On Media – Page 3 – Christopher Wink

Newsrooms should have and defend their ‘basic beliefs,’ not the tactics to get there

News organizations, at least here in the United States, operate with all sorts of assumptions underpinning their foundations. But it gets uncomfortable once you review them. I believe more news orgs should identify these.

Out of a reporting project, I found myself considering what those core beliefs are for Technical.ly. To identify these assumptions, we’re forced to address: what is the line between a newsroom becoming partisan and a newsroom defending justice? My divide is between the *tactics* to reach a given goal, and the goal itself, which might be understood as that organization’s *”basic beliefs.”*

From my perspective, a news organization today should hold firmly those *beliefs* about the world and the communities it serves. These can and likely should range by the organization. As an exercise, I wrote a few that I believe are basic beliefs of my own news org:

Representative democracy is our preferred form of government;
A free press that challenges its community in pursuit of the most true view of that community is at times inconvenient but beneficial;
Race is an immoral predictor for health and economic outcomes, and should be removed;
Invention is a means for solving collective problems and should be rewarded;
Economic mobility makes us all better off, and entrepreneurship and career opportunities help;
Group-based income inequality correlates to conflict and so should therefore be reduced;
Violence is rarely a justified act and so should therefore be reduced, etc.

News organizations should defend fiercely their core beliefs — and individual employees, including newsroom staff, should be allowed to do the same. This is why when we had a newsroom conversation, it felt easy to encourage Technical.ly’s D.C. reporter to protest personally and loudly at a Black Lives Matter protest.

In contrast, the *tactics* to reach those goals are where I view newsrooms must tread most cautiously. In tactics, we find politics and partisanship; it is easy to fall in love with one set of tactics and then therefore become a political actor. Debating and lobbying for tactics is not inherently bad — activists and advocates are crucial, but I believe that’s where journalistic approach ought not venture. I believe there are exceptions but news organizations should use those exceptions rarely.

A good example? Minimum wage research is mixed. Whether a federal $15 minimum wage will reduce income inequality is contested. In contrast, there’s more consensus around growing local minimum wages to fit prevailing wages, and we at Technical.ly have guardedly written in a more favorable light to a local increase than a federal one.

What is my news, media or content business worth?

As the web has brought down the upfront costs of launching a publishing business, there are plenty of them. This means I’ve been asked to join several conversations about how to decide how much one of these are worth.

I’ve been involved in several conversations over the last few years in which publishers (those with no full-time employees to those with several dozen) have sought advice or discussed the topic. I suspect I’ll have other conversations like them in the future, so I thought I’d just share some of the advice I most commonly give and have seen take place.

Notes on ‘Stuff of Thought’ by Steven Pinker

Language is a manifestation of human thought. So it’s an effective tool to understanding how we perceive the world.

That’s the premise of the 2007 bestselling book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. His prodigious collection of popular books blending linguistics, thought and human nature have made him both a celebrity academic and a frequent source of scorn.

I appreciate his contributions and regardless of popular perception, I’ve enjoyed working through his catalogue. Below I capture some notes from finally getting through this one. Find 2007 reviews from the New York Times and the Guardian.

White authors writing non-white characters

American fiction writing is over-indexed for straight white male voices, considering our rapidly diversifying country. A consequence of this has been painful examples of white authors doing a crummy job conveying the voice and experience of non-white characters.

This has been no better demonstrated than in Young Adult fiction. The deserved backlash has gone to a logical extreme: should white authors write non-white characters at all?

If you believe like me that there, indeed, will continue to be white authors and that we do not want all stories told by white authors to be exclusively populated by white characters, then the more productive question is how can white authors effectively and ethically write non-white characters?

Newspapers were once the big tech platform companies everyone hated

This is adapted from a Twitter thread.

There are many parallels between early newspapers and today. Like then, today big tech platforms are vilified for taking creative destruction to a more harmful end to civic discourse.

Then partisanship and misinformation gave rise to the modern concept of editing. Perhaps something akin is happening again.

News organizations: how do you get throughout feedback from your community?

