mean that the entire product design of journalism is to be consumed individually?” So, if you think about it, you’re on your phone, you’re watching a video, you are an individual choosing your own adventure, and taking in this information that is really difficult and complicated. And you’re often doing it by yourself.
You're left to yourself to make sense of it or to just form your own opinions and not be informed by other people who are seeing a different angle of the same topic. And so how might newsrooms and journalists create spaces for collective sense making, where you can go “here’s this major issue, and here’s 10 different ways that it’s impacting people”, and hear from the people themselves who are being impacted in different ways. Thus you can get a more well-rounded understanding, and also understand where you fit in, and how you can do something about it, not just be informed.
HOW NATURE COMMUNICATES. I was at a conference and there was a woman who’s kind of the mother of biomimicry, which is a field in which we design things based on how the natural world operates, and she said communication in nature happens in three parts: there has to be a signal, so something being pushed out, there has to be some kind of meaning-making from that signal, and there has to be a response.
Without all three of those things, there is no communication.
Journalism is obsessed with and hyper-muscular about the signal, and not the meaning-making, and not the response. We're focused on informing, but not engaging and equipping people for what to do next. To me, journalism is a failure of communication if you compare it to how communication actually happens in the natural world. It's just signal signal signal.
THE CONSTELLATION. The original sin, or the biggest sin of journalism, is not acknowledging that we need each other. There is this idea of individualism, and this culture of “we should be self-sustaining, we should be able to do things ourselves”. Not acknowledging our interdependence is what also fuels the isolation, alienation, loneliness that people are feeling. Because it feels like we’re not supposed to be interdependent, because our culture has pushed us toward a narrative frame that makes interdependence seem like you’re bad, you fucked up, you’re broken.
But interdependence is the key to a thriving ecosystem. So even within a city, how can a newsroom look at itself not as a destination, as in a hub and spoke model, but instead as being a node in a network, a constellation.
If we stop thinking of our institutions as the be-all end-all, and frame our goal as actually making things happen in community, then I think people would be able to be much more creative in how that institution can operate and move. If you start to disaggregate things from just keeping a company alive, and instead have people paid and thinking about what are the talents and jobs to be done that are still needed in community, I think all manner of creative options become available.
But that’s scary, you know. Like who’s about to blow things up and be like: “we’re gonna become a distributed network coordinated interstitium of our city rather than a company with a label and a name that puts things out on a signal.”
New roles
For journalists to do such work and/or do it so differently, they also need to reframe their roles – both in theory and in practice. Some of these could be actual newsroom jobs, some could be part of the responsibilities of anyone who engages with communities.
Experience designer;
Convener;
Facilitator;
Mediator;
Relationship builder;
Community collaborator;
Industry networker;
Guide;
Teacher of storytelling;
Cheerleader for change agents;
Story librarian;
Identity builder.
jesikah maria ross 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”.
She is also one of the hosts of the Care Collaboratory (check out this zine!), a gathering of people interested in care-based storytelling practices (which I've been fortunate to join for their spring-summer 2024 season.)
Something she thinks a lot about is our power as journalists to convene, which she sees as essential today: “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. No amount of sharing text and images are going to really penetrate. I think we need the antidote to that: connection.”
What we need for connection is to create experiences, ross says.
“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.”
Designing these experiences, combined with hosting, facilitating, and moderating them are the skills we need or the skills we should bring in through collaborating or co-creating with other civic actors. In her book, Sue Robinson also lists four essential new roles that open into a wide array of activities: relationship builder, community collaborator, conversation facilitator, and professional industry networker.
New skills
All these new roles have new skills embedded in them. The one that comes up the most, not surprisingly, is listening – arguably many of the others spring from it.
Listening;
Learning;
Hosting;
Facilitating;
Humility;
Trauma-aware reporting;
Distill and synthesize;
Decode and humanize data.
In How Journalists Engage Robinson highlights two essential skills - learning and listening - and unpacks what else is embedded within them:
1. Radical transparency. Highlighting who was involved in story production, the contributors’ identities, ethical decisions etc.).
