A proposal or two for you…

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for the help navigating my desire to provide a solid service to my journalism students with conflicted feelings about journalism education and the larger news and information environment. It helps to know I'm not the only one who oscillates between sincere desire to cultivate possibility and the urge to blow everything up.

Class started yesterday and I haven't learned how to pace this new schedule. So, this is not an analysis post. We're fully in the cultivating possibility vein. I'd like, in fact I need, your feedback on some ideas for both deepening and expanding the conversation here. First, let's go deep.

How do you feel about sacred reading?

What even is sacred reading? I just mean very close and intentional reading. I've written before about my love for this practice, which came into my life about a decade ago.

It happened when we moved to Detroit and enrolled the kids in a school they could walk to and that had programs for all of them, from pre-K to middle school. But it was Catholic. My husband and I had never planned on, or prepared our kids for being educated in a religious environment. As I searched for anything secular to help me prepare, I stumbled on a new podcast started by two Harvard Divinity School students.

Their idea was to help people navigate the world by applying spiritual reading practices to secular texts, and to do this reading in community. They chose Harry Potter as a “sacred” text because so many people in their generation had such a close relationship to those books and returned to them. (This was years before J. K. Rowling's hateful behavior towards trans people complicated the meaning of those books for many people, including me.)

The podcast gave my kids and me an easy way to talk about and process the language and practices of religious devotion without even a whiff of the indoctrination I chafed against during my own Catholic childhood. Even though the project has sunsetted, I continue the close reading practices. I'm helped along by books that crew has since written like Praying with Jane Eyre, the Power of Ritual, and my personal fave, Forgiveness.

I thought about a close reading group this summer as I puzzled through how best to approach learning about and questioning the role of empathy in journalistic work and practice. None of these questions have clear answers. Should we try to cultivate empathy with our work? Does empathy have a relationship to real-world action? What is the real power of empathy and its associated emotions of sympathy and pity and compassion? What are the limits of those emotions. Maybe we need to puzzle through these tough ideas actively and together with a text to help focus us.

I talked over the close reading idea with a friend of mine I trust to talk me down from my many bad ideas. She was sufficiently into the idea that she wants to join the group!

She had an idea for a book that is, I think, inspired. It's Small Things Like These. It's short. It's beautiful. And, it's a book you can return to.

We could start in November, reading one chapter a week, always through the lens of empathy. We would gather online to talk through it, and we would try to apply some traditional close reading practices like lectio divina.

If you're interested in joining please let me know. If there are at least a handful of us, we'll give it a try. I think it would be fun, restorative, and help us do some much-needed sense making around a tough theme. I have done a reading group like this once before. During the at home portion of the pandemic a group of kids and parents read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (a book with lots of isolation themes) this way. It was so helpful.

Do you want to hear from more people through News Fix?

Now for an idea about expanding our conversation. This one was inspired by a text my daughter sent me while she was still away from home working at her college. “Have you seen any good pieces about the Ariana Grande discourse?,” she asked. Grande had just announced an upcoming “much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny.” The scrutiny is truly endless and focused on everything from her relationships to her hair color. Lately, it largely centers about how skinny she's gotten.

My daughter's question made me miss the feminist blogosphere I used to turn to in times like these. I read so many, too many, Substacks by people I don't know looking for a good piece to send along that was voicey but had strong analysis. I came up empty. (Tell me what and who I missed!)

We can only read so many newsletters, and the form makes broadening a conversation hard because the discourse is so atomized.

I have two ideas that might address this atomization for those of us here in News Fix land. I'd love to hear if you like one of them, both of them or neither, and will follow your lead.

Idea one: A digest (a la blogroll) of other newsletters about civic information and news and a summary of their theme for the week. This would be a separate service and opt-in. Full disclosure, I would probably automate most of this.

Idea two: More News Fix takeovers. These wouldn't be Q and A's, but posts by other people in this space that I would edit. The upside of this idea is that more voices lead to more robust conversations. The downside is that this is a totally non-monetized newsletter, so this would be a band of volunteers.

There's so much for you to weigh in on. Thank you for doing so. I really do appreciate it and need your feedback as I explore some new things. Until next week, take care!