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.
To be clear, I am not saying all example of using “journalism strategy” are good, or aligned with my beliefs. I only mean to track here examples of non-traditional news and information providers that use fact-based storytelling to gather a community, especially online.
To simplify the framework, I put these examples into three groups of roughly 15 million practitioners of what I’m calling journalism thinking, or journalism strategy:
- Creators and influencers who are rapidly professionalizing without a framework in which to operate. There are 50 million active content creators online, and already more than two million of them earn at least six figures and work full time, according to an influential report by investment firm SignalFire. They expect those numbers to double in just the next several years. Even if just 1 in 10 of those soon-to-be 100 million creators are focused on research, science or other fact-based storytelling efforts, as one conservative estimate put it, that represents at least 10 million target-market creators;
- Marketers and other business leaders who consider storytelling an important strategy. There are almost 12 million English-speaking professionals who list marketing in their job title on LinkedIn, representing just one sliver of the overall global market this book can attract. More than 80% of marketers in a recent survey said they spend money on their professional development, including book purchases for themselves and their teams. If even just a third of marketers who invest in learning were interested in this topic, that would represent more than 3 million more;
- Issue advocates who are growing online communities. Nearly 12 million Americans work in the nonprofit sector, with many others informally leading an expanding number of issue-based online communities, according to Pew Research. Even if just 10 percent of these people are drawn to this approach, this would represent some 1.5 million target-market issue advocates and community leaders.
Examples below in each category.
Examples from individual creators:
- Discussions of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election being swung in part by alternative media channels, chiefly through podcasts led by Joe Rogan and comedian Theo Von, both of whom interviewed Donald Trump
- In response, progressive media channels and posters like Courier Newsroom (founder Tara McGowan)
- Kahlil Greene, 21-year-old TikToker @kahlilgreene, invited to the Biden administration’s “TikTok briefing” on the war in Ukraine
- Kyla Scanlon, finance Creator with 150k TikTok follower and 40k Substack subscribers, interpreting Federal Reserve Bank news
- TikToker QuickThoughts (150k+ followers) parsing what other creators are saying using data
- Economists interpreting labor, inflation and other economic data, including Kathryn Ann Edwards and Christopher Clarke
- Science communicators combating misinformation on vaccines
- In just a few short months, science writer Swapna Krishna earned 2 million TikTok likes and a gig hosting a PBS web series by spending hours independently reviewing research and fact-checking claims about space and far-out technology.
Examples from content marketers:
- Hotel chain Hilton discovered that a well-edited multi-part docuseries on climate change resulted in a quantifiable reputational boost.
- Content marketers advising on source-building: “Content builds connection. Connection builds trust. Trust drives conversion.”
- The community-company movement that crowdsources and verifies information.
- Some B2B publishers that were founded outside journalism practices but found their way there to increase trusting relationships.
- Time Out went from a print publication into a culture one. CEO mentioned that what they were good at was curating experiences for cities. So they just do that on every platform. Someone in the audience asked how he balances need to elevate other brands with his own brand. He says “thats why I have editors.” Julio Bruno, CEO of Time Out Group said in fall 2019: “We employ journalists, but now we also employ bartenders”
Examples from advocacy organizations:
- Transparentem, an NGO, produces field research to uncover and highlight investigates labor and environmental abuses — and has experimented with ways to improve conditions.
- Published by an advocacy group, Energy News Network, which has a journalism-trained editor Ken Paulman
- Wikipedia’s crowdsourced writers, editors and community of fact-gathering.
- Founded in 2009, Kaiser Health News
- Jim MacMillan’s The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting
- Bellingcat, the human-rights NGO that has investigated Russian war crimes in the Ukraine
Below I’ve pasted some screenshots for future reference.
Content Marketing expert Fio Dossetto who writes a guide that aims to teach “the ideal way to create useful, helpful, and convincing content about anything is to match topical complexity with subject matter expertise.”