2. Power dynamic appreciation. Acknowledging in reporting and in content production the power dynamics at work. This also refers to the power in the newsroom and within the reporter’s own self, and the newsroom’s problematic practices.
3. Mediation. Helping people find common ground/values and moving beyond polarization.
4. Reciprocity and feedback loops. Following through with sources and community members, checking in with people constantly.
5. Media literacies. Everyone, from K–12 teachers and parents to tech companies and journalists, has to help people recognize good information.
6. Community offline work. Visiting schools, hosting forums.
7. Needs/assets/solutions analyses. Proactively helping community stakeholders to listen for a community’s various needs, recognize the existing assets and potential partnerships, connect groups and policymakers, and work toward solutions to problems.
8. Collaborative production. Partnering with other news media or community groups to develop shared ethical guidelines around information exchange or asking people to crowdsource and even produce content.
New collaborators
Arguably, a community-centered approach that prioritizes care and listening should lead to collaboration, and co-creation. Journalists don’t need to have all the necessary skills, but they need to know where to find the people who do and what to ask for:
Community organizers and activists, who can bestow a transfer of trust and power and also be trainers and guides;
Facilitators, who can be mentors and co-hosts for difficult conversations;
Experience designers and artists that can help shape convenings.
Leezel Tanglao is a Assistant Managing Editor of Digital for the Dallas Morning News, and a community leader and innovator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she brought together peers from the Filipino Young Leaders Program to build Tayo, a virtual help desk to answer the Filipino-American community’s questions and debunk misinformation in a way that was aware of who the stakeholders were. “How do we prevent people from dying because they are getting faulty information?” was their driving question. “And how do we get through to them?”
Her journalism skills were crucial to framing the project, but the succes came from its interdisciplinary taskforce (technologists, attorneys, health care experts all contributed). Tayo has now expanded its research and informational scope to public health, migration, election information and other topics, and each article is still regularly reviewed by a panel of subject-matter experts. Finding funding is still difficult for Tanglao and her peers because Tayo is hard to put into a box.
“They way we’re set up now doesn’t fit under the traditional journalism lens, which is actually very depressing to me”, Tanglao says. “You are basically gatekeeping other communities that have a lot to offer and know the audiences better. The practices of journalism can be far more than we know it to be.”
New workflows and stories
As all of the above come together, our approach to the work will change – both in what we do and how we do it. We can:
Use a community participation model: listen-harvest-prioritize-act;
Choose a level of participation: from providing information, to consultation, all the way to empowerment;
Be transparent about who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how;
Do stories together – especially with vulnerable communities or communities that journalism has been done to;
Surface civic victories as inspiration;
Be a translator for jargon coming from other civic actors, which we can turn into actionable experiences for citizens;
Become a repository of solutions for community problems.
Joy Mayer has been running the Trusting News project since 2016. Joy’s essential pitch is that you need to meet your community’s needs in order to be trusted. You have to listen, engage, invite people in, make them understand how story ideas appear and how they get decided on.
But there’s a piece that has to come before “process transparency”, she says, and it has to do with benevolence and the perception of it: “Do I feel like I can trust you? This kind of has to come first. Before I believe your checklist, before I believe the fact checkers, I have to believe that the people doing the fact checking have integrity. This Knight/Gallup research last year asked about societal benevolence and individual benevolence. And the question is like, do I believe that journalists care what happens to me as a result of their work? And do I believe the journalists care what happens to society as a result of their work?”
For many people, the answer was “no”, they didn’t think journalists gave a shit.
Involving people in the work, whether by deciding together what should be covered, involving them in the journalism, training them to do the journalism themselves, and then giving them agency over how they’re portrayed are complicated moves for the profession.
“A really practical example”, says Shirish Kulkarni, an award-winning journalist and media innovator from the UK. “People say: why don’t journalists check their stories with us after they've interviewed us? It’s a simple, obvious thing. And journalists say: ‘oh, it’s journalistic independence’ (...) But if people don’t have power and trust is the existential challenge we are facing, why should we not? What are we scared of? I think that what we are scared of is the key question there, because at some level, I think we know we’re misrepresenting people.”
