Journalism is a strategy, not an industry. More verb than noun.
I’ve written for years now about what I called “Journalism Thinking,” and so I cxontinue to collect examples of what I consider acts of journalism produced outside of news organizations. Consider this a place for me to gather these examples for future use.
Continue reading Examples of journalism strategy outside news organizationsThis will be the last year of my 30s.
Might as well send this decade of my life out with a flourish. One way I do that is with my annual resolutions, setting goals and a direction for where I want to get.
Below, I share them for my own reference.
Continue reading My Resolutions for 2025I closed last year having felt that I set a new normal I hoped to continue in 2024. I was right.
I traveled a bit more, spoke a bit more, wrote a bit more, all while feeling more comfortable as a parent and a bit more certain where my company had to go. Plenty of vulnerabilities remain but I feel more comfortable in my life post-pandemic and post-kid. I am blessed, if challenged.
Below I share the highlights.
Continue reading My 2024 in reviewIn 2018, progressives had an especially dim view of the American project.
The Trump administration — from the “Muslim travel ban” to unfunded tax cuts to the more general corrosion of norms — was considered a destructive symptom of “the toxic brew of American exceptionalism.” The remarkable “special century” of American-led peace, growth and economic prosperity had ended. A subtler decline was made public.
Or as prolific writer and critic Matt Taibbi famously put it back then: “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
That’s from the 2018 book America: A Farewell Tour, written by journalist Chris Hedges. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Hedges self-identifies as a socialist and has had an outspoken career — leaving the New York Times after his criticism of the Iraq War featured getting booed for a commencement speech. He later contributed to and ran Green Party campaigns.
The book thoughtfully features many in-depth character studies from far-flung corners of American life, from BDSM culture to white supremacy, from sex work to gambling.
“This is the new American capitalism,” he wrote. “It is not about producing products, but escapist fantasies.”
Regardless of whether my politics overlap with his, I respect how Hedges has pursued his sense of truth. He’s at least an independent thinker. This book came in the heat of progressive reaction to the Trump administration. With his second administration starting next month, It felt fitting to return to see how much of Hedges’s 2018 take held up, and what fell flat.
Back then, like as now, he wrote that we were in Gramsci’s interregnum — which the Marxist writer used to describe when an old order has fallen but the new one has not yet come.
“The American empire is coming to an end,” Hedges writes confidently (p. 294). “It will limp along, losing influence and electing diminished leaders. It will lose reserve currency status [Editor’s note: but to whom!?] and falter.” All “within a decade or two”, he writes. This is by no means an optimistic book, and what hope it has is in working people building something better, it is outstripped by Hedge’s antipathy to the established order. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to others — I especially appreciated his thoughtful argument against reactionary violence, as a distraction from the work of organizing.
Below find my notes from the book for future reference.
Continue reading America: A Farewell TourAn old editor told me once: always pick up the phone, but never apologize until you mean it.
As a beat reporter, you’re going to get feedback from sources—sometimes praise, often critique. That’s a good thing. Sometimes we’re wrong, and hearing feedback helps us correct the record. Our goal is to get it right. But sometimes, the anger directed at reporters isn’t about errors or issues that require action. It’s about emotions, misunderstandings, or disagreements.
Continue reading Beat reporters: How to respond to an angry community sourceNaïveté abounded among rich-world leaders in the 1990s.
Free market capitalism and representative democracy seemed ascendant. Free-flowing information online seemed to inspire people to overthrow repressive governments.
In March 2000, then President Bill Clinton famously dismissed a new effort from the Chinese Communist Party to censor the internet: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Likewise, German and other European leaders argued that doing business with Russian and Chinese companies would make them freer. Looking back, this all looks plainly wrong.
That’s a theme from the 2024 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
More free-flowing information does not necessarily mean more truth. Technologies have helped democratic movements no more than they’ve helped authoritarian ones, and turns out those Russian oil providers and Chinese electronic vehicle firms were at least in part government actors, so their motivations weren’t only aligned with a Western capitalistic view.
Today, at least half of all humans now live within states considered autocratic. The world has gotten less democratic in recent years, a backward trend that in the early 1990s seemed impossible. Applebaum’s book is a breezy and thoughtful overview of this emerging bloc she calls “Autocracy Inc.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Autocracy Inc.It’s not that gender doesn’t matter. It does. The point is that people experience gender differently than others, and that recognition is next in a long journey of social progress.
Intellectuals, academics and activists in gender theory are not of uniform opinion but many discuss “co-construction” today, in which gender is a product of both culture and biological sex. The language is nuanced, and the politics are heated. That’s no reason to not push forward.
That’s from the new book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” from Judith Butler, the feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar. As an undergrad, I read “Gender Trouble,” the 1990 book Butler wrote when they were just 34 years old, and which popularized many concepts developing within gender studies. This book is about gender generally, though trans identity is a focus.
Continue reading Who’s afraid of gender?Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.
Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.
The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.
Continue reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?We were back. Audience was great, I enjoyed my lunchtime keynote interview with Wired editor Steven Levy.
To fill an early-morning slot, I crowdsourced a session (in old school unconference style!) on creators as distribution partners, and creators of news. (The topic has been on my mind!) In a crowded room
Below are a few notes from the daylong unconference on the future of news for my own memory.
Continue reading A few lessons from the 15th annual Klein News Innovation CampThe creator economy may be big, or not. The numbers are somewhat divided because definitions are still evolving.
I took what I did know from covering, living and curating creator campaigns, and gave a keynote on the topic for the Philly Ad Club’s annual conference. They had roughly 150 marketers on site at the cozy innovation space of Independence Blue Cross’s headquarters.
Find my slides here. A rough audio recording of the presentation can be found here (or here).
I published here a piece on Technical.ly informed by this work.
