This is from a social video I posted: “PR pros without a strategy for supporting and growing journalists and creators are like safari tour guides without a strategy for protecting endangered wildlife.”
Journalists subsidize PR. That’s always been true. But today, there are now six times as many PR specialists than journalists in the United States. It’s untenable. Let me share how we got here and what we can do about it.
Continue reading Journalists subsidize PRFollowing a series of well-reported stories by Technical.ly on a startup in turmoil (including this most recent one), the founder threatened legal action. I’ve been here before.
In fact, I had drafted here a blog post from 2013 (!) that I’m refreshing for these purposes. Once or twice a year, we at Technical.ly get some kind of threat of legal action. Sometimes this amounts to a cease and desist letter, once it was formal-sounding demands for reporter notes and more often it is bluster.
Most usually though, our legal counsel advises us to stay quiet. No use inflaming the situation. But this time, one of the startup founder’s allies posted on social media a criticism of my reporter. That gave me cause to post this video response on social here (and embedded below for ease).
Continue reading What I’ve learned from being threatened with legal action as a journalist and news publisherOpera is a tightly defined form of musical theater, but it doesn’t encompass all celebrated music. Journalism risks a similar narrowing of scope—a class divide that leaves it lacking the range and diversity its principles deserve.
As a community of practitioners, we often misunderstand journalism as the exclusive product of a single industry: news organizations. Journalism is not just a product; it’s a set of principles and approaches developed over centuries to foster trust and build relationships.
In the 20th century, journalism’s societal value—fact-based, contextual information to help communities navigate a complex world—was primarily produced by news organizations. This dominance stemmed from a successful business model that paired advertising revenue with independent newsrooms. That model, however, has collapsed under systemic creative destruction. Instead of rethinking how to produce the outputs (journalism) more effectively, we remain overly focused on restructuring the inputs (news organizations).
Meanwhile, other actors—some unaware of or uninterested in journalistic norms—have invaded the space. They mimic the appearance of journalism but produce outcomes ranging from banal content marketing to partisan propaganda, further eroding trust in traditional news organizations.
As someone who co-founded a digital-first local news organization after the Great Recession, I’ve spent the last decade operating in this shifting landscape. In 2011 I wrote: “Sustaining the craft of journalism matters more right now than the craft itself.”
Our work looks little like the 20th-century newspaper model that dominated local journalism, which leaves us seen as anomalies rather than as viable examples of what’s possible. Through this experience, I’ve become convinced that journalism practitioners are still thinking too small. We need to codify the tenets of journalism into a worldview that any professional or organization can adopt—making journalism less of an exclusive craft and more like a cloud-based SaaS tool: adaptable, scalable, and widely accessible.
Local journalism, in particular, suffers under two unsustainable extremes: large-scale media brands thriving through web-enabled reach, and small, local brands struggling with audiences that appear minuscule in comparison. Nonprofit newsroom models have emerged as a promising response, preserving the core principles of 20th-century accountability journalism while leveraging philanthropy and reader support. These models are important and long-lasting—but also limited.
Nonprofit journalism cannot meet the needs of every community. Competing against other vital services like food banks and job training, especially in times of crisis, is an uphill battle. Moreover, the editorial firewall of the 20th century has left many journalists deeply uncomfortable with—or even hostile to—revenue generation. That mindset is dangerous if we want this work to last.
What we need is a broader exploration of commercial opportunities and new ways to align journalism’s value with sustainable business models. My own company, Technical.ly, hasn’t cracked the code—because there is no code. But we’ve worked through the painful, slow steps of building something sustainable, and I believe those lessons are replicable.
I’m motivated by the conviction that every community needs a voice. Journalism doesn’t belong to news organizations alone—it belongs to anyone committed to creating and sharing fact-based, contextual information. If we embrace that, we can ensure journalism thrives, not just as a profession, but as a societal good.
I run a community journalism organization in part because I believe independent voices that push honest, challenging and productive dialogue are vital.
Especially because of our audiences (a political range of business and civic minded with Technical.ly; and a social services coalition with Generocity.org), we can be a force for change in our communities. I find that everyday, which keeps me excited by our work. It’s even more true in moments of intense scrutiny.
On the heels of a pandemic and an ensuing economic shock, we are in the midst of one of the most consequential conversations on racial equity in a half-century — sparked by yet another high-profile murder of a Black man by a white police officer. I’ve found myself taking a critical look at how I’ve responded. I don’t do enough, but I’ve certainly already been to the “Acceptance Stage of Grief for white supremacy.”
Continue reading White Silence is Violence: a self-audit on doing the workSay the United States needs 50,000 full-time local journalists to maintain our distinct and robust discourse. That’s to have an independent voice to sniff out injustice and to put a mirror up to communities with professional rigor. (Despite our discourse, two-thirds of Americans trust their local media.)
Today there are just 37,000 working journalists in the United States, and falling. More alarmingly, even that number is increasingly made of non-local reporters, based primarily in New York City, Washington D.C. and California.
We may have half, or even fewer, the number of full-time local journalists this country may need for an informed public. (Yes, there may be more American coal miners than local U.S. reporters.)
That 50,000 number comes from a landmark report for the FCC by Steve Waldman, the editor who launched and is now running Report for America aimed at addressing just that issue. Confronting an enormous gap, his nonprofit crucially places reporters in local newsrooms (both nonprofit and for-profit) with identified coverage gaps.
The journalism practitioners among us are maybe too aware of how disrupted is the advertising model that defined our category for a couple hundred years. Frighteningly though, seven in 10 Americans still think their local news media are doing well financially.
Put another way: a central part of U.S. democracy and local civic dialogue has been broken for 20 years, we still haven’t addressed the core problem, and, apparently, the stakeholders we most need to participate (our readers) aren’t even aware of the problem. This essay is meant to outline why my professional work has focused where it has and what I hope that might offer others who care about acts of journalism.
Continue reading Here’s what I’d do to ensure local journalism exists 20 years from nowI originally posted this on Medium here. It received considerable endorsement, including here, here and here.
Early professional news networks in the 14th and 15th centuries were couriers on horseback, informing warlords and merchants. Even competitors saw the value in shared professional news gathering, when there wasn’t a state-owned alternative. Subscriptions, then, subsidized the first foreign affairs and business reporters.
Over the next 500 years, innovations in distribution and in printing and paper technology shaped professional news-gathering into the 20th century model we most recognize today: advertising revenue subsidized relatively low unit costs to ensure widely available mass media (albeit almost exclusively from a white male perspective, but that needs its own post entirely).
Today we’re well into the first generation of the digital transformation of news-gathering and distribution. Yet we as journalism practitioners are still managing to underestimate how dramatically things have changed.
Continue reading ‘Journalism Thinking’ doesn’t need a business model. It needs a call to armsA version of this essay was published as part of my monthly newsletter a couple weeks back. Find other archives and join here to get updates like this first.
In high school, my varsity soccer coach would preach: Masters change speed.
The best players aren’t always the fastest. They are the ones who can go fast and then slow. Dribble the ball at a sprint. Stop. Pause. Redirect. Sprint again. Pace. Pace. Pace.
It’s among the lessons from my youth I reflect on most often. It carries through so much of my life. I love speed. It takes mastery to manage on deadline, something I surely learned from newsrooms. Yet, as I age, I’m most proud of how I can find moments of calm to slow down amid my frenetic pace.
Continue reading To be great, you must know how to change speed
Anybody worth learning from has plenty they stand for.
I love hearing the rules of thumb, the standards, the conventional wisdom and the accrued learnings of these people. Similarly I try to capture tightly-phrased aphorisms and holding myself accountable with plenty of direct and specific lists and resolutions.
So of course I was a sucker for the concept of ‘12 Rules for Life.’ It’s a book published early this year by Jordan Peterson that spiraled from popular to, fitting for today’s era, being engulfed in a strangely hyper-gendered debate. The book’s over-simplified approach of ordering one’s life with structure did gain positive feedback, including a podcast episode from Malcolm Gladwell. But because Peterson is aflame in lots of identity politics, I walked away from the the book less interested in adding to that debate than with something else.
I spent the last several months taking notes of the many universal truths I held myself to, and recommended for others. It became a fun game for parties among friends and family: what are your 12 Rules to Live By?
Let me share. (I collected ones from friends and family here)
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Who better to explore one of popular writing’s most contested modern debates than an icon who has worked on both sides of that debate? That’s why today’s episode of The Writing Process Podcast, the final of this first season, is with T.I.
Conventional wisdom tells that the process of developing rap lyrics was polarized by the genre’s most prolific star: Jay-Z maintained he would develop lyrics in his mind, influencing Biggie’s habit of not writing lyrics either. That transformed a generation of rap stars into memory-led lyricists.
A friend asked me what I thought is the best skill to develop. Build the habit of habits, I told her.
That’s how you get the most out of yourself and your place. It won’t always work but if you develop the rigor and constitution to choose to add a habit and then go and do just that, you’ll be gold. That is how you develop discipline.
My method for doing this is my near obsessive approach to annual resolutions. Each year, I put forward a dozen of them, many straightforward goals but often several tied to habits I want to add to who I am. I tie them to individual months but in truth I plan to do many of them throughout the year and beyond.
Recently I was considering how many personality traits of mine I believe started as resolutions. I think they’re a good example of building the habit of building habits. I wanted to share.
Continue reading Build the habit of making habits: resolutions of mine that stuck