The second idea I'll borrow from Joy Mayer is humility. Yes, explaining journalism is still necessary, because we take for granted that people understand how we decide what to cover when, of course, nobody understands. “The industry can’t decide”, Mayer says. “In a newsroom we can’t agree on how we decide what we cover! And yet, somehow, we think the public will know that, right?”
What Mayer has since added to an ideal newsroom’s to-do list is humility – journalists understanding what they’re missing and how they can do better. And asking communities to tell us about our failings.
“We’re asking more often the fundamental question of who feels seen and understood by journalism, and who feels neglected or misrepresented by journalism, and the answer to that question holds a lot of keys”, Mayer says. “So I think that the longer I’m doing this, the more I realize how much we’re getting wrong, and the less patience I have with journalism that might meet journalists’ definition of success, but isn’t actually helping any communities.”
New products and formats
Journalism that actually helps and represents communities has to assemble products that align with our definitions and principles: be caring, make lives better, create connection etc. And it might well be that expanding the definition of a news product beyond something that is “published” or “broadcast” could be freeing. This could include:
Forms of journalism done at human scale;
Actual Experiences (AE);
Conversations;
Live events – from journalism on stage, to plays;
Public square events;
Spaces and communities to connect around the news;
Public forums;
Answering questions;
Providing context;
Facilitating living libraries.
None of the above conform to the way we're used to getting journalism delivered to us. And most don't conform to our contemporary desire for efficiency – they actually run counter to the promises of customizable content through GenerativeAI.
Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar describe these as: „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 events, 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”.
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?
Thus, journalism as a meaningful inefficiency is about creating products meant to distribute “caring responsibility”. Quoting from Gordon and Mugar:
“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.”
jessikah maria ross designed the conversations on housing that Gordon and Mugar spotlight. (She has also recently written this guide on how to do participatory trauma-informed journalism). jesikah says we should start thinking about how “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.”
Telling good stories isn't going away, but maybe the way we get to consume them, or find the space for them to reach us is changing.
In recent years there have been several research studies on the effect of various forms of live journalism on the public. A paper on the Finnish live journalism show, Musta laatikko (Black Box), concluded that it creates a “shared reality” that “can support audiences to comprehend the news by contextualizing them as part of history and anticipated futures. (...) The stories can also transcend everyday existence by being a reminder of how finite and precious human life is. Similarly, democratic and public participation can be portrayed as a meaningful moral and universalist pursuit, rather than a citizen responsibility to be fulfilled. (...) Moreover, journalists can envelop themselves and their audience within a shared 'us' and thereby invite them to reflect on shared meanings, collective truths, and the social and ecological challenges faced by society.”
New metrics
It's all fine and good until we get to decide what success would look like for the journalism described above. Metrics for connection, shared reality, and for works of “meaningful inefficiency” have to be different. Here are some of the things we should think about measuring:
Meeting better in communities;
Conversing more meaningfully;
People being more careful with each other;
Participating more;
Having more patience for change;
Coming together for good;
Becoming more curious;
Empowerment.
Even though many journalists complain about the industry’s reflexive tendency to talk about views or clicks, they can’t help themselves. Many feel a story has failed if it hasn’t hit some (often) arbitrary threshold of trafic. Maybe it’s the institution’s definition of succes, or maybe it’s the reporter’s, but it exists.
Even in newsrooms that don’t share traffic numbers or use them to make decisions, the feeling that “not enough people saw this” exists. There is a natural tendency for many in the profession to have reach, and it’s been fed by more than a decade of conversation about “scale” and the seemingly infinite possibilities of social media. Today, journalism is entering a post-social world – virality isn’t what it used to be for news, and the platforms’ relationship with the business has largely ended.
Trying something as radical as measuring the impact of a gathering on, let’s say, 10 people in a room, while simultaneously grieving the very real dip of traffic coming from Facebook can be daunting. Not to mention that many digital newsrooms still operate on a financial model largely reliant on digital advertising and clicks. Even in places that embrace reader revenue as a business model metrics are complicated: some measure how stories convert readers to paying subscribes as a way of succes.
Can you measure creating stronger community bonds and reader revenue while also keeping the incentive structure aligned to the mission?
