935 Lies: what journalism learned from the War in Iraq

The Bush administration made 935 lies to extend the specious connection between the attacks of Sept. 11 and the American invasion of Iraq. So says longtime investigative journalist and journalism champion Charles Lewis in his reporting and 2014 book entitled “935 Lies.”

Lewis uses the book to champion the importance of investigative journalism, the role of journalists more generally and an engaged citizenry. Lewis is part of a class of journalists whose careers spanned the golden age of American journalism, when the business models worked and audience reach was an essential monopoly. That has all changed, yet his perspective is still welcome. The book is drier than I expected, but the mix professional memoir and treatise on journalism was full of insight.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

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Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News

Tall tales and blurring the lines between fact and fiction is part of the American identity.

Fake news isn’t new but the latest variation on the theme. So argued Kevin Young in his 2017 book Bunk
The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
.

The book came from a series of articles he wrote for The New Yorker. It mashes culture, journalism, cultural appropriation and Americana. It reads like a collection of interesting tidbits, which can be fun, though I put the book down and picked it back up a few times over the couple years since it was given to me.

It still adds to my understanding of my field and my country. As Young quotes poet Mary Karr as saying: “The American religion — so far as there is one anymore — seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.”

Below I share my notes from the book for my future reference.

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3 ways journalists can use AI writing ethically

This was originally a video, post and thread elsewhere.

ChatGPT is especially scary to journalists because AI writing feels a lot like cheating. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are three ways I’ve experimented with AI writing that don’t break any journalism codes:

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Imagine a kind of Community Criticism Readiness Index

Imagine 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:

  • What would you do if you observed something you perceived as immoral but not illegal?
  • Who would you tell if a neighbor uncovered a brilliant solution to a persistent problem?
  • How would you respond to evidence of regulatory capture?

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.

Nonprofit news models are important. We need others too

With new grantees announced earlier this year, I’m thrilled by the success of nonprofit local newsrooms, well represented by the American Journalism Project, rolling across the country. It seems clear that each U.S. state, and many regions around the country, will, and should, have some version of this model, sustained by local philanthropy and individual donors. This is a necessary, and exciting, layer to the future of local news ecosyinstems — it is also incomplete. As the founder of decade-plus-old, bootstrapped, niche multi-local newsroom, let me share why.

Back in 2009, I used two plastic containers as a couch and supplemented my meager freelance income by doing odd jobs in landscaping and plumbing. It was clear a true global economic crisis was hastening the decline of my trade. I was living in a crumbling, mouse-infested apartment in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. I scared, lonely and very sad.

Two friends I knew from my college newspaper days were also feeling quite stuck, falling through the cracks of a yawning fissure in how our economy worked and information gathering needs were met

From the start, we agreed that every local news organization still structured as an advertising model was on an irreversible path of decline. The web’s power was scale, anything that unnecessarily drew geographic boundaries was unnatural. None of us came from families with any business background but we were curious and frustrated. We felt very abandoned by those who should have been our mentors and advisors. If I’m being honest I still harbor a chip on my shoulder from those days, and likely will for the rest of my career.

Since then, I’ve become fixated on understanding how journalism creates value for communities. I’ve learned that journalism’s value—curating and verifying information to help people understand their world—remains immense. But too often, the ways we attempt to sustain journalism misalign with this value.

Nonprofit models are one such approach. They freeze the core principles of 20th-century accountability journalism and fund it with philanthropy and reader donations. This is a promising trend, and I believe these newsrooms will endure as a key part of the ecosystem. But they aren’t enough.

For one, nonprofit newsrooms must compete with other critical community needs—food banks, job training, and the arts. During times of crisis, it’s unclear whether journalism can consistently win that competition. More importantly, there are simply too many communities for nonprofit models to serve alone.

Instead, we need a broader range of experiments. Journalism shouldn’t limit itself to replicating legacy models under new funding structures. We should explore new business models that align journalism’s value with sustainable revenue. That means embracing entrepreneurship, commercializing ideas, and rethinking how we engage with audiences.

For-profit newsrooms have the potential to play a critical role here. Charging a lot of people a little—or a few people a lot—remains the foundation of any sustainable business. Yet, too often, journalists are uncomfortable or even dismissive of revenue generation. That mindset is dangerous if we want journalism to endure.

I don’t mean to suggest that my own company, Technical.ly, has cracked the code. If anything, my experience has taught me there is no “code.” There are only the slow, messy steps of experimentation. But I remain convinced that local news needs more than one model to survive.

“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.

Thoughts on tax status and journalism

Journalism is the messy art of connecting that which is true with that which can be understood. I’ve defined it in other ways before. However you define it though, practitioners like me tend to assume it is important. We work to maintain it.

In the past few months, I’ve taken a critical look at that assumption, that journalism matters. One way I’ve done that is thinking about the types of organizations that produce whatever it is that journalism is.

In periods of economic change, when institutions or processes or elements of culture are lost, challenging the assumption of importance matters. It’s a crucial step. Are we trying to hold on to this thing because of tradition or because something functionally has import?

Political philosophy is rich with debate over what crucial societal functions should be enshrined into government, or maintained by charitable organizations and what the free market can do best. With the economic disruption confronting how journalism is produced, this question is relevant again.

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Local and national media: once no difference, and now the central difference of newsrooms

One of the many economic ripple effects of the global scaling of the web has been an enormous rift between place-based and place-less news organizations.

As recent as the early 1990s, the business fundamentals of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer weren’t all that different. They were all advertising and subscription businesses that used a newspaper model as its strategy, leveraging thick newsrooms to gobble up a high comprehension of readers in its audience segmentation.

The web has transformed this into what seems very obvious to you today. Despite the geography in their names, the Washington Post is read globally for insight into U.S. government affairs; the New York Times is read globally by an affluent tribe that identifies with its brand and the Philadelphia Inquirer is read regionally by those who want to access that geography’s largest and most influential newsroom.

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Real Life Local News Revenue Experiments: ONA19 session

Powered by a decade of pursuing local news revenue models, I got together a few friends doing similar work and hosted a session during the 20th annual Online News Association conference, in New Orleans, on Thursday.

The session was called Real Life Local News Revenue Experiments That Aren’t Advertising. Building on a 2016 lightning talk at the same conference, I published an essay a few days before the session to gather related thoughts and spark conversation.

My big takeaway: journalism is a strategy, not an industry. Or put another way, it is an approach to competing in any number of business models. For local journalism to thrive in the future, we need to find and experiment there.

Find notes, slides and more below.

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The importance of journalism’s double-sided marketplace

This is adapted from a recent tweet thread I shared.

Someone recently described to me the “dishonesty” of the two-sided marketplace business model of modern journalism — of selling both subscriptions and advertising.

The argument is that by having two “customers” (individual readers and company advertisers), a publisher can never do right by both at the same time. There was a reference to Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent.” I disagreed. Let me share why.

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