I assume that the idea of ‘letters to the editor’ was once a representative and effective means for news organizations to receive feedback from their community.

I’m not certain it remains so. For one, those can of course only be sent in for what has already been announced. I also get the sense not many reporters really listened or could gauge the preponderance of feedback.

The rise of quantitative surveying helps, though of course surveys are also not necessarily representative. We at Technically Media do our fair bit of surveying, after events and annually too. We also host regular curated groups of readers and (importantly) those we aspire to be readers of ours.

“Ability to deliver for clients” can’t be anathema for news organizations

Leading a small news organization puts me at an unusual crossroads: I’m as close to our sources as I am to our customers. In my experience, most of those interested in financially supporting Technical.ly know their stuff. Of course, there are exceptions, but on the whole, they’re better informed than average.

Yet I often encounter a default assumption among journalists: To demonstrate independence, many instinctively treat those who financially support their news organization worse than those who don’t. This creates perverse dynamics. I’ve had potential advertisers tell me they avoided sponsoring us because they feared their independent coverage would be perceived as bought-and-paid-for.

This is a dangerous place for news organizations. It’s a cultural tic that likely developed during an era when newsrooms operated as monopolies, flush with resources, and could afford to brush off financial supporters.

But that’s not where we are today, and it’s not where we should want to be.

I push my newsroom on this point: You don’t have to treat financial supporters better, but you certainly shouldn’t treat them worse. As a publisher with an entrepreneurial mindset, I see it as part of my role to find ways to acknowledge and thank those who support us. But I won’t force it.

What I will insist on is this: the “ability to deliver for clients” cannot be anathema for news organizations. If society equates a news organization leveraging its “halo effect” with content marketing, we’re missing the point.

Technical.ly’s reporting is guided by truth, not business objectives. That’s journalism. But attracting advertisers, sponsors, and investors whose goals align with ours isn’t a problem—it’s smart. The danger lies not in seeking aligned partners but in twisting journalistic goals to fit theirs.

Independence doesn’t require antagonism. It requires clarity of purpose.

Three emerging approaches to local journalism

It’s no longer quite right to say journalism as a whole is imperiled by the internet-age. In the last decade, powerhouse national outlets have made the business model leaps. Other important and influential national and global organizations gather and produce valuable information for the civic good. Their concerns are now with truth and partisanship and objectivity. These are heady issues but they’re not directly revenue problems.

This is different from publishers with a geographic focus; previous business models don’t comport simply with web-powered scale. Local journalism is very much in crisis. I know this personally and professionally, so I follow trends closely with an applied viewpoint

I’ve long thought that we at the news organization I cofounded a decade ago are something of an outlier, trying to approach local reporting through a for-profit, multi-local strategy. (I wrote here about why Technically Media is not a nonprofit). Recently though I’ve noticed that we may fit into one of three broad approaches I see tackling local news.

This is made clear by the strengthening of the country’s superstar national commercial journalism providers as the collapse of the dominant local forms continues apace. Web-powered scale has laid bare that national and local outlets are in entirely different categories.

There was a crowd of us, now we are almost none

From an eyewitness account of the Black Death of the 1340s:

“There was a crowd of us, now we are almost none. We should make new friends, but how, when the human race is almost wiped out; and why, when it looks to me as if the end of the world is at hand? Why pretend? We are alone indeed. You see how our great band of friends has dwindled. Look, even as we speak we too are slipping away, vanishing like shadows. One minute someone hears that another has gone, next he is following in his footsteps.”

[source; first spotted in this video at 33:42; not Agnolo di Tura]

(Photo by Mads Rasmussen via Unsplash)

Advice for journalists graduating into a recession

New journalists, I graduated May 2008, and though I actually think this moment is even more challenging than then, let me share a few thoughts I wish someone told me then.

It’s ok to consider a job outside journalism. Your skills (writing, analysis, research) are portable. We do want people to shuffle to growth industries. You can bring journalism thinking and support elsewhere.

But the economy is presently stalled and many of you are true believers, so let’s talk.