New tensions
Doing the work will surface tensions between old ways and habits, and new ones. The ones regarding metrics are just some of them. Here are others:
React vs. Restore;
Call out vs. Call in;
Point to vs. Guide to;
Break news vs. Gift news;
Burn vs. Build;
Business vs. Service;
Shame vs. Solution;
Diminish vs. Illuminate;
Transactional vs. Transformative.
These are all ways to contrast the old paradigm with a new one. Much of journalism is reactive: it’s purpose is to provide information after an event has happened. What if it’s purpose was more proactive, more intentional? What if instead of pointing fingers and calling out politicians, it “called in” and invited conversation?
Many of the tensions referenced above deal with one of journalism’s main activities: expose wrongdoing. Still, in the act of doing so practitioners often resort to shaming, blaming, and painting the world bleak.
In a conversation with journalist-turned-conflict mediator Amanda Ripley we addressed the difficulty of moving away from framing the world as such:
“I think sometimes journalists think ‘well, of course people avoid news because it's hard, and news is hard, and life is hard’, and they get very righteous about it. But I think the biggest problem is that there's nothing to do with the news.
If we were in our new organization, would we run every project through a litmus test which is basically: Do people already know about this? Is there anything to be done? And if there's nothing to be done by them – which is most of the time – then is anyone doing anything? Is there a vicarious sense of agency that we can help generate through storytelling and reporting so that even though I can't personally intervene in that conflict, it’s good for me to know what other people are trying to do? And even if it doesn't work, it's good for me to know. Because it might spark ideas for my community.
But if the answer is no, no, no – people already know about this, there's nothing they can do, and you have no reporting or data that would indicate that anyone else is doing something useful. I guess the question would be: should we cover it?”
What Amanda is saying is that it will be hard to stop doing journalism they way we’re used to do it: reactive, combative, often without paying attention to whether it’s been useful to anyone. Solving some of this tension might at least open the door to innovation.
“I remember when I was working on the Complicating the narratives essay”, says Amada, “I interviewed this woman who had been a journalist and she became a mediator, and she said that if she were to go back to journalism, she would spend a lot less time trying to be clever and more time trying to find the bits and pieces of people's stories that don't fit.
That really stuck with me; you know when something really lands, and you realize that you've been complicit in that.
I mean, the truth is I can be pretty clever, and it's easier to be clever in language when you're taking something down, when you're criticizing, and judging, and attacking. It's just easier. It's easier to be in any room the person who's attacking than the person who's inventing or trying to find a solution.
I think people are very hungry for some other ways to navigate conflict right now. So it's not hard. It is hard to learn the skills and to implement them and to go against the cultural grain that you're in, whatever it is. That is hard.”
New challenges
Both creating new metrics as well as holding tensions to see what emerges will eventually also run up against the dire reality of funding. Who will pay for this? And who will have the patience to stick with it for the time it needs to show results?
There are a lot of complicated questions regarding who pays for this, and who benefits. As Andrew Losowsky of Vox Media puts it: “Are you serving the communities who will pay for your journalism? And if so, then you are primarily serving the people who have the money to do so? And also, are you serving those who advertise next to your journalism? And if so, what does that say about the types of journalism you will or won't do? [There] will always be conflicts there. And I think that is an inherent contradiction at the heart of a lot of journalism.”
That's not the only challenge, but it might among be the main ones. I’ll list some you’ve read about below, as a reminder of the work ahead.
Little money to test theories & run pilots;
How do you share in-person conversations with a larger public? What's enough to be called public service?
Is this journalism done solely through a progressive lens?
Does this risk excluding people who can't participate and access experiences? Can we design truly accessible places?
If reach is not the goal, and metrics are “soft”, how do we define “enough”? Can we define success as a limit on capacity? (See also this essay on “degrowth journalism” by Adam Thomas).
There is a lot of ego in journalism; do we need different talent pipelines?
This requires new leadership – how can we change the default paradigm of straight white men at the helm?
Cultural resistance, especially for countries/spaces with little interpersonal trust, a high distance from power, lack of tolerance for uncertainty, and high levels of cynicism (according to the Hofstede scale).
