Christopher Wink

Multi-local news can thrive when it’s about more than just place

(This originally appeared a Linkedin article)

Newspaper veterans keep trying to rebuild newspapers.

The impulse is rarely stated so bluntly. But you hear it in most strategy sessions about “saving local news.” Funding and analysis focus on a town-square-style local news bundle that newspaper veterans are determined to sustain for shared identity.

I actually agree with the civic benefits of a single, professionally-curated website, newsletter and social feed that approximates what’s happening in a place. I benefit from such efforts, even if I don’t share the deep emotional connection that people who loved the best years of local newspapers do.

Yet single-mindedness squeezes out other ideas. This blind spot is illustrated in the way the term “multi-local” is currently being discussed and digested by journalism insiders.

What Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly“ teaches the rest of us

Why does there remain a plethora of social ills the disproportionally affect Black people in America over 150 years after chattel enslavement has ended? “The answer: black communities have been subjected to unrelenting an ongoing historical trauma.“

That’s from The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Dr. Lawrence T Brown in 2021. He coined the term “black butterfly” to refer to the patterns of racial segregation in Baltimore, which mirrors patterns in other US cities.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Philosophy or Computer Science: Who Has Higher Unemployment?

Who do you think has a higher unemployment rate right now—recent college graduates with a philosophy degree or those with a computer science degree?

Yikes: it’s computer science, per the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s part of a massive change I’ve written about.

Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It

To understand the economic, cultural and political progress of Black Americans, it helps to look locally.

Brookings researchers released the Black Progress Index with a dozen factors they say are predictive of Black empowerment. It tells a story of entwined issues in American society.

That’s from Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It, the new book from Andre Perry, a fellow of the Brookings Institution.

Below I share my notes for future reference

How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down

If storytelling is so powerful, then why hasn’t the “storytelling big bang” of social media coincided with “a big bang and harmony and empathy”? Well, it has, but that empathy is for in-groups at the expense of the whole.

Social media can feed us any narrative we want: that we are smart, or behind or, above all else, that we are aggrieved by someone. This isn’t because the social platform companies want this specific outcome exactly. Rather, it’s because algorithms feed us what we want to keep us engaged, which reinforces content creators to create more of that subject matter — all of which is what these platforms do want.

In this way, storytelling is “an essential poison” like oxygen, something we need to live but which when isolated or over-concentrated can kill us. In science, that’s called “the oxygen paradox” which inspired the title of a 2021 book called “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down” by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Ahead of a conference keynote I gave on “the case for storytelling” for place-based marketers, I recently reread his 2012 book Storytelling Animal, which helped me find this one.

“Story is a mercenary that sells itself is eagerly to the bad guys as the good,” Gottschall writes. They are “influence machines” and so stories aren’t moral; they’re moralistic — they can be used for good and for bad.

Will There Be More Software Developers in the U.S. Next Year? I’m Betting Yes.

Will there be more software developers working in the United States next year?

My friend—provocateur, venture capitalist, and debutante—Brian Brackeen says no. I say yes.

Now, Brian isn’t some fool. He’s an investor who backs tech companies. I’m a journalist who covers them. So we’re making a bet out of it. [Update: Amusingly, others are betting on this now too]

The Rise and Decline of Nations

Coalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.

Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.

These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.

Improve not just your life span, but your health span too

Today’s medical and pharmacological systems have been successful in responding to trauma — reducing childhood mortality and fatalities from any number of catastrophes.

But as we live longer, more of us face chronic diseases that need more prevention, sometimes decades before any given catastrophe. That’s “Medicine 3.0,” and before the systems ever get an overhaul, there are lessons for us. Improve not just life span, but health span.

That’s the argument of the popular 2022 book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” by physician and longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia. It’s no fad diets or quirky health plans. It’s a bit more like a contribution to health like what economist Emily Oster did for pregnancy — ripping through research to piece together a more commonsense and modern approach to the world.

Below I share a few changes I’m trying to incorporate into my lifestyle and other notes from the book.

Bloggers were once the creators, and there are lessons to learn

Nearly 50 philanthropists and funders squeezed into the breakout at the annual Media Impact Forum conference held at the National Constitution Center.

Our panel’s focus was on newsroom-creator relationships, which we at Technical.ly have dove into — both with creators, and with our own newsroom and, in a sense, because looking back my start as a “blogger” sure sounds a lot like the creators of 15 years ago. My moderator Liz Kelly Nelson wrote up more here on the conference here, and she previously wrote this piece which fits into my writing on ‘journalism strategy.’

Below I share a few notes from the discussion.

The Technological Republic by Alex Karp

The freedom, peace and security that allowed Silicon Valley to flourish was quietly underwritten by an American military that these same Silicon Valley technologists are ambivalent about supporting.

Far from its origins in the Second World War, Silicon Valley focused on consumer technology, which gave it no greater ideal than profit and comfort. This must change, or so argues Alex Karp, the cofounder-CEO of the controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies, in his new book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”

Why, asks Karp, are technologists and knowledge workers ambivalent about working to support invasive corporate advertising, but ardently opposed to (militaristically) defending the Free World?

Writing of Silicon Valley engineers, but no doubt thinking also of millions of other complacent American professionals: “They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”

Palantir and Karp are entwined with a techno-libertarianism that sounds increasingly unhinged: company cofounder Peter Thiel just recently gave a bizarre interview with the New York Times in which, among other quirks, he gave a long, extended pause when he was asked whether humanity “should” survive. Karp might respond the strength and security of the United States affords a diverse array of perspectives, including eccentric billionaires.

Karp reminds, though: “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.