News Fix # 60: Necessary conditions

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.

I really appreciated all the feedback last week. Thank you. Our close reading group is a go! Expect more details at the end of this month. Anyone who wants to join, should plan for an early November start date. I'm gaining clarity on a strategy for broadening the number of voices here too, because of your feedback and ideas. Again, thank you. The opportunity for collective problem-solving is truly my favorite thing about writing this newsletter.

We are 60 editions in to News Fix. The transition to a new academic year and a round number feel like a good time to be honest about last year's goals and to set some new areas of inquiry for this next year.

The unanswered questions

We know the news has a tendency to address its own challenges crisis-by-crisis and newsroom-by-newsroom. That approach is both inefficient and insufficient. It increases the pressure on struggling and successful newsrooms alike and in my experience it can make even predictable challenges feel overwhelming.

When I started this newsletter it was to air and start to pick away at big questions I felt were hampering my own effectiveness as a reporter and editor and my newsroom's growth. These are, basically, questions about what news and reporting need to do. At the beginning of last year the questions that felt most urgent were:

• which journalistic functions newsrooms should prioritize beyond filling information gaps,
• how to better design news for discrete individual and social utility, rather than expect products to do both.

We are making progress on these questions as a field. Two concrete examples that spring immediately to mind are the open conversations about how to design a theory of change for your own journalistic practice and the new civic action toolbox helping people to act on reporting. (Kudos go to RJI for supporting both these projects). There are many more, from new news projects, to new social networks, to the doubling down on a civic media field as the answer to monopoly-controlled algorithmic media.

The questions of what news and reporting should do and what needs they need to meet might feel out of touch with the frenetic pace of economic, social, and technological upheaval in the world and our information environments. That pace of change is what made these questions feel essential but at risk for being ignored.

We are in a period of such profound change that we have to reimagine and rebuild our news and information industry into a completely different system, whether we want to or not. We can choose to let the market define our work for this new era, a frankly terrible idea. Or, we can start to build a public media offering people require and deserve.

The tough part

I've worked diligently on the questions of what journalism and journalists need to do to be more valuable to more people not just last year, but for my whole career thus far. There are absolutely some great local newsrooms doing incredible work and getting closer to becoming sustainable community institutions. But the wider adoption of these models, methods, and tools—including most of my own work—still hasn't accelerated. This is profoundly disappointing.

There are still only a few local newsrooms where any hardworking reporter or editor can be assured their work will reliably help individuals meet their own needs. There are even fewer than can deliver for individuals while helping residents and officials change local systems and practices to be more responsive and accountable. Too many newsrooms are still spinning out content. Too many newsrooms are more accountable to their economic models than they are to their communities.

This year's guiding questions

I expect to continue to highlight others' work and continue to pursue my own around last years' questions about what journalism needs to do to create more value for more people. But I want us to think about how we make the work more possible. This will require us to engage with questions about how to change the conditions in information environments, not just the products.

These are the three questions I want to add to our list this year:

• Can we create additional models within civic media that include and are enhanced by reporter and newsroom involvement without being completely dependent on it?
• How do we harness existing demand for civic media and increase this demand?
• What local policy and economic conditions are necessary (not optimal-but necessary) for civic media to be reliable and valuable enough to serve community needs?

These questions aren't necessarily new, I know. There are plenty of smart and capable people already working on elements of each of them. But I've not spent my own time engaging deeply with any of these questions. Nor have I supported this kind of work as much as perhaps I should have. I hope to help us broaden our view of what might fix the news by bringing these ideas and voices into our conversation and inquiry. How does that sound to you?

It will be two weeks until your next News Fix because due to really poor planning I have a deadline to meet on Labor Day. Until then, take good care of yourself, put on the Trio album and send some love and resources to Nepal and Tibet or to somebody you know who is coming to terms with a loss.