A pitch for a pilot project
In the final third of DoR, the publication I co-founded and ran from 2009 to the end of 2022, we aimed to do journalism that centered storytelling as a tool for personal and societal transformation (and healing), that was informed by our public's needs (connection, discovery, serendipity, participation), and that was oriented towards spotlighting solutions.
Our aim was to create a sense of possibility: in a world with many ills, there are ways toward better futures, and here are some potential ones. We served a bittersweet cocktail, with an aftertaste of hope.
The space we have left open has largely not been filled (at least not by a newsroom with a similar coherent mission), and talking to community organizers, civic activists, and expert facilitators has shown the need for journalism as connective tissue still exists. Arguably it's even greater now, especially if it can fulfill the need for complementary emotions to the anger most investigative-centered independent outlets provoke through what they uncover.
Context
The amount and quality of civic information in Romania has grown in the past couple of decades. Civil society actors have also diversified, and now you can see all roles on the social change spectrum represented: from organizers, to rebels, to activists, to helpers and so on.
This chance has led to the emergence of numerous communities: from communities of practice, to communities of place or interest.
Together, they have created a new civic space, a much more diverse ecosystem. Diana Ghindă, a host and facilitator with 20 years of experience has called the existing groups “islands of cohesion”, alternate ways of gathering and doing that are meant to supplant larger social systems and structures that are in disarray or crumbling.
Problem statement
Many existing communities interested in changing existing systems are isolated. They don't know enough about the other “islands” and how much they have in common. They are also sometimes disconnected within, largely a remnant of the pandemic and its lingering weariness of contact, and also struggling to stay afloat in a climate of precarious funding and external threats such as a war across the border in Ukraine, and rising illiberal tendencies in the region.
They are also learning by doing, Adela Alexandru, a feminist community organizer with Centrul FILIA says, which makes the process of growing the social change talent pool harder. The on the ground realities civic actors are working to change also don't allow for an ideal separation of roles, as theory would have it: one day you organize, the next you lobby for something on behalf of a group, then you get involved on the ground as a helper, and the cycle starts again.
This also creates little space for reflection and engagement outside of the day to day work.
Much of the initiatives they undertake require information – both in small cities, but also in a metropolis like Bucharest. That's because state actors intentionally or unwillingly dropped the ball, with faulty laws and regulations, poorly communicated, and often not implemented. Many civic actors thus end up doing both the work of public institutions (especially when it comes to social services or urban development), as well the work of journalists: filling freedom of information requests on public contracts, consulting experts on what to make of a new regulation, gathering information on air quality, and then packaging this for their constituents (often with no dedicated staff for this).
Sabina Mihăilescu and Iris Ursea from Între Vecini, an organization that aims to empower neighbors living in the same building(s), said they were recently working to find out the best flowers to plant in the urban garden adjacent to an apartment building. Eventually they found an expert that will teach the people living there, but couldn’t that information be useful for others, too? But is it them that have to repackage it and pass it on?
We journalists could have (and still can) filled that role, but somehow we didn’t. The image of the journalist is not associated with that of a guide to your daily needs and challenges. It’s just one reason people became largely skeptical, because what they see – when they see us – is mostly extractive, speculative, transactional, or sometimes careless. Those working with vulnerable groups say journalists don't come to listen; they just need “victims” to illustrate a broader story. Others say journalists come in, make a fuss about what's not working in a sector, and then go away, leaving other civic actors to deal with the fall-out.
All this leads to organizations and communities that are overwhelmed, under-resourced and with little bandwidth to gather together to learn from one another, collaborate, or strategize for systems change. These islands need to connect more often.
It's a state of affairs that needs to change, says Alina Kasprovschi, who runs Fundația Comunitară București (FCB), the most important community foundation in Bucharest. FCB started by amplifying existing hyperlocal civic initiatives through grants, and has slowly expanded its ways of working to include more capacity building and multiple stakeholder collaborations. As it now works on drafting a future strategy, Kasprovschi says the main goal would be to bring even more different civic actors together to connect, to foster belonging, and thus to create conditions for larger-scale change to happen (in time).
