From transaction to relationality

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Forgive me (thank me?) for keeping this short. I've been under the weather this past week. That's saying a lot here in Detroit, where the snow and ice have arrived with a vengeance. Cough drop wrappers are everywhere.

Something giving me energy even now is that hundreds of people have signed the News Futures charter since last week. If the charter doesn't describe the kind of news future you're looking for, I encourage you to write your own. Perhaps even share it. I'd love to see it.

As President Donald Trump and private citizens working under questionable legal authority take a wrecking ball to longstanding institutions, building something new feels incongruous at best. At worst it feels irrelevant, but it isn't. It takes necessary discipline to build during decline. This is especially true for reporters and editors, for whom reaction is an overdeveloped muscle. I too self soothe though crisis response. But crisis response is a questionable strategy when Donald Trump creates crises in order to gain attention.

Roman Anin is a Russian investigative reporter and the editor of istories living in exile in the United States right now. I heard him say that many of Vladimir Putin's critics did everyone a disservice by saying for years that Putin operated primarily from self-interest and without an ideology. In his opinion, that view created a permission structure for Putin's actions that were always in part ideological, even if the ideology was not immediately legible. National news is creating a similar dynamic for President Trump.

I'm no political scientist, but it appears to me Trump is working steadily to create a patronage system where there was once democracy. This is as ideological as anything. Thousands of people are losing their jobs right now because they do not have enough economic power to fully participate in a patronage system.

In this environment it is a tactic, a solution, and ideological to build something to aggressively democratize high-quality information that equips communities. I don't see enough aggressive energy, outside of News Futures, to create this kind of change.

Many people who help lead news and resource news organizations will be gathering in Miami this week for the Knight Media Forum. I will not be there. I don't love big conferences in general, and have always had a hard time with KMF in particular. It feels like being stuck in a multi-day collective action problem. The people who show up to KMF are powerful and resourced and smart. But it has always felt to me that the vibes are off here. It feels that collective power is unwelcome and not encouraged. It feels like there is a hope that the will to democratize things can be diffused rather than harnessed. I hope this year is different.

Right now, I'm reading Relationality by David Jay. Thanks to Jennifer Brandel for the recommendation. It's a guidebook for moving away from transactional relationships and into something more meaningful. It is meant largely to help in personal relationships, but I'm seeing what I can apply to the relationship between news and community. What are you reading that's getting you through this week? Let me know. Take care of yourself, and don't get sick!