The news future is much brighter than the news

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together.

Most of my last week was spent at the News Futures convention. Let me tell you. It was the fix that I needed. 

I knew I was a little short of energy and inspiration for the work ahead of us if we’re going to try to build a less cruel world. I know many of you also feel unsure how to call up your energy reserves, too. It was more restorative than I expected to spend a few days with good people willing to stretch and adapt to move toward some shared goals. It wasn’t necessarily easy. Being productive across differences was at times a challenge. But by no means was it too hard. 

Here are a few things News Futures has done over the years that I think have created the conditions for it to become a space that is both generous and generative. These aren’t the only things it has done; these are just some easy ones. If you want more, there are plenty from News Futures Care Collaboratory (they are great). You can use and adapt these ideas into your own gatherings-small or large, news involved or not. 

It's not about your day job. Everyone in News Futures shows up on behalf of themselves, not as a representative of an organization. This gets reinforced from the welcome messages to the nametags, and it is freeing. It’s easier to be curious about each other when you're not using a job title as a heuristic. Individual creativity feels more welcome and power less concentrated. We show up at work-related gatherings because we care about the work, but that doesn’t mean we can’t put our work identity in the background and value each other as people. This is a space where practicing journalism or other civic tasks as a vocation feels completely possible.

Work is urgent, but strategy and relationships benefit from time. The work now encompassed in News Futures began during a small gathering I pulled together in 2018. It was just about a dozen local news folks, most of whom I admired but didn't really know, interested to see what we could do in coordination. I appreciated the kind shoutouts I got during this year's convention, but it's not totally accurate to say I “started” News Futures. It was more like I catalyzed something just waiting to coalesce.

As the group grew and formalized, it kept the original spirit—that we could trust each other to push the group forward. It was just necessity at first; we were all so busy we had to have faith that the right pace for the project would be the pace we could summon and maintain the energy for. Most of us in that initial group came from newsrooms, where we're trained to react quickly. It was lucky our lack of capacity trained us to also develop the patience and deliberateness collective work requires. Growth was slow for the first many years. But during that time, we learned what it takes to build a welcoming and productive "do-ocracy" unlike anything I've been part of, and now we can work a little faster and a little bigger. 

Structure your ambition, don't constrain it: Will Evans reportedly announced his goal to increase Washington Post subscriptions to 200 million (from about 2.5 million), just a few months before he presided over a huge round of layoffs and then was forced to resign. Was his goal delusional? Absolutely. That is what ambition without structure is.

I didn't hear delusional promises or platitudes at the News Futures gathering. I heard what News Futures attendees hoped for, what they wanted to work toward, and where they were committed to spending their individual and collective energy.

Nobody comes to News Futures because they're happy with the status quo. When so many thoughtful, energized, and hard-working people get together, there will be a surplus of ambitous ideas and tactics. Constraints are helpful in this context. With the right facilitation (which we had; ask me if you’re looking for somebody), our individual ideas were narrowed down and shaped into a collective ambition.

We use two foundational documents to make this easier. The first is the News Futures charter. This is the document around which we're building shared purpose, identity, and standards. A foundational document you can return to and judge yourself against is incredibly helpful.

The other foundation is the strong field framework. It's not a perfect tool for an emerging field, but it’s worked well for us, and there is a lot to appreciate. We hope this structure will let us do our most ambitious work yet-to build a new field—a civic information field.

Journalism is a job I love. But that love has not made me blind to its many limitations. News Futures is building toward something broader, where journalism is present but not centered. We hope organizers, educators, artists, and public servants join us and shape the work into something even more valuable and useful. 

If you're compelled by this and want to join News Futures, please do. It's easy. Read the charter. If you're into it, sign on. You'll get invited into the Slack and into a new round of working groups starting up soon. There will also be more opportunities for plugging in and bringing the charter to life throughout the year. If News Futures doesn't feel like your thing, tell me about a groups you like to work in and alongside.

What I'm reading: 

Wrongheaded takes on AI are almost as ubiquitous as AI-generated content. I know. But I'm just going to quickly weigh in on an AI argument where both camps are missing the point. Earlier this year Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, publicly applauded himself. He had proscribed the use of an AI agent to write stories for the newsroom that would then be fact-checked by a human. The benefit, he said, was that reporters could spend more time in the field. Last month his move was covered by CJR. People are still talking about it. TLDR one side says AI should write more news stories; the other side says AI should never write news stories. You know what? We need fewer news stories! That's the right take here!

If the focus of a news story is so divorced from the need for compelling narrative that AI can write it, there are simply better formats for that information. People who need information don't have time for your stories. People who need something explained to them probably need to be able to ask questions to a chatbot or human and get accurate, verified information. This particular argument about AI is just about business models, not what audiences need.

More clarity on our infrastructure issues: A new report Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro wrote for Media Impact Funders is already getting some attention. I'm looking forward to reading it carefully. The report was released a few hours ago, so I've only skimmed it but am looking forward to a careful read. Hansen-Shapiro is a thoughtful researcher. She used more than 550 applications for Press Forward grant money as a data set and tried to diagnose common needs and constraints among newsrooms. It's a cool idea. This is how she described her report in a LinkedIn post:

"The deeper finding is that the field's core constraints are increasingly systemic rather than organizational. Fragmented systems, thin shared capacity, the absence of coordinating mechanisms that would allow scarce resources to be pooled rather than duplicated - these are all increasing the operational burden on local newsrooms."

She later writes, "The long-term health of local journalism depends on whether the field, collectively, can lower the marginal cost of producing reliable civic information at scale. Not outlet by outlet but at the systems level. That is not a newsroom problem or a JSO (editors note-journalism support organization) problem. It's a funding strategy problem."

I'm for smart use of resources, collaboration, and shared infrastructure. But what I'm taking from this report so far is that the fever around there being an actual business model that can support enough local news to meet information needs might finally be starting to break. I hope to talk to Hansen Shapiro about this research. Especially what her vision of civic information at scale would really look like.

This was a very news-nerdy dispatch! Thanks for being here. Too nerdy? Just let me know. Your feedback is welcome and wanted.

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Take care until next week. 

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