Quick! We need to build a much slower system.

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 can't wait to hear from you.

On a few beautiful spring days earlier this month, I was lucky enough to host Koby Levin, a senior reporter at Outlier. He visited to talk to journalism students and faculty about his Profits and Losses project that will connect individual Detroiters to millons of dollars the county has worked to keep from returning, in violation of the state constitution.

The project is incredible, Koby is incredible, and this work makes me feel the way other people feel about sports. I'm so overwhelmed by my love and excitement for reporters and reporting that I want a high five and a huge beer.

I know not everyone sees this project as a welcome wave from the future. The reporting products are unconventional; in addition to stories, of which there have been plenty, there were more than 200 volunteer and paid phone bankers who together made more than 4,000 phone calls. There were Google Sheets that became more structured data fed into text messages, and reporters sometimes had to spend a lot of time with individual Detroiters trying to ensure they understood what to do to reclaim those unconstitutional takings.

Listening to Koby teach about his work, I realized that what is potentially more challenging, but far more replicable about this work is its pace, not its products.

The attention economy runs on creating false senses of urgency and need. It's less agile precursor, the 24-hour news cycle, did also. By now we all have a harder time figuring out what to attend to and how long to care. Speed, instead of need, is the currency. If they show up in the attention economy at all, most newsrooms are on the margins. But that's different from actively pushing back against the pace and distractions built into the products.

The profits and losses project, on the other hand, moved completely at the speed of true material need. A source handed Outlier's newsroom a spreadsheet of how much money the county likely owed almost 3,000 foreclosed property owners just 3 months before a deadline for those people to file a form that demanded the money from the county. Koby and project manager Shiva Shahmir let everything flow from there. It was intense and pretty fast, but there was no manufactured urgency. Outlier was built to respond to many individual needs efficiently, but this project was different. It was the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic that the newsroom responded to collective need. It's an incredibly rewarding way to work. Every reporter who has provided help and info after a natural disaster or this summer's ICE enforcement actions has done this kind of work.

The attention economy damags the muscles needed for productive and deliberative decision-making. For accountability and civic health to actually be possible, we need to cultivate productive discussion and deliberative information acquisition. We need less news delivered more intentionally, even as the attention economy pushes in the other direction. We all know it.

What will robust systems that can calibrate information to true, not manufactured, needs look like? Let's imagine some! Mattia Peretti* has a great slide deck on human-centered journalism as food for thought. But what are you thinking?

What I'm reading to help me think through this question:

Jennifer Brandel's incredible LinkedIn post (when have those words ever appeared next to each other?) models how to grow into more deliberative versions of ourselves. Jen just sold Hearken, an OG attention economy resistance tool. She used the occasion to imagine an interview between herself and the person she was when she started the company 11 years ago. It is so honest, funny, and insightful. The entire thing reads as a cautionary tale about what gets ignored, underinvested, and underimagined when the focus of innovation discovery is on aggressively capitalist solutions rather than longer-term social and individual utility. On a more personl note Jen describes herself in those early days as talking too much and being too nervous to let the room lead. I do remember that version of her, but I read her as brillant ambassador, not nervous. I have noticed in the last few years though how present and generous she is in work spaces. I admire the hell out of it and hope I'll get there someday.

I haven't read Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, but I've learned a lot from his book tour. In a wandering conversation with Ezra Klein, they talk about how steeping ourselves in "algorithmic media" changes our expectations about what is possible in our politics and communities. This interview with Pollan goes over the same ground but is much shorter.

I've spent more time with Journalism + Design's community news networks over the last few weeks. This framework is independent of production imperatives, which is part of what makes it so interesting. Megan Lucero and Cole Goins are training on the framework April 22nd.

I showed this video from IDEO about redesigning Los Angeles’ voting machines to my business of journalism class to introduce human-centered design. If you need some inspiration for why and how to build better systems, watch it. This thing is a balm, from the attention to detail to the radical accessibility to the pleasure of watching people be damn good at their jobs. My class spontaneously clapped at the end.

My vote is for this ceasefire to hold. Take care of yourself until next week, and if you can:

📫 Forward this newsletter to somebody, or

📚 Tell me what you're reading

Thank you. You're the best ;)

*This spring I've worked with Mattia Peretti as a newsletter coach. He's great, and now I'm biased.