How can a new kind of newsroom help at this moment?
Potential solution/mission:
Journalism is largely missing as a civic actor in the ecosystem described above. It could join to help gather and connect existing actors at human scale (vs. social media broadcasts from the sector, and other outreach initiatives), understand and explain issues relevant to multiple communities, spotlight existing or potential solutions, all with a mission of enabling collective healing and systems change.
It can listen together with civic actors to the needs of communities, it can use experiences as forms to create connections between change-makers and citizens, it can host conversations and gatherings as tools for collective sense-making, and it can be a guide for people to access services that improve their lives, and for civic actors to discover innovative solutions and new ways of working.
A pilot phase of this project can be focused mostly in Bucharest over the next few years, to better engage local civic actors, strengthen the connections within the ecosystem, being the missing node that can strengthen a constellation, while also training a new generation of engaged/civic journalists.
A subsequent phase could involve creating new hubs of local journalism based on a similar model. They could be incubated by local community foundations or other civic actors, and can grow from there.
Guiding principles:
To distribute responsibility of care in the community;
To create connection;
To co-create with multiple stakeholders;
To make conversations a product;
To add context for a common understanding of issues.
Roles/Jobs to be done:
Convener;
Experience designer;
Listener;
Gatherer of facts, stories, solutions;
Amplifier of success stories;
Synthesizer of complicated systems;
Challenger of existing practices.
Products/Outcomes:
Experiences;
Gatherings;
Live shows;
Solutions journalism;
Stories of hope;
System explainers;
Guides to participating in communities.
Main funding sources:
Large philanthropic grants from foundations that support the development of local civic infrastructure, such as the Romanian American Foundation.
Unrestricted funding from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sector – these can be pooled from small or medium-sized sponsorships from numerous companies, which don't threaten the independence of the project.
Forms of civic partnership, such as pooled funding from civic actors – mostly as a form of membership, which could include access to training in storytelling, reporting, writing etc.
Direct support from the community/communities at large that participate, engage or enjoy the resulting storytelling.
What can go wrong:
Everything. But here are three main areas of tension:
People. Who do we start with? How do we upskill? How long will it take? Locally, there are very few journalists familiar with engagement concepts, even fewer that have practiced it. The main challenge of such a project is translating big ideas into activities/products, and this needs a core team that gets the vision, so we can build around them.
Relationships. How do we thread the line between serving the larger community, and serving the civic actors we're collaborating with? Where do we draw the lines? Are there even lines that need to be drawn? How do we communicate our role as journalists in this ecosystem – to partners and citizens? How do we interact with the rest of the journalism world? Does it matter if we're branded as being outside the journalism space?
Patience. Such a project might take 5-10 years to bear fruit, and even then most of the impact would be at a micro level (individual transformation). Who funds for micro level impact? If we promise mezzo (organizational changes) or macro-level impact (systems change) to secure funding, do we run the risk of mission drift and abandoning the ideas of connection and community in favor of more traditional accountability journalism practices? Can we be ambidextrous and do both human-scale connection and larger-scale systems changes?
(Ideal) calendar of next steps
June-September 2024: Continue interviewing both news innovators as well as local civic leaders, build on the project.
July-September 2024: Get feedback on the draft version, make a draft of the project public, get further feedback and invite stakeholders for more conversations.
September-December 2024: Fundraise for pilot projects, add dimensions to existing initiatives (existing newsroom coverage areas, niche newsletter, live events), strengthen a network of interested local journalists and other civic actors.
October 2024 - April 2025: Test some of these ideas in journalism conferences and forums.
March-April 2025: Bringing together interested parties for conversation and training at The Power of Storytelling in Bucharest, Romania.
Thank you for sticking through till the end. If, after reading this, you or your company/organization wants to contribute to making this happen (financially or otherwise), let me know. Alongside former colleagues we have begun to put together a pooled fund for journalistic experiments could include many of the ideas above.
You can also pledge your support to Draft Four; this would mean I can take on fewer freelance jobs and focus on trying new things. The pledge option should appear below or in the upper right hand corner on this page.