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 organizationsI’m proud to share Technical.ly was awarded the “Journalistic Impact” award (in the large tier no less!) last night in Chicago by the well-regarded LION: Local Independent Online News Publishers!
The leading driver was our big THRIVING reporting project on economic mobility, and I’m so proud that our other multi-local reporting was honored too. Best I can remember, this is our first proper journalism award, and it’s a big one — even though our communities have often kindly honored our work!
Continue reading Technical.ly is honored for its “journalistic impact”Your novel is only half the story. The other half already happened.
That’s from the 2016 book from literary agent and story consultant Lisa Cron called “Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere).”
I love ‘writing about writing,’ and this book is one of the most commonly cited works among writer groups. Because of that, lots of writers have opinions on the book. For my money, it did just what it aims to do, and I appreciated Lisa’s approach. I’ll recommend it just like it was recommended to me.
This book includes a bigger concept that I found insightful: The reason stories attract so much attention is humans evolved to seek self-awareness and understanding from them. “The purpose of story — of every story — is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and others,” Cron wrote. “We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How to use brain science to tell be stories: Story GeniusWhy do so many people hate journalists so much? I think part of the answer is journalism isn’t only what you think it is. Gimme a sec.
Spoiler: I’m a journalist but more properly I’m a guy who founded a local news organization 15 years ago. Still going! So my entire professional career has been spent on the sustainability of local journalism. Career choices!
Continue reading Why do so many people hate journalists so much?Journalism can only be done adversarially — or immorally.
So argues the 1990 book The Journalist the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, which was first a serialization the year before in New Yorker. The nonfiction book is today considered a seminal work in journalism ethics, and related fields. Though frequently referenced in other works I’ve read, I only now finished the short book.
Malcolm focuses on the relationship between a journalist named Joe McGinniss and a man named Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused of murdering his wife and children. McGinniss wrote a 1983 bestselling book about the case, which then became a popular movie, but was later criticized for his handling of the relationship with MacDonald, resulting in a high-profile libel case. In short, McGinniss was accused of portraying himself as sympathetic to MacDonald but always planning a damning book. Malcolm takes this narrow example to draw wider conclusions, including the nature of truth and how it is represented in journalism.
Below find my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The Journalist the MurdererImagine a Community Criticism Readiness Index, a tool to assess whether residents have someone to turn to in times of uncertainty. When faced with questions of identity, impropriety, or anonymity, who would they contact, and how would they share information?
In the 20th century, news organizations were often that go-to ally. What I call “journalism thinking,” shaped by those institutions, proved particularly effective in bridging the gaps where laws, frameworks, or formal institutions fell short. Law enforcement, advocacy groups, government agencies, and attorneys all play critical roles in society—but humans didn’t evolve within legal systems. We evolved within stories.
Journalists, then, have long been storytellers in the service of justice. While their work famously uncovers high crimes, far more often they help communities make sense of their everyday lives. Journalists operate not as enforcers of the law but as mirrors and mediators. Their power comes from an audience relationship built on trust, consistency, and curation.
To construct a Community Criticism Readiness Index, we might survey hundreds of individuals across diverse circumstances:
The index would consider input from at-risk populations and privileged groups, spanning communities both traditional and web-based. These subcommunities—rapidly forming thanks to digital organizing tools—need critical eyes as much as any long-standing institution.
What I’ve observed from informal studies is that many communities no longer have the trusted outlet that once played this role: the local newsroom. While national journalism and advocacy at the highest levels have rallied to respond to crises in recent years, the decline of local journalism remains an unresolved and growing threat to civic society. It’s a problem akin to climate change: pervasive, systemic and requiring broad collaboration to address.
Over the past decade, more people have joined the effort to rebuild local journalism, but there is still so much work to be done. And like climate change, market factors will play an essential role in the solutions we find.
This is an essay about the future of local journalism and the approaches we’ll need to sustain it in the decade ahead. If we’re to protect our communities’ ability to criticize, reflect, and rebuild, we need tools like this index—and the local newsrooms that make those tools meaningful.
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.
Continue reading Newspapers were once the big tech platform companies everyone hatedIt’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.
Continue reading Three emerging approaches to local journalismThis post will draw a very bright line between the Creation and Distribution of verified information for communities, and argue for that distinction’s importance for understanding today’s news-gathering and journalism climate.
One of my favorite pieces of business-reporting conventional wisdom is that everything in the economy is cyclical. It just depends on how big the circle is this time.
That goes for business building. As early web entrepreneur Jim Barksdale famously put it, “there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.”
Information gathering (what we roughly call “journalism” today) has been a strategy for businesses for half a millennia. In its early commercial forms, the act of gathering that information and the act of distributing it were essentially two different businesses. In Barksdale’s parlance, they were “unbundled.”
Continue reading Media Funders: Value the difference between Creation and DistributionSay 